Sculpted Words

Six stanzas and an envoi.

The dizzying pattern that set my path straight.

I first came across the sestina in an Intro to Poetry class at Black Hawk College. The assignment read as follows: “Write a sestina or villanelle on a subject of your choosing.” Poetic genres, particularly structured forms, are where most of my writing experiences lie, and it doesn’t take long for those who know me to learn of my undying love for the sestina. It is a love stronger than my passion for “proper” haiku education, burning brighter than my carefully crafted iambic pentameter in a Shakespearian sonnet, so you can imagine how this story ends. I write my first sestina, find love at first sight, and seek to inspire the next generation to create their own… only, the story of my first sestina assignment ends with me writing the villanelle.

Yes, I took one look at Elisabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” and decided that I would write some artificially optimistic poem with rhyming refrains about the “dawn” and a “fawn” to go for the easy A instead. This was one of those decisions that followed me, persistently searing itself into the back of my mind with a regretful sizzle. The very word, “sestina,” existed in my brain space over the next year somewhere in the cranial equivalent to that space between your couch cushions where you find week-old popcorn kernels and broken mechanical pencils, resurfacing whenever I’d least expect (or want) it.

It may seem strange to begin a writing history so close to the present, but I have often found that my various rebirths are much more meaningful than my origins and hold some of my biggest accomplishments. After transferring to WIU’s Quad Cities Campus, a mix-up in my paperwork enrolled me into yet another Intro to Poetry class with a different professor. I sat in class, once again dabbling in sonnets and ballads and villanelles. I made it through another unit on metrical feet with the same definitions from newer sources. Perhaps what shocked me the most about this experience was how different it felt. I was doing riveting things with the same terms, only in a different order. I was a living sestina.

My poems flew together more elegantly the second time. I stayed true to meter, but my newfound willingness to deviate from that meter proved far more effective than my robotic commitment to tradition. I experimented with slant rhyme and enjambment, all while working within the bounds I’d drawn to adhere closely to the structure. In breaking these conventions, I felt like I was finally doing the form justice. When it came time to write a poem about a topic of my choice, this time, the sestina chose me. After spending weeks in nature to keep my sanity during COVID, I took inspiration from the movement of the rivers and man-made gravel paths, telling the story of how these rivers and roads waged the eternal battle of man vs. nature. The ending words remained, but the message shifted, morphing the roads into a dark villain that destroyed as the rivers raised their cries. The dizzying pattern I’d avoided a year ago seemed to fit the chaos of a still world. Everything was changing but stuck in the same—an eternally evolving 2020.

This poem is not my biggest accomplishment in my writing, but this rebirth is. This rebirth that showed me that the same words can speak anew in the next phase of life. That form is more vocal than content as a megaphone for the meaning. That you can be in the exact same place you were a year ago and still change.

Six stanzas and an envoi.
The dizzying pattern that set my path straight.
On this path, I welcome who I will become as the person I have always been.