It’s my birthday and I’ll poem if I want to.

Um, and you can join me if you want to. November is one of my favorite months, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. But this year it’s even more favoriter (I can make up words if I want, too) because our poetry slam is one of my favorite forms: the sestina.

Our first poetry slam, the unofficial one, four whole years ago, oh my god, was a tritina, and we’ve returned to that form time and again when we need a quick poetry fix. Ten lines and you’re done, boom, all you have to to is get three little words in order. You may even have written one yourself, if you’ve joined us in the last four years.

The sestina is the tritina’s big sister: six words instead of three, seven verses instead of four. But the mechanic is exactly the same: start with seed words (I’ll give you a few examples and talk about picking good ones) and rearrange them until a poem falls out. Ready? Let’s get started.

So how do you write a sestina?

A sestina has seven verses. The first six verses have six lines. The final verse has three lines. They don’t have to rhyme (thirty-nine lines that all rhyme with each other would be kind of intense. I’m not saying it’s not doable, I’m pretty sure Nelly did it in Country Grammar, but it’s definitely a niche skill and that verse where all the last words are the same word is cheating). They don’t have to scan, although you’re welcome to write a sestina in metered verse, it’s just optional.

The real trick to a sestina is the pattern of the last words in each line. See, the terminal words of each verse are a rearrangement of the terminal words of the previous verse. Where the tritina grabs each verse from the last in the order “bottom, top, middle” the sestina does the same thing, but in pairs, back and forth. Or at least that’s how I think of it. Then the last three lines end in the same words as the first, third, and fifth lines of verse 1, with the second, fourth, and sixth words worked in so that the short verse still contains all six words.

You can also just copy the pattern down without having to think too hard about it, don’t worry.

Is your head spinning? My head is spinning. Let’s talk about this in an easier way: give the last words of the first verse letter designators like you were setting up a rhyme scheme, but since they don’t rhyme, it’s A, B, C, D, E, F.

Okay? That should make this flow a whoooooole lot smoother.

I’ll write the instructions out two ways: for visual thinkers and for folks who do better with a pattern to just copy.

I really need to see how this works

I know. I can explain the rules all day but until you see how they map onto an actual poem, they’re just theoretical, right? Like seeing the formula for acceleration isn’t the same as rolling a ball down a hill.

Let’s look at a contemporary sestina, because honestly if you search for sestinas on poets.org or the comparable sites you’re going to find Ezra Pound’s Sestina: Altaforte and John Ashbery’s Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape and frankly I see what they were trying to do there but I still find both poems unbearably stuffy and overcomplicated, like they were dogs who had just learned a new trick and were repeating it at you while barking so that you would maybe give them a treat even though you hadn’t asked them to do it.

Instead, I’m going to throw a sestina at you that hardly anyone has read because it was published in McSweeney’s back when McSweeney’s took poetry (because McSweeney’s is amazing, they only accepted sestinas). It’s lovely, readable, and easy to find the word pattern in, which makes it a perfect exemplar. Except for the muddy envoi; there was, briefly, a school of renegade envois. We’re not doing that. The terminal words for this envoi SHOULD be house, door, coins, and don’t change America to American.

A Domestic Sestina

As usual, falling asleep she pictured a hill and upon the hill a house.
She could not anticipate too much, had to let them form in her mind,
and then in her mind walk up the hill, and then open the door.
Sometimes the hill was in Japan, sometimes Latin America,
often Ireland or France. She could tell the country by the coins
in her pocket, though sometimes there were elaborate gardens

suggesting a national character, a preponderance of gardens
leading up to or extending behind the house,
sometimes a fountain beneath which greenish tile glinted with coins
scattered across the bottom, fees for the mind’s
dreaming. Always she forgot she had fallen asleep in America,
far from the village roads lined with bombs, the opening doors

of ruin. She believed inside the heart there was a door
unlocked by beauty. Here were the white gravel gardens
raked daily by monks, here were the ponds of America
stocked with koi that gleam and leap, here was the tea house
shaded by banana and palm, by evergreen and the mind
of winter and plum blossoms falling like silent coins

to carpet a new geography. Maybe like blossoms the coins
grew on trees, maybe the silvers and golds were the only doors
in the world? She had to believe the ideas her mind
delivered at night, when she was asleep in ancestral gardens
scented by lilac and pear, when she was the dark house
herself of ghosts long ago called to America.

Asleep, she never wondered why anyone came to America.
Of course, the streets were paved with gold, and buckets of coins
were rainbow luck, and every family had its house
with curtains and swings and a slot in the door
through which letters and checks were deposited. Even the gardens
were ripe for those who did not mind

too much being given. But it was not only her dreaming mind
that wished to live in the kind of house
she’d always imagined; it was the houses and gardens
themselves insisting they be desired. True, there were coins
jingling in her pockets, enough, but nowhere would she find a door
to such desires, never would the stones leading up to the house

through fragrant gardens transplant her as routinely as her mind
to her mind’s houses, even the musty, foursquare American
houses, common as coins, keys still hung by the door.

McSweeney’s also published one of my favorite sestinas, HOW TO BUILD A SESTINA TEMPLATE IN MICROSOFT EXCEL which is kiiiiind of one of the world’s perfect poems because it is actually functional as well as a poem. If your version of excel supports this structure, you might consider using it? WHO KNOWS.

Keeping promises

Back somewhere up there in this post I told you I’d give you some pointers on picking out good teleutons (if you knew what envoi was, teleuton is your vocabulary word for the day; it’s those repeating terminal words in your lines). So here we go!

Good “seed words” to use for a sestina have more than one meaning. Take “promises” – it’s either “the present tense of a verb” or “a plural noun.” Words that are both nouns and verbs are fantastic for sestinas because they’re flexible enough to take on several roles in your poem. Look at “mind” in the sample poem. “Dream” is another good one.

As you pick your teleutons, look at them in a group: do they make sense together? A grouping I’ve used is “lips, cheek, steel, delight, skin, and lapse.” Try to consider the overall feeling the words give you. Look for a mood, or an image. When people ask me for seed words for a tritina or sestina I think of mood, tone, and contrast. I love giving two cold words and a bright red word, for a winter feeling. Or two soft ones and a sharp. See how my six-word set falls into the “two soft and one hard” pattern? In the example poem, the teleutons evoke domesticity together. Then the poem comes along and upends that domesticity, playing against the words to develop a mood.

Try one of these things as you pick your words out, or ask for a six-word set in the coffeehouse and crowdsource your words.

See you on the grid!

A special present for you!

It may be my birthday, but you get the present: an extra poetry form to choose from for this month’s slam. If the sestina is giving you grief, it’s ok to turn in a tritina this month. Just follow that link to the rules!

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me