I don’t recall when the sestina became one of my formal poetry obsessions but for a while I wanted to write a good one so badly that I kept a sticky note in the back of my writing journal for words that I thought would be the best ones to utilize in a sestina. Like the word ring. Verb? Noun? Multiple meanings?

My compiling of words has been going on for at least a few years if not closer to a decade (off and on). I keep thinking I can be one of the few to craft an enjoyable sestina.

I have yet to make a viable example.

A sestina, “is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet . . . 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”(Wikipedia).

The first stanza can be thought of having end words:
1 2 3 4 5 6

The proceeding stanzas are then:

2nd stanza 6 1 5 2 4 3
3rd stanza 3 6 4 1 2 5
4th stanza 5 3 2 6 1 4
5th stanza 4 5 1 3 6 2
6th stanza 2 4 6 5 3 1

and then the tercet or envoi  further complicates the poem with line one containing words 2—5, line two 4–3 and line three 6—1. (About.com)

Perhaps an example is now in order? Or two.

First up is a link to a sestina by Ezra Pound and this second link is to a series of modern sestina’s that were presented on McSweeney’s. (Or now three as I link to a fun sestina in the only journal Vox Poetica)

Why do I think contemporary poets need to try forms like the sestina? Because working in form can often actually free you. When you try to make a thought fit into a specific form, suddenly you find words that you use less often appearing on the page, you find you have to think more about sentence structure and line breaks. Formal poetry can, in fact, free you from your own bad free verse habits.

Not that I will ever turn away from free verse. Free, primarily narrative verse, is still where I thrive but every once in a while if I feel like playing with words or I think I have nothing to say, I pick a form and see what my subconscious wants to say.

For additional enjoyment how about a game involving sestinas?

Or a video of BOA author Alan Michael Parker reading a sestina? Can you pick out the six key words without the text of the poem?

Additional links:

• Poets.org
• Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop
• Wikipedia

Jessie Carty’s writing has appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Houston Literary Review. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks At the A & P Meridiem (Pudding House 2009) and The Wait of Atom (Folded Word 2009) as well as a full length poetry collection, Paper House (Folded Word 2010). Jessie is a freelance writer and writing coach. She is also the photographer and editor for Referential Magazine. She can be found around the web, especially at http://jessiecarty.com where she blogs about everything from housework to the act of blogging itself.

I have nightmares about being asked to scan poetry. I am a poet. I love poetry, even the classics with their rhyme and meter. But, I confess, I find scanning impossible.

The first time I came across scansion was in grade school. I don’t remember the exact grade but I am thinking late elementary like 5th or 6th grade. We were told to take our vocabulary words and to mark the accented and unaccented syllables. I could not do it without a dictionary in hand. I tried to say the words “naturally” but I could make my voice “rise” up on whichever syllable I wanted to be the accented. In a possibly related fact, I can’t hear “notes” in music. Yet, I taught myself how to play a few songs on the piano when I was a young teen.

Do I just have a failed ear? How am I a poet if I cannot scan a line?

When I started writing poetry, as most poets do, I wrote in rhyme. I remember my first creative writing teaching during my freshman year of high school telling me that I had a natural use of rhyme and rhythm. When something, supposedly, comes naturally does that then make it harder to explain?

As I continued my education as a poet, I wanted to be able to make the implicit knowledge I thought I might have (is this that subjective thing called talent?) and somehow make it explicit. I wanted to be able to explain how it was that I wrote a poem so that I could help other people appreciate poetry without it just being about taking apart lines.

And we are back to scanning.

There are, of course, a variety of meters but the most common is blank verse. The first thing that probably comes to mind when you think of blank verse is Shakespeare and/or iambic pentameter. If these come to mind, you are correct! Blank verse is also noted for not having rhyme. Many definitions/explanations of the meter indicate it may have evolved while writers were translating classic Latin and Greek verse which does not rhyme. There are also many Italian forms that do not rhyme and writers always want to make something new while still speaking to the tradition of the art form. Non-rhyming, yet metric verse was a natural progression.

Blank verse can, of course, lend itself to easy scanning but can also begin to sound like da dum da dum da dum if devices such as enjambment are not utilized or if readers (in oral presentations) do not try to vary their reading patterns. It is still a very prominent form with modern writers such as Frost, Stevens, Yeats and Auden. With the revival of variations on sonnets I can see the meter continuing to be popular. It is said to be the meter of the natural voice, how often do we write in blank verse without realizing it?

I’d like to post a poem that I initially wrote while trying out different forms. It started from an exercise that asked you to write a sonnet. The poem is in no way a sonnet now but what do you think of the meter? Am I fooling around with blank verse.

