Six and Rain Sestina
SIX by Charlotte Mandel
At six, my cheeks were apple red.
Relatives pinched me like fruit on a stand,
testing me. I longed to be pale,
glassy and flat like the people
reflected in black mirror windows
staring in the howl of subway tunnels.
Riding to Coney Island, the tunnels
blasted into daylight. Veiny red
blobs flooded my eyes. Sun melted the windows.
I jumped and slid off the wicker to stand,
squares imprinted on my thighs. I smelled people
and corned beef. I could hear the rattle of my pail.
Under my wet wool suit, sand rubbed the pale
hidden chinks of my body. I dug tunnels
with care, my fingers creeping like people,
sandhogs meeting, their torches red
fire boring through. I mixed mud to stand
firm, fit in bits of shell for windows—
white, like eyes of a fish. Windows
couldn't be trusted. Glass looked pale
but might be backed with silver, force you to stand,
rigid, planted in a screaming tunnel
watching faces staring in the dim red
narrow passage, the eyes of bodiless people.
In the movies, behind the screen, real people
ballooned like silhouettes in windows.
My mother sat beside me, offering a red
apple that felt cold and black in the pale
gigantic flickering talking tunnel.
A man was touching me—I didn't understand
why my mother looked away, letting me stand
it, letting me suffer eyes and hands of people—
the man's fingers groping for tunnels
under my dress. The wall in front was a window
framing a strange man's eyes magnified, pale—
a scream in my throat like sand, burning red—
"We'll go home, your skin is red." My mother made me stand,
pulled off my bathing suit. Pale bodiless eyes of people
stared through black mirror windows at my body screaming in tunnels.
Copyright 2010 by Charlotte Mandel
RAIN SESTINA by Chuck Levenstein
Patience is a virtue nurtured by endless rain:
Old forests are proud of their ability to wait
While lesser shrubs insist on irrigation ditches
And pipes of stolen water, streams diverted,
Dams inserted to pool and pump the skies
While the trees and I are dry or wet as Nature wills.
My tribe is not inclined to subdue weather with its will
Our rites include no prayer or sacred dance for rain
Or sun; legend tells that for forty years we had to wait
With backpacks and flat bread, trudge through desert ditches
And dunes behind old Moses, from refuge diverted
Because the fool struck a rock, impatient with the skies
A pity we were abandoned to sand and white skies,
And a jealous god insistent on his will,
When there were swimming deities who loved rain,
Imbibed heavenly nectar and were content to wait
While we stumbled away from digging Egyptian ditches
(Desire to escape from slavery, of course, not to be diverted.)
Suppose, just suppose, the fleeing caravan had been diverted
And dark Atlantic waters parted under Brazilian skies,
And we trailed the Amazon drenched as a wet god willed,
My ancestors might have learned the Portuguese for "rain",
And armed with arrow and bow we would wait
To ambush Herzog's Jesuits in soggy ditches!
Alas, we were not born with the britches to sit in ditches!
The fate of a destined stream cannot be diverted,
Exiled tribes may yet find their way to Himalayan skies
Where upstream Tzaddiks spin the wheel of no-one's will
And on Bhuddish heads snow falls, quiet as this summer's rain,
And Godot! There he is! Sits but doesn't wait.
These umbrella musings keep us dry while we wait
For slippery waters to cease slithering by in roadside ditches.
Our wetlands misery, malarial mold and all, must be diverted
Until clouds dissipate, as in memory did clear the skies
And they filled with radiant Apollo's will.
How long will our patience be tried by this damned rain!
Yes, even flowery patience will wilt if forced to wait
For an end to endless rain, the petals diverted
From terran skies end their short lives in a ditch.
Copyright 2010 by Chuck Levenstein
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
The sestina is scary. That's what I think most poets think, and I find that sad because the sestina is one of the most enjoyable ways I have ever found to write a poem.
But I think I know why they're scary (I have three reasons, actually) and this month in Critique Corner, with contributions from two highly accomplished poets, I'd like to see if I can allay some fears.
They are Charlotte Mandel with "Six", which was originally published in her collection A Disc of Clear Water (Saturday Press, 1982), and Chuck Levenstein, editor of the former online zine Poems Niederngasse, with "Rain Sestina".
