Oh Bother: A Poet Attempts the Sestina

I sat with a new writing group about a year ago, which prompted attendees to write a sestina.

A what?

I had never heard of the form, but no surprise there. Sonnet and haiku were the only ‘forms’ I had ever heard of before.

I appreciated the challenge, though. So of course, I researched and settled on one of my favorite poetry craft books: The Art and Craft of Poetry by Michael J. Bugeja.

I decided I was going to like this sestina thing—it’s a form patterned in math. (Math—my true love, though long ago abandoned—and a story for another time.)

So, I wrote my sestina and was pleased.

Only lately, however, did I understand that what I had written may be adjacent but was not a true sestina.

Oh bother.

Enter the “tritina”—a modern, abbreviated, more manageable form. Something to tackle before taming its larger cousin.

Dedicated words to end each line of a stanza, while rotating the order of the end words in subsequent succession. Defined rotation, followed by an envoi—with rules as well.

The sestina is composed of six stanzas—a challenge for sure. The tritina is three stanzas—a stepping stool or a stopping place in its own right.

I wasn’t being casual with my original sestina. I studied the form and liked it—even though it was reputed to be “the most difficult fixed form” by the French lyric poets.

Okay, that was a little daunting. But I liked it.

Ornate.

Restricted to six end-words.

Preconceived pattern.

Envoi. Yikes. It alone felt like a math problem disguised as a poem.

But it made sense. And I loved the words I chose.

But in the end, it became tangled.

And although I was quite pleased with the result, the result, I now know, was not a sestina.

I followed my heart, not form. Repetition became semantic, not mechanical. Image returned emotionally, not positionally.

After all, I am a meaning-first poet, not a math-first poet. (Stay tuned on that thought, however, because I am believing right now that poetry is a sort of math—but, that’s another essay, right?)

The poem I wrote that wanted to be a sestina fell short. We’ll call it a proto-sestina.

It fell short because I wrote driven by meaning, not by obedience to form. I had failed to see the role of the rules because I focused instead on what I wanted to say, ignoring my commitment to say it in a specified way.

Will I rewrite the sestina—fix it?

Probably not.

It spoke to me in a way I was not trained to hear otherwise. Besides, the lesson for me here was realizing that while some forms invite collaboration or free movement, other forms demand you submit.

I am ready now for submission to certain poetic forms.

I will write a true sestina.

But not today.

Today, I train myself on a smaller scale. Tritina.

It makes sense to start with ‘manageable’ for learning something entirely new: rotational logic, fewer elements, same pressure, but lower load.

This was a way for me to preserve what mattered to the sestina and to me: recurrence, psychological turn, and restraint.

I could now have my meaning and math too. Poetic heaven.

Meet my tritina—Brilliance Above.

shrinking from wonder

partial consent to partial darkness

too far away to know the cosmos

the dahlia spectrum seeds the cosmos

where Dahl once tended child wonder

and doubt hides in fields of dancing darkness

already dead, light reaches for darkness

and curiosity drifts amid a chaotic cosmos

until stardust exposes living wonder

whose place is it to wonder

about dead-night darkness

while the cosmos spills its brilliance above?

Math meets meaning. I couldn’t be happier.

How about you? Where do you find yourself resisting structure?