How I Finally Wrote a Sestina, and Why

Forgive the clickbait. I will get to the “How I Wrote a Sestina” part of the title soon, I promise, but I actually want to start with the “Why.”

As I wrote over on my Substack recently, I had some big news to share in August, the biggest of which was being awarded a Literary Fellowship in Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. I’ve extremely grateful to them for this honor, and I wrote about the ways I’m planning to use the funds that come with it. One way is to up my submission game, and to do that, I’ve been working on my SubTracker database.

I have a few kinks to work out and school is starting, so there won’t be time to post an update right away, but eventually, I will. I’ve been working on two improvements that will help me submit to more magazines this year.

One is a way to track my fees. For a long time, I had a system for tracking expenses and income along with my submissions, but when that old submission system went by the wayside and I ported it to Open Office (or LibreOffice), I didn’t bring in the expenses/income part. I did export all my old data, but since I wasn’t keeping track of all the $3-$5 submission fees and other expenses weren’t very much, I could keep up with it in a spreadsheet. Now that I want to track my submission spending, I needed a way to manage it more easily. And with a recent book out, I also had more need for tracking income, so it made sense to bring these spreadsheets into the database and create a way to view them. I’d been working on that, but the fellowship and the goal to submit more, even to markets that charge fees, gave me the push I needed to finish it.

The other side of submitting more is keeping track of reading periods. I have a way to track deadlines in the database, but I don’t have a good way to see what reading periods are about to open or to see other reminders I might want to give myself. I’ve been relying on my normal Reminders app for this, but I don’t want to clog it up with a ton of notices about submissions.

So I created a database table for reminders, where I can put a date, the name of the place it is associated with, and a brief description. That way, when I find a place I’d like to submit to but that isn’t open, I can add them to the reminder table so I won’t forget. I’d like to integerate both the reminders and the fees on the Places form, and I need to make sure they’re working the way I want them to before I make them public.

And that finally brings me to why and how I finished a sestina.

You see, I got an email reminder over the weekend from a magazine I’ve submitted to previously that they are opening for submissions. They take up to 10 pages of poems and like to see several related poems. I had a series of poems I wanted to submit, and I had a draft sestina that went with the series, so if I could only get that ready, I’d be closer to the number of pages they prefer.

The sestina is a form that I’ve contemplated writing for years. It seems so simple and yet is maddeningly complex. You just need a stanza of six lines, then you take the ending words of those lines and repeat them as the ending words of the next five stanzas with the pattern being that you take the last final word of the previous stanza as the final word of the first line of the new stanza, then the first line’s final word becomes the final word of the second line of the new stanza, followed by the final word of the fifth line, the second line, the fourth line, and the third line. Easy, right?

A few months ago, I had an idea for a sestina and managed to write the first stanza. That allowed me to write out the final words for the next stanzas in the pattern: 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531, and an evoi with 123456 across three lines (two of the words in each line, one at the midpoint and one at the end).

I had managed to get about half to two thirds of the way through the second stanza in about two months. I also took vacation, worked on proofs of A Writer’s Craft two different times, and dealt with one or two other things, occassionally coming back to the sestina and tinkering. I changed my six words a couple of times, but ended up coming back to the ones I had started with.

Then I had a deadline of trying to finish the sestina this weekend, if I could, and even though I should have been working on syllabi for the fall semester that starts tomorrow, it came to me. Not all at once, but I did crack the second stanza, and that gave me ideas for the third and fourth, which led me to a turn in the fifth and sixth, ending with a return to the beginning in the envoi.

Not writing helped me to write the sestina in the end. All these ideas had been brewing, and some things even needed to happen in the world before I could finish the poem.

You see, the problem wasn’t only with the form, though that is daunting — there are 39 lines to juggle, after all, and you have to repeat without sounding repetitious. The bigger problem was with the subject matter, though. I knew I wanted to write about a particular myth, but as I had explored it, I learned I didn’t really like the main character. Often that proves to be the most productive, so I knew I just had to find the right angle in. I’d started finding that in my first stanza, but reached a roadblock and needed to find my way out of the wilderness.

Oddly, it was this summer’s wildfires in Europe and also the western US that gave me the images I needed. That was something completely unrelated to the myth, but the turn I found took me there. The problems I’d struggled with in dealing with the myth led me there. It just took time and several failed attempts to find a way. No attempts are really failed if they show you the dead ends so you can try the winding path that will eventually get you where you need to go.

The other thing that helped me get there was writing in other forms. I’ve been writing more ghazals and pantoums in recent months, and I’m convinced that working with repetition in these forms helped train me to be able to navigate the interweaving patterns of the sestina. They helped me think in less linear ways, which is necessary for writing a form with so much repetition. Echo and resonance are much more important than straightforward logical thinking when writing like this, though you still need to write with standard, linear syntax.

Am I happy with my sestina? Yes. Happy enough to send it off with this batch of submissions, though when it comes back to me or before I send it off again, I will likely tinker with it some more or at least see how it lands with me after I’ve let it stew for awhile. After all, I’m never truly done with a poem until it’s published, but you reach a point where you’re ready to send it out into the world and see where its journey will take it. And now that frees me up to work on other poems.

But first I’ll get back to syllabi and setting up my online course shells, preparing for my first classes, and al lthe other things that mark the start of a new semester.