Scary Thing #1: I Flunked Math
These charts one sees all over the Internet! They make the form appear like kabbalistic numerology comprehensible only to pattern-seeking savants. No! Remember this is a form invented by people who wove their own belts; the rules of the sestina are no more complicated than tying a macramé knot, each line of poem, a cord of twine. As a string of knots, the pattern doesn't refer back to the first knot but just to the previous. The stanzas spool off of one another: 6,1/5,2/4,3 of the previous stanza, 6 times—a simple braid.
Now to finish a row, some sort of edging stitch is needed. In sestinas, this is called the envoi. Although once there were traditional patterns for the envoi, they have long ago been abandoned to more general rules: all the end words appear somewhere in the last three lines, usually two per line, one at the end and one somewhere in the middle. Also, most sestinas end with the last word of the poem's first line. Not only does this not require any computer programs to remember, but it is a pleasure of the form to exploit it to expressive effect.
Notice how Charlotte Mandel does this in "Six". The end words correspond with the end words from the first stanza as 1,2,3,4,5,6—not just a clever reference to the title and form, but highly expressive as well: a childish counting up suiting the theme and adding an ominous touch.
Now, the evolution of variations on the envoi is an essay in itself, which brings us to...
Scary Thing #2: History is Long
It seems one can't enter a discussion of the sestina without first encountering its long history. To be fair, its history is quite interesting, in part because more details of it are known, at least more so than some of the other forms of its day. It makes a good story that no one can resist. Unfortunately though, all this ado has the effect of casting the form as unapproachably venerable. No again. Sestina is not venerable; it is vernacular. (Allow me just one colorful factoid: its main proponent, Arnaut Daniel, was depicted in Dante's Purgatory as the vernacular poet.) More importantly, the sestina has had numerous revivals amongst poets since, clearly attesting to the pleasure they give one to write.
Why? Because the sestina is a prose form, built in sentences not phrases, unlike its more design-dependent contemporaries, the triolet and the villanelle. As opposed to these phrase-repetition forms in which the phrase drives the poem, the end words in a sestina serve more as destinations. Choosing how to get from one to the next is much of the fun.
As a prose form, the sestina is particularly suited for argument. In Levenstein's poem, for example, stanza four begins with "Suppose" and stanza five with "Alas." These are rhetorical terms, meant to propose new facets.
Most sestinas are written in the third-person form, often covering big sweeps of time as Levenstein has done. Elizabeth Bishop's famous "Sestina" offers an interesting contrast. This poem reads as if it were a screenplay—so many shifts in vantage point.
Bishop has chosen present tense for her narrative. It did occur to me to wonder how that might work for Mandel's poem, especially in the first line of the sixth stanza, if not all the way through.
In both cases, the guideposts of end words elicit surprising turns in the journey. In this sense, the sestina is a poetic form.
It is poetic in another sense as well, that is, in its music. The sestina has a way of generating riffs. Scan the left-hand column of "Rain Sestina," and you will detect a pattern of "and"s resolved in the envoi as "an end".
Now a form that shifts and riffs lends itself to humor. (Though the all-humor-all-the-time mode that dominates the form's latest revival, the postmodern sestina, is admittedly amusing—all right, often very amusing—it limits the expressive range of the form to glib to outrageous.) Levenstein made me laugh twice in stanza five, just the right time to vary the tone and keep the poem lively.
A second characteristic of the postmodern sestina, obviously, is to be self-referential, or perhaps more apt in this case, form-referential. Charlotte Mandel accomplishes this nicely in her envoi as mentioned above. Her title is a hint as well.
But there is a problem with being too self-referential: it can be paralyzing.
Scary Thing #3: But, But...What If I Choose Wrong?
All the free advice out there about homonyms and words that can be used in multiple tenses and invisible words and words from the same family and so on, turn a form so relaxed it could easily be used by a child into an ordeal. Moreover, cute as the postmodern wink can be, too much self-consciousness about the end words puts an inordinate emphasis on something secondary to meaning.