The Navy Wife

The yeast left rising,
doubling fat and full
is Sunday morning:
bacon, eggs and milk.

On the couch, the snoring
mustached man is Monday,
smelling fat and foul.
The ship it clings to him—
the smokes, the sweat.

Yet she lies
with him. Sees some
hope in him
even as he breeds
miscarriage
and teaches her wine.

On a Wednesday,
stretched between weekends,
she wanders; plants
fruit trees in the yard.

He returns on Friday,
during dry dock,
driving with a warm
beer perched on his knee.
He just misses
striking the saplings.

She grabs the keys from him
and goes inside, locking the door.
She fills a pot with water
while she lights the stove. Tonight
will be her favorite: corned beef,
cabbage and potatoes.

(Copyright 2010, Paper House, Folded Word Press)

I wonder if there are new ways to learn how to scan lines? What methods could help my old ear finally hear a word and just know which is the accented syllable, which is the unaccented one. Am I the only one with this issue? Do you use blank verse or other metric forms? Do you scan poetry? I am a nerd at heart, so do not fear to admit that you scan poetry in your free time. I make lists for fun.

Examples.

Wikipedia
Craft of Poetry

Types of Poetry

Jessie Carty’s writing has appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Houston Literary Review. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks At the A & P Meridiem (Pudding House, 2009) and The Wait of Atom (Folded Word, 2009) as well as one full length poetry collection Paper House (Folded Word, 2010). Jessie works as a freelance writing, writing coach and as editor of Referential Magazine . You can find her around the web but most often she is blogging about everything from housework to the act of blogging itself at http://jessiecarty.com

I assume you know what twitter is. But anyways, as a microblogging service it began as an idea that would let people webcast their SMS text messages from their phones. As SMS were limited to 160 characters and the message then had to include info to get it through the system and on to the web as a tweet, as it became know, they were limited to 140 CHAR.

I’ve never done that, and it’s possible that most people who use twitter.com from their phone do so through a dedicated twitter client over their data plans. So, even people doing from their phone don’t do it as the original idea was envisioned.

Anyway, some people write twitter stories, some people publish what other people write in twitter based magazines, and sometimes they even pay to publish stories written in 140 characters. Crazy!

140 CHAR

You are lucky to get three sentences in 140 characters. You could map a beginning, a middle and an end to those sentences but, obvious as it sounds, it does not always work. Not exactly.

A nano-sized story that fits into the twitter format of 140 CHAR, needs at least three elements to work. It is around these three elements that the story is written. These are the seeds around which a story grows in the telling, even if one or more of the pieces are not mentioned directly.

To explain this I’ll use Tzvetan Todorov ‘s five stages of narrative from his Narratology stuff.

Stories can be structured, explained, analysed, as moving through five stages of narrative:

1. setting
2. disruption
3. recognition
4. response
5. resolution.

Recognition

In super small fiction this structure of five stages will not fit into 140 CHAR, it is not possible to actually move through them one after another. Not directly. Directly some are going to have to be left out. Indirectly it is the work of the reader, if they can, to add the missing stages from what you do put in.

So, it’s your job as a nano fiction writer to help the reader interpret and fit in the missing pieces of story structure from your clues, such that they ‘get’ the story. Similar to getting a joke, indeed, jokes probably a good place to start practicing.

Actual elements can almost be picked at random and thrown together but it is their ordering as structural pieces, and their revelation creates the story. A particular story.

Response

You must have all stages though. If this is not done, then one has merely intimated a scene or a thought or a feeling. But a mere gesture, however gracefully done, towards something (which is not actually hinted at) does nothing. If nothing happens there is no story.

BUT in 140 characters it is very very hard to do this. Because you can’t do all the five stages. No. It’s barely possible to list these structural stages of narabbitology or whatever it was.

So, pick three to keep. Or pick two to hint at. Subtlely or not.

The resolution

So how do you hint at them? This is the real trick of writing nano fiction, you have to get the stages that you do use, the structural pieces, to do double time. Each element has to be able to carry two of the stages of the narrative (doesn’t have to do it, but be able to). That’s why I call them elements, as they appear to be indivisible, but really they are two things, (two structural stages of narrative). (This is why jokes work, e.g. an assumed reference is overturned by a change in context to an incongruent reference.)

Thus a stage does both their direct work (say the first stage: the setting of the story) while cleverly pointing at the indirect element (say, stage 4, response to the disruption). The reader works this out when they get to that stage (having read stage 3 suddenly stage 1’s direct reference is pushed aside for another meaning).

