Try The Sestina, It's Delicious!

I had the privilege, when I lived in Florida, to participate in several workshops with the poet, Peter Meinke.  Peter is an expert on poetic forms and during one of his workshops he suggested, after a critique of my poem, that I might enjoy writing a sestina.

The poem was 'Velvet Boy', published in The New Delta Review (Summer 2006, Vol.23, #2).  I wrote narrative poems in free verse (unrhymed verse without a metrical pattern), but I liked challenges and often imposed restrictions on a poem, whether it was the length of lines, the repetition of a word, or in the case of 'Velvet Boy', a different mention of fabric in each verse.

VELVET BOY

When he is face down in a pillow
Velvet Boy wonders if love tastes like linen.
Sometimes he grips the bedsheet
pretends it's a magic carpet and he is Aladdin
flying above the boulevard and the cars
and the freaks and bloated johns.

Tonight's trick is drunk and white
as chenille in moonlight, and Velvet Boy,
his face pushed into the pillow,
feels each grunt and thrust and wishes
whiskey didn't smell like dreams;
wishes dreams didn't sound like johns.

Later the john snores in cottony breaths,
a pillow hugged to his chin.
Velvet Boy lifts a fifty from his wallet
to fill in the cracks where fantasy can't.
Through the motel lobby, he runs
like a shadow hiding from light.

On the boulevard, traffic runs slow.
A Cadillac pulls up to the curb
and a john waves a hundred out the window.
Velvet Boy slips him a smile like satin.
He knows this life will swallow him whole,
a pillow pressed over his face.

Meinke encourages poets to explore forms: the sestina, the pantoum, the villanelle, and sonnet, among others.  'Without knowing these forms, how will you know what your poem wants to be?'

Since his workshop, I've been an ardent admirer of poetic forms, namely the sestina and the pantoum.  I've met with some success in both forms.  I labored over a villanelle for the better part of three weeks once, and though I like the form, I sure as hell don't want to write it.

I recently discovered the 'golden shovel' poem, an acrostic form, you can read one example here.  Another poet friend sent me her attempt using a Dorothy Parker poem and it was thrilling to read.  "You have always told me to try forms and now I understand why," she told me.

There is something liberating in restriction.  Yes, I said that.  Like the sestina, a 'golden shovel' poem has the last word of each line already determined and the poet is cornered, forced to write his or her way out; almost like writing the poem backwards.  Using these forms, the poet must reach further for words, walk around them and see them from different angles, manipulate them and bend them.  The joy is finding a new phrase, a brazen image, or a clever twist in a definition.  There is poetic ecstasy found in punishing line breaks and enjambments, both tools are necessary in the 'golden shovel' and the sestina.

I have heard many poets (and it's painful to hear) that they 'only write free verse because it's easier', and they have no interest in studying or trying out other forms.  First, I have never considered free verse easy.  Poets, whether formalists or free verse, labor over words, syllables, rhythm, line breaks.  I remind poets that poetry is also a visual art form, sometimes the way the poem looks on the page can influence the way it is read.  Chances are, if you think writing free verse is easy, your poetry probably sucks.

I'm no expert on poetic forms, but I am a fierce advocate of the poet's obligation to know them.