In practical terms, you need about 45 words in your first stanza. You can get those words from anywhere, a diary entry, the back of a cereal box, one of the poems in your unfinished file. Now pick some words you think you might like to work with. Choose wisely: thematically, musically, sure, but don't fret it. You will discover that it is possible to make adjustments.
In fact, so adjustable is this form that you can begin with any stanza and the pattern will hold. Pin the cut stanzas back onto the end. Often the meaning will render this ridiculous and new lines will need to be composed, but sometimes they merely need a bit of reworking. At best, sometimes this is just the leap a poem needs to keep it energized.
Here's how this revision would work with using the poems of both of our guests as examples:
In Levenstein's "Rain Sestina" the last two stanzas and envoi would now be:
These umbrella musings keep us dry while we wait
For slippery waters to cease slithering by in roadside ditches.
Our wetlands misery, malarial mold and all, must be diverted
Until clouds dissipate, as in memory did clear the skies
And they filled with radiant Apollo's will.
How long will our patience be tried by this damned rain!
Patience is a virtue nurtured by endless rain:
Old forests are proud of their ability to wait
While lesser shrubs insist on irrigation ditches
And pipes of stolen water, streams diverted,
Dams inserted to pool and pump the skies
While the trees and I are dry or wet as Nature wills.
Yes, even flowery patience will wilt if forced to wait
For an end to endless rain, the petals diverted
From terran skies end their short lives in a ditch.
In Mandel's "Six" the last two stanzas and envoi would now be:
why my mother looked away, letting me stand
it, letting me suffer eyes and hands of people—
the man's fingers groping for tunnels
under my dress. The wall in front was a window
framing a strange man's eyes magnified, pale—
a scream in my throat like sand, burning red—
At six, my cheeks were apple red.
Relatives pinched me like fruit on a stand,
testing me. I longed to be pale,
glassy and flat like the people
reflected in black mirror windows
staring in the howl of subway tunnels.
"We'll go home, your skin is red." My mother made me stand,
pulled off my bathing suit. Pale bodiless eyes of people
stared through black mirror windows at my body screaming in tunnels.
In both cases, there is most certainly something to be said for the choice. As Levenstein's poem currently stands, the final stanza is sort of a summation, resounding themes that have been previously stated—another god brought in, a return to the theme of patience. This poem has just been something to do to kill time while it rained. But in the new arrangement, the thematic statement "Patience is a virtue nurtured by endless rains" is now offered as a wisdom discovered—way more worthwhile than a time killer (at least to me as a reader). The address shifts too, from "we" to "I," adding another level of cadence.
What is lost is the inviting first line. "My tribe..." is less generous, less inclusive, less obvious too—that is, it takes more parsing. The opposite effect is true for Mandel's "Six," where much is gained by beginning with the second stanza with its active, in-progress, "Riding to Coney Island, the tunnels/blasted into daylight."
Simply tagging on the first stanza with no revision would be risky in this case. Personally, I like it. I like the shift from the memory to the adult reflection upon it coming at this point in the poem. Reworked or not, what it definitely does demonstrate is how a digression of some sort at this point would heighten the drama of the mother's response in the envoi. This revision sacrifices the form-referential design of Mandel's envoi, but she might yet be able to save that idea.
The larger general point, though, is that the sestina is more flexible than one might think. So relax, pick a few words, and settle in for a long poem. There's nothing to be afraid of.
Where could poems like "Six" and "Rain Sestina" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Virginia Warbey Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by May 19
UK-based literary society offers prizes up to 800 pounds and possible anthology publication; no simultaneous submissions; fees in pounds sterling only
Connecticut Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Connecticut Poetry Society offers prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems, 80 lines maximum
New England Poetry Club Annual Contests
Postmark Deadline: May 31
Various themed contests, including a members-only category for poems in traditional forms, with prizes of $100-$1,000
Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
One of Britain's largest and most prestigious awards for unpublished poems, short stories, and flash fiction by authors aged 16+, with top prizes of 5,000 pounds in each genre; enter by mail or online
Margaret Reid Poetry Prize for Traditional Verse
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Prizes up to $3,000 and online publication for published or unpublished poems in traditional forms; Winning Writers assists with entry handling for this contest
These poems and critique appeared in the May 2010 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Categories: Poetry Critiques, Traditional Verse
