On this Clean Monday, I’m delighted to share my sestina poem “Zephyr Wind Talks to a Kite in Athens, Greece.” This poem first published with Cable Street.
As the Poetry Foundation explains, a sestina is a
complex French verse form, usually unrhymed, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoi. The end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas; the closing envoi contains all six words.
The same glossary offers more information about the sestina, including the sestina’s particular pattern of end word repetition.
Contemporary poet Sandra Beasley has written many sestinas, which she describes as a “gyroscope of form.” One example of Beasley’s sestinas includes “Let Me Count the Waves.”
As I’ve grown in my own poetry practice, I’ve discovered a distinctive path of knowledge through poetry. “Zephyr Wind Talks to a Kite in Athens, Greece” is the fruit of an initial nudge to write a sestina about kites. Soon after, I read Hapax by A.E. Stallings, which introduced me to the connection of kites and Orthodox Lent.
When I searched these Greek kites online, however, I learned they were not just any kites: the Clean Monday kites are hexagons that revel in the number six. Additional online searches tell me that there are six major global wind patterns. The more I researched, the more it felt like this poem was writing itself.
Speaking of A.E. Stallings, her “Sestina: Like” is its own tour de force. And I’m thrilled that another sestina genius, Rebecca Jane, has kindly written a guest post on this very website about her poetry practice. Rebecca Jane is the author of She Bleeds Sestinas.
What about you: do you have any experience reading and/or writing sestinas? What do you think about this poetic form and its intimacy with the number six?
Image by Gigi Field from Pixabay
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