The simplest way is in fact to use the beginning, the middle and the end. But the middle element, in such a naïve format, has to do three of those narrative stages mentioned above. That is a lot for it to do: one direct and two indirect, so you might as well spread the load a little, and have two elements do some indirect work. The naïve form is actually harder. (Traps for young players.)

Now, readers, even if they have never heard of the Franco-Bulgarian writer Tzvetan Todorov nor of Narratology will expect that structure of five stages mentioned above, if unconsciously. It’s a habit we all learnt when we were making sense of the world as young children. (The search for meaning is a childish thing, perhaps only exisiting much like how the grammars of language get that way because babies learn them.)

This is both good and bad. It means you can rely on their narrative experience past to read between the lines and so imagine these other structures and stages. Readers expect them, they hunger for them. Thus, they will be able to join the dots of the stages they expect to see, and overlay them on what has been given.

It’s bad because there are no rules as to how to do it exactly, what to leave out, when. So now, every story will differ in its omission. How you deal with this is the true challenge of the twitter story writer. For it’s these holes the reader fills in which make the story whole. Once they make it whole, then they ‘get it’. This is your primary job, if you don’t enable this, then your story will not entertain, educate, edify or rouse.

If the writer stops these holes up wrongly, or fails to hint at them, there will no story at all.

There might be some other beautiful thing admittedly, that’s not what this post is about.

Epilogue

So what’s in a a story? Generally, it is agreed, that basically, something has to change. It might only happen in the reader’s mind, the old “change comes from within” response to panhandlers, but without change there is no story.

But that’s enough for this post.

I hope this helps, but I only worked it out in hindsight so let me know if is useful at all.

This post first appeared at formeika.wordpress.com. I’ll be using this structuralist approach on that blog to look at some twitter story examples in other posts. E.G. Hemingway’s six word story

A Fib (for short) is a six line 20 syllable poem with count of 1/1/2/3/5/8 although I argue (and it has been done) that you could continue the Fibonacci sequence and write a much longer piece (see this Wiki about Inger Christensen and look for details about her book Alphabet) .  There are no rhyme schemes involved or specific subject matter that is preferred.

Back in 2006, that was about all I found on the Fibonacci poem. Since then a Wikipedia article has been created, Poetry Foundation has an essay posted about the form and now there is at least one literary journal devoted to the Fibonacci.

I am surprised that the wiki article indicates that John Frederick Nims discussed the form as early as 1974 in the introduction to Western Wind. I have Western Wind, how did I not notice that?

The form has even been discussed in the New York Times. These links will give you at least an hour if not more that you can spend learning about a form that seems so simple but can truly be daunting to create.

I have only attempted a few and I’ve never published myself. Although I did publish one at Shape of a Box that is viewable in the links below.  I love combining science and math in poetry but I could never quite make it click.  My most recent try was written during my Periodic Table project that eventually became the chapbook  The Wait of Atom. The poem didn’t make it into the chapbook but I thought I’d include it here.

Beryl

Found
in gem
stones. Beryl,
is the crystalline
form of Berylium, whose name
means roughly “to become pale”. She gasps at the lone stone.

It is a fun form to try, so get out your pencil, paper and calculator and give it a try.

Additional links:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/intro.html

http://www.fibetry.com/

http://www.squidoo.com/fibonaccipoetry

Jessie Carty is the Editor of Shape of a Box, YouTube’s First Literary Magazine. Her poems have appeared in publications such as MARGIE, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Northville Review. Her non-fiction works have appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag and TheExaminer.com. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her first chapbook “At the A & P Meridiem” was released by Puddinghouse Publications in 2009. Her 2nd chapbook The Wait of Atom was released by Folded Word Press in 2009 and her first full length collection Paper House will be released by Folded Word in 2010. She can find her lurking on the web, but mostly at her BLOG

When I entered my MFA program in 2007, I was bombarded with prose poetry.  I felt fairly well read before I started the program given that I have been reading since I was three. I was even an English major as an undergrad. But somehow, even in a course titled “Modern Poetry,” I was never exposed to the prose poem.

Learning about prose poetry in my 30’s, however, was worth the wait.  I’m not even sure I would have appreciated the form when I was younger.  I would have said, what a lot of people still say, “That doesn’t look like a poem.”

There are so many definitions of what a prose poem is (you can see a very detailed entry with several defintions here) and, of course, there is always the ubiquitous Wikipedia article that has certainly replaced the time students used to spend flipping through heavy Encyclopedias in the library.

