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Sestina

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  • Glossary Terms

    Sestina

    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, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines.
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Fourth Wall Arpeggio

    By A. Van Jordan
    Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
    have I written about my mother,
    who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
    and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
    never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so

    out of character...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Mixed-Up Sestina

    By Jordan Pérez
    We have been shitting and pissing in the sealed buses through the night,
    then out, and stadium lights click on. Rows of stands standing empty.
    I think of the stories of ancient Rome: lions or dogs tearing apart
    the faithful in arenas like...
  • Poem

    Interlude

    By Denise Leto
    Write of water in each of its motions,
    of matters worn away by water, to give
    her what can't remain in the body
    for movement alone.

    Matters worn away by water take
    her hands past desire
    to make movement for you written
    in the curve, the catastrophe...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Outbreaks

    By Kitchen McKeown
    i search for god but the sun is a penny.
    looper moths form halos beneath the streetlamps.
    summer’s ghostly curtains. check the weather.
    haze. i search for god but the moon is gone.
    i search for comfort, and the eels come.
    they cross my meadow...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    A sestina for a black girl who does not know how to braid hair

    By Raych Jackson
    Your hands have no more worth than tree stumps at harvest.
    Don’t sit on my porch while I make myself useful.
    Braid secrets in scalps on summer days for my sisters.
    Secure every strand of gossip with tight rubber bands of value.
    What possessed...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Strikes and Gutters

    By Clark Moore
    As Walter settled in to finish his coffee, he was struck
    by a phantom, peripheral visage, white as pins in flight, or bunny
    white, in haze — a visit from “The Agent,” in the nominal parlance
    of chemical memory, calling from a distant muddied element.
    Or...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    The Painter

    By John Ashbery
    Sitting between the sea and the buildings
    He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
    But just as children imagine a prayer
    Is merely silence, he expected his subject
    To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
    Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

    So there was...
  • Poem

    Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

    By John Ashbery
    The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,   
    Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
    From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
    Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant   
    To spend one’s vacation...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    The Mad Man from Macon

    By Maceo J. Whitaker
    Sestina Jackson met Text-Deft James on 09/09/09.
    A Red Hook, BK dock party celebrated Otis Redding’s
    Birthday. Sestina mouthed along to “The Happy Song,”
    And TDJ smiled, baring his Cornel West-esque
    Teeth. Text-Deft’s chops whiter, but same gap.
    Cigs and java, then shake, as Battery...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Sestina: Like

    By A.E. Stallings
    Now we’re all “friends,” there is no love but Like,
    A semi-demi goddess, something like
    A reality-TV star look-alike,
    Named Simile or Me Two. So we like
    In order to be liked. It isn’t like
    There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain “dislike”

    Is frowned on:...
  • Poem

    Beautiful Poetry

    By Camille Guthrie
    I was too shy to say anything but Your poems are so beautiful.
    What kinds of things, feelings, or ideas inspire you,
    I mean, outside the raw experiences of your life?
    He turned a strange crosshatched color
    as if he stood in a clouded...
  • Poem

    The Mortician in San Francisco

    By Randall Mann
    This may sound queer,
    but in 1985 I held the delicate hands
    of Dan White:
    I prepared him for burial; by then, Harvey Milk
    was made monument—no, myth—by the years
    since he was shot.
     
    I remember when Harvey was shot:
    twenty, and I knew I was queer.
    Those...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People

    By David Ferry
    The unclean spirits cry out in the body
    Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice
    Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean
    Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment—
    Nobody witnessing could possibly know the...
  • Poem

    The Complaint of Lisa

    By Algernon Charles Swinburne
    There is no woman living that draws breath
    So sad as I, though all things sadden her.
    There is not one upon life's weariest way
    Who is weary as I am weary of all but death.
    Toward whom I look...
  • Poem

    Sestina of the Tramp-Royal

    By Rudyard Kipling
    Speakin’ in general, I ’ave tried ’em all—
    The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world.   
    Speakin’ in general, I ’ave found them good   
    For such as cannot use one bed too long,   
    But must get ’ence, the same as I ’ave done,   
    An’...
  • Poem

    Sestina: Altaforte

    By Ezra Pound
      LOQUITUR: En Betrans de Born.
         Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.
         Eccovi!
         Judge ye!
         Have I dug him up again?

      The scene is his castle, Altaforte. “Papiols” is his jongleur....
  • Poem

    Sestina

    By Algernon Charles Swinburne
    I saw my soul at rest upon a day
          As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,
    Among soft leaves that give the starlight way
          To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;
    So that it knew...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    If  See No End In Is

    By Frank Bidart
    What none knows is when, not if.
    Now that your life nears its end
    when you turn back what you see
    is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No,
    it is a vast resonating chamber in
    which each thing...
  • Poem

    The Guest Ellen at the Supper for Street People

    By David Ferry
    The unclean spirits cry out in the body
    Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice
    Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean
    Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment—
    Nobody witnessing...
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