Reflections on a Hugging Sestina

Photo by @MichelleEvansArt

By André Duvall

[Note from Moristotle: When I asked André to please read and comment on a sestina I had written, his response was so thoughtful I asked him for permission to share his response publicly. The sestina appeared yesterday. I wrote it in September of last year, the same month André wrote his reflections, and I presented it to Dennis & Jan Huggins in October.]

I wanted to wait to comment on your sestina until after I had time to re-read it slowly and savor it. I do believe it “approaches perfection,” as you yourself felt. What a wonderful tribute to your friends – I feel the poem is successful on many levels:
    Each of the six words takes on a different inflection, or a new meaning, or shows a different perspective, which is one of the potential manifestations of a sestina (and perhaps the finest ones do this). This technique is not always easy to demonstrate.
    I feel as if I know the Huggins quite well after reading your poem, in the sense that I feel their kindness, and that I would very much like meeting them.
    You tie their openness with the benefits experienced by the neighborhood. The poem has attractive anecdotes – the wood carving of numerals, the walks of their dog.

Elizabeth Bishop

    Thank you so much for sharing this. Your composition of a sestina comes at a very good time. Just last week, it was raining, during the last week of September. Lying in bed, my thoughts turned toward my favorite sestina, that of Elizabeth Bishop, the one I shared with you that was your own first encounter with the sestina form. It is titled “Sestina” and begins, “September rain falls on the house...” [See Moristotle’s very first posting about sestinas: “Persimmons in sestina (first stanza),” October 1, 2012.]
    The equinoctial tears – the almanac – the grandmother – the fading light as the days grow shorter – here we are in autumn!
    It is a glorious day here – crisp air, blue skies.
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Editor’s Note: For André’s inspiration to me to write a sestina, I commend to readers one he wrote and we published back in 2013, titled, like Elizabeth Bishop’s, simply “Sestina.” At the end of it, I noted that

When we referenced Miller Williams’s Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms on October 1, we failed to mention that though the lines of a sestina are usually of equal length, their lengths can vary, as André’s sestina illustrates. Even the lines of Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina, which was an inspiration to both André and me, are of unequal length, though they are very nearly equal (and much shorter than most of the lines in André’s poem).

Copyright © 2021 by André Duvall