The definition I find most useful is paraphrased from Russell Edson “A prose poem is freed from the requirements of poetry and doesn’t have the constraints of fiction.” A prose poem, therefore equals Freedom.  Freedom is where, I believe, prose poetry began.  Leave it to the French to start a new revolution in poetry, to find that even free verse was not free enough, to inevitably create the prose poem in the 1800’s.

I will include quite a few links below for those of you who want to look (and I hope you will) more into the history of the prose poem and for examples of the form.

I am also including a prose poem that I wrote and a few topics for possible discussion in regards to the prose poem.  I hope you will join the conversation.

Here is one of my prose poems:

Family Night at the County Fair

Cotton candy like a pink dervish looms on the cone presented to me, by a hand that is pale like popcorn. Everyone is concave, wobbling while they walk the midway. Little girls in blue ribbons clutch the fingers of fathers in loosened ties. Big boys ride the spinning cars, catching their mother’s eyes as they whip by like the insides of cracked eggs. Whisked into dough boys. I take the Super Slide. The attendant calls, “Single Rider!” At the bottom, damp dark grass clips onto my bare shins. When I stand the pieces drop into the cuffs of my white socks. I can’t find the cotton candy cone but the sugar melted into red on my palm.

Commentary:

Now why did I make this a prose poem?  I tried it in lines in earlier versions but I wasn’t finding line breaks that worked well. The lines would become uneven and the flow of the poem wasn’t working when I tried to put it into lines. Once I moved the lines into “block” form, the logic of the poem became cleaner. I found myself moving from image to image rather than focusing on how the poem looked on the page.  I ended up, I feel, with a much stronger poem.

I have included an earlier draft of the poem below with de-lineation.  Perhaps before you read it you might want to print the poem above and/or mental try to make line breaks, just to see what you come up with.

Here is an earlier version of the poem with lines. Try reading each version out loud and, I hope, you will see the difference in how the poem flows.

County Fair

Cotton candy like a pink dervish
looms on the cone presented to me
by a hand that is pale like popcorn.

Everyone is concave, wobbling
while they walk the midway.
Little girls in blue ribbons
clutch the fingers of fathers
in loosened ties.
Big boys ride the spinning
cars catching their mother’s eyes
as they whip by like whisked eggs,
whisked into dough boys.

I prepare to slide, the attendant calls,
“Single Rider!” I ride my potato
sack down, unable to gauge success
with no one to race.

At the bottom, damp dark grass clips
onto my bare shins and when I stand
the pieces drop into the cuffs of my white socks.

The candy in my hand has melted
into red on my palm
as the sky above grays into black.

Here are some general notes about prose poetry that I have collected and which I hope will start some conversation:

• Line break is the easiest way to define the difference
• What happens when there are no constraints?
• More reliance in prose poetry on contrast because there are no line breaks
• More stream of consciousness
• Stanza in Italian means little room – what do you think of with a prose poem essentially looking like a single stanza? A little room? A paragraph.
• Poetry is the sound of language into lines. Prose is language into sentences. This minor difference meant that the prose poem had to be invented (my notes from lecture given by James Logenbach at Warren Wilson MFA program)
• Prose poetry must hold our attention with syntax and diction without the assistance (necessarily) of the line, rhyme etc
• By creating prose poetry we need to understand what we are generating, why we are writing in that form, as well as what we are rejecting by writing in it.
• Poetry develops its own system. Its own logic. That is how you develop form. Form should inform the subject matter.
• A good prose poem is working if you feel it is poetry.
• The idea of folding back, in prose poetry, in order to move forward.
• Want to stir the waters some more? How about Flash Fiction?

Additional Links

Sentence Magazine

The Prose Poem: An International Journal

An ongoing discussion with history, bibliography etc

Anthology: Great American Prose Poems

No Boundaries: Prose Poems by 24 American Poets, Edited by Ray Gonzalez

The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic

The Death of the Poem by Justin Courter

New Zealand Poet Vivian Plumb reads her Prose Poems

Ron Silliman reads from “The Alphabet”

Jessie Carty is the Editor of Shape of a Box, YouTube’s First Literary Magazine. Her poems have appeared in publications such as MARGIE, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Northville Review. Her non-fiction works have appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag and TheExaminer.com. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her first chapbook “At the A & P Meridiem” was released by Puddinghouse Publications in 2009. She can find her lurking on the web, but mostly at her BLOG

And so, we began to create Form140.  A working definition is this:  Any poetic flash within 140 characters (including spaces), a/k/a Tweet.  Carl Sandburg’s famous poem “The Fog” would fit.  

