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Monday, October 1, 2012

Persimmons in sestina (first stanza)

When my cousin André visited us two weeks ago and he accepted my invitation to write about the Harvest Moon, he asked me whether I'd ever read Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Sestina" and later wrote that:
I like to read her poem in late September, especially on a rainy day like today. In a sestina, the final words of each line of the first stanza (six lines) are reused for the remaining stanzas, but the order in which the words appear are different each time.
    In a well-written sestina such as the one by Bishop [text of her poem here], the words take on new meanings and imply different ideas each time. Bishop's poem alludes to the cycling of the seasons, relating it (as I interpret it) to the cycle of life and death.
    Doubly reminded, I read Bishop's poem and was similarly charmed. I looked up the sestina form, in Miller Williams's Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms, and learned that in its classical form a sestina has a precise prescription for the order in which the six end-words appear from stanza to stanza, culminating in a triplet (or "terminal envoy") in which each line uses two of the six words, one of them at the end and the other buried within—again in a prescribed order. My inner mathematician grew excited and I wrote back to André that I felt challenged to write one myself, and what about him?
    I haven't heard back from him yet (he's a very busy doctoral degree candidate in keyboard performance), and that has given me time to conceive another idea: What if I were to commit myself to write a stanza at a time just prior to publishing it? I don't know whether you noticed Friday's limerick of the week, but I wrote it, and it was intensely autobiographical:

When morning comes and day's post's not ready,
Comb the papers with eye poised, steady:
    Some news from somewhere
    Will come out of nowhere;
Hold on, th'experience can be heady!
    That is, breakfast's having already passed without today's piece having been written yet (let alone published), I hope to feel some adrenalin starting to flow (the "heady experience"). And, when I don't, what I can feel is fear. Today it has been a very nice adrenalin drip, with me having—whether ultimately warranted or not—a high confidence that I could not only write Stanza 1 today, but could write each of the following ones, and the conclucing triplet, when its time came.

I promise that I haven't written Stanzas 2 through 6 yet, nor the terminal envoy, but I did write Stanza 1 within the hour preceding my writing these paragraphs. My "rhetorical set" of six words is: persimmons, tree, rain, garden, sun, sky.
    And here is Stanza 1 of "Persimmons in sestina":

October's the season for persimmons.
Heavier, heavier becomes the tree
As its roots absorb the watering rain
And color and light pervade the garden,
Everything jubilating in the sun
Under a vibrantly sheltering sky.
Stanza 2 [published with Stanza 3 on October 8] must use the end-words in the following order:
...sky
...persimmons
...sun
...tree
...garden
...rain

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