Sestina Contest. Up for the challenge?  August 15, 2008 - August 31, 2008

Okay, so below is the definition but it confuses me. Is it possible to actually follow those instructions and write something that makes sense?????


sestina (also, sextina, sestine, or sextain) is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time; if we number the first stanza's lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza's lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531. This organization is referred to as retrogradatio cruciata ("retrograde cross"). These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet's first line usually containing 1 and 2, its second 3 and 4, and its third 5 and 6


OKAY
SO here is an example:
An example of the way in which a sestina's end-words shift:




Poets choose free verse over form one

says because they need room to

belt it out without stone-age three-

forked rules tomahawking their brains before

they get started - For example - the five

beat line has been passe since '56


when Howl blasted its organic six-

teen gun salvo to freedom without one

shot fired in reply (not counting five

or six palefaced rhymers trying to

hold the fort) - But any poetry, for-

mal or free, aims at making magic: Three

[...]


These are the first two verses of the poem "Warpath", written by Peter Meinke (first published in the Georgia Review).

Laura E. Aranda

TX

3 Contestants
3 Submissions
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Created Aug 15, 2008