But as we develop Form140, we also begin to improvise solutions to Twitter’s inhospitability to traditional line breaks, as in the variations below:  

1.  Equation poems.  These are poems without line breaks, but structured by keyboard signs such as ” -, +,  x, >,< and =.”   A working example is “(you)(me) – rocking horse – pogo stick – skate board = empty nest.”    

2.  Cumulative poems.  These are poems where the first line is one word, the second is two words, the next is three words,  etc. — or the opposite, dwindling down to one word.  The poet  decides on keyboard symbol(s) to use to divide the lines.

3.  Prose poems.  Prose is used, but unlike stories, no beginning, middle and end, or plot is needed.  All that is called for within the 140 characters (including spaces) is a moment of grace.

4.  Any poems involving spinning, flying spins, or the poet’s choice of circular, concentric, mobius strip, or other infinite action. 

With Form.Reborn, we observed that some forms can be tweaked easily to fit within the 140 character limit: haiku, cinquain, limerick, one stanza ballads, one heroic couplet, etc.  Others, on the surface, seem to defy the bounds of possibility: villanelle, sonnet, sestina, etc.  Can they be done with text-speak?  Should they?  Will readers want to track a few lines of long forms at a time until the series is complete?  We published vibrant images and concise thought that readers enjoyed whether they were in a doctor’s waiting room, in line at the grocery store, walking to class, or  . . .

Now, the next chapter begins.  We invite you to help write it.

France has a rich history of poetry innovation.  The villanelle is just one of the many forms that developed as an imitation of a French model.  The form entered into English-language poetry during the 1800’s.

A villanelle appears to be a fairly simple rhyming form but it is actually extremely difficult to write because the first and third lines of the first stanza are repeated throughout the poem as a sort of refrain.  So not only do they rhyme each other but they will also rhyme other lines in the poem and need to be repeated, often without any alteration, without becoming boring.

A villanelle is normally 19 lines long, consisting of five tercets (three lined stanzas) and one concluding quatrain.

Below is a breakdown of how the form looks.  I borrowed this information from the Wikipedia article because it is the simplest way to show how the line set up and rhymes work.  As you can see, even this simple illustration can still be quite difficult to understand, and even more difficult to execute with any skill.

Refrain 1 (A¹)
Line 2 (b)
Refrain 2 (A²)

Line 4 (a)
Line 5 (b)
Refrain 1 (A¹)

Line 7 (a)
Line 8 (b)
Refrain 2 (A²)

Line 10 (a)
Line 11 (b)
Refrain 1 (A¹)

Line 13 (a)
Line 14 (b)
Refrain 2 (A²)

Line 16 (a)
Line 17 (b)
Refrain 1 (A¹)
Refrain 2 (A²)

I have attempted, over the years to write quite a few villanelles but I have never had one published.  I am including a pop culture one that I completed earlier this year mainly to give you a concrete example of how the rhyming works.

Marvin the Martian’s Villanelle

Marvin the Martian
wanted to destroy
the Earth. He wanted to win

with his Illudium
PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator.
Marvin the Martian

of a single mind
never tried to enjoy
the Earth. He wanted to win.

And for that he was like men,
like a man fiddling with his big toy.
Marvin the Martian,

small and thin,
no bigger than a boy.
The Earth. He wanted to win.

Win? That Bunny wouldn’t let him.
Marvin was constantly foiled.
Marvin, the Martian,
The Earth. He wanted to win.

For more modern and contemporary examples you can read poems such as:

• One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
• There were several examples  n the 2008 issue of Margie if you can obtain a copy with titles such as: Satchel Paige Villanelle by Chris Mattingly and Cirrhosis by Katy Miller
• This article by Albert Riosalso contains several examples.
• Week 8 of Project Verse was to write a Villanelle.
• Jillian Weise has a villanelle titled “The Surgeon” in her collection The Amputee’s Guide to Sex
• Paul Mullineaux from Poetry Daily with Men Knitting
• Video of a poem by Dash Poet (aka Mark Shephard), view below or click here to read with text of the poem in the side bar 

Additional source material:

Wikipedia on Villanelles

Can you think of other examples? We’d love to hear from you.

Jessie Carty is the Editor of Shape of a Box, YouTube’s First Literary Magazine. Her poems have appeared in publications such as MARGIE, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Northville Review. Her non-fiction works have appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag and TheExaminer.com. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her first chapbook “At the A & P Meridiem” was released by Puddinghouse Publications in 2009. She can find her lurking on the web, but mostly at her BLOG

rhyme scheme:  none

titles:  yes

subjects: any

Twitter-ready:  one couplet usually fits

bare-bones beginning:  Wikipedia