The Sestina

The sestina is an unusual poetic form that comes from the Middle Ages. It consists of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoi. The rule is, each line ends with one of six words, their order changing in a spiraling pattern. The order is ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA, and for the envoi, each of the three lines contains two of the six words: B and E in the first line, D and C in the second, F and A in the third. It is extremely complicated, but it's also an extremely fun form to compose. Beyond the repeated words, there are no fixed rules regarding line length or meter.

Sestina in Winter

The snow is falling silver.
Evening gives way to night.
Out of the clear blue, a solitary raven.
The valley stretches a snowy ocean
To the mountains, islands of pines.
I am longing for you yet.

The world is a world of dew, and yet
We madly rush to gather silver.
Everyone toils and secretly pines
For a life without a sleepless night,
Or just to drown in an ocean.
My kingdom for the wings of a raven!

"Nevermore" quoth the raven,
Coined in Eden, existing yet.
Nevermore returns the traveler to the ocean;
Its surface a mirror of silver,
In its depths eternal night,
The ever-unknown for which our soul pines.

Not the friends of long ago, Takasago's pines.
Lady of my dreams, with hair of richest raven,
Within my heart is melancholy night.
A blossom of the deepest hue, and yet...
The moon is polished silver,
A boat in a cloudy ocean.

I've grown fond of strand and ocean,
Silent paths between ancient pines:
For them I would barter my gold and silver.
My mind's a skittish hatchling, my heart's a raven.
And are you sleeping yet?
Wasting hazy days, alone night after night?

The tide is at its neap tonight.
There's a moving point of light on the ocean.
There may be hope for us yet.
In times of snow we learn the true nature of pines,
Over scorched battlefields flies the golden raven.
The frost comes, painting everything silver.

Listen to the night breezes through the pines,
The crash of the ocean, caw of the raven;
My heart moves yet, though it's hard as silver.

Sestina in Autumn

This time of year, the painted leaves
are red and gold: it is fall.

For this I take up pen and write

into the nights, which are growing long,

by moonlight or by candlelight

until my tired hand sinks down.

The colors falling, falling down,

the bright door closing as the season leaves.

The dust falls mute as they alight.

Like lives, the leaves decay and fall.

We say we knew it all along,

but the falling never feels right.

I wander from my front door, turn right

at the street, and then walk down

to the riverside; the road’s not long.

Winter is cold, but it relieves

our selfish pride before the fall,
and gives a glimmer of our old delight.

You are my dove, my love, my light,
but I must insist that you go right
back where you came from, lest pain befall
you and me both. It's all down-

hill from here. Love only leaves
ashes in its wake, and strings us along.

There was once a time (it seemed so long)

my mind was daily filled with light.

I’m not sure anyone believes
how much I miss you, Mister Wright.

Nothing stirs. This town’s run down.

The path stops at the waterfall.

I don’t cry, but the tears fall

across my face. I don’t belong

here. I wish to be back down-

town in that city where windows light

the skyline each night, to be forthright.

But I should go, before youth leaves.

I let my sestina fall from my lips in the twilight.

I long for home, or him, for wrong or right.

And so my eyes are down, and my daydream leaves.

Valentine Sestina

This is the season for Cupid,

When snows finally melt into spring,

Branches adorned with flirtatious sparrows.

With such succor love blooms like a rose,

And eagerly beats every heart.

Won't you be my Valentine?

The dawn delivers a Valentine

From a secret admirer, or Cupid.

It warms winter's wanting heart

And bursts forth like a fountaining spring,

As from seafoam the Cyprian rose,

As comes her chariot hitched to sparrows.

Songs of robins, finches, and sparrows

Serenade this Day of Valentine.

Someone gave me a single red rose.

Was it you, mischievous Cupid?

At its scent, hope and laughter spring

From forgotten places in my heart.

Leaf buds furled in the shape of a heart

Please the hearts of winter-worn sparrows

Sure these are the first blossoms of spring.

Let them adorn my Valentine,

With those blossoms beloved by Cupid:

The lilac, the tulip, and the rose.

Her two lips are petals of reddest rose.

Her golden hair ensnares our heart.

She is the mother of that rascal Cupid.

Her arrival's announced by sparrows:      

Venus! Ruling Queen on Valentine!

Whenever she comes, comes spring.

What we keep locked she's here to spring.

At her touch, all we hoped to hide arose.

I predict a storm for Valentine.

Once content, here's chaos for the heart.

Feelings flurried as flocks of sparrows.

Thick as rain, the arrows of Cupid.

This is my sestina for spring, season of the heart,

Inspired by the song of the Rose, songs of Sparrows.

Accept my Valentine's Day gift, Venus and Cupid.  

Entanglement

We are a world apart:
                  You in sun; I in snowy gloam.
Darling, if you were in my arms
                                    I would be home.
May your life be long, and mine,
                                 For your dear sake.
You smiled; I smiled at you,
                                 You took your take.
Did you know?
                                  Could you yet tell?
                   It was love into which we fell.

Tap or Push?

In poetry, the sound, length, and connotations of a single word become salient to a more significant degree than in prose. The best poems--the memorable ones where lines and phrases stick in your mind and you can't figure out just why--are carefully crafted word by word. The length of each sound, the flow of each phoneme into the next, the pause at just the right place all contribute to the musicality and effectiveness of a poem. One single word can spell the difference between a great line and one that just doesn't quite work, and one great line can be the difference between a masterpiece poem and a forgettable one.

In China there was a story of a Tang Dynasty poet, Jia Dao, who couldn't decide whether to use the word "tap" or "push" in a line of poetry. The story led to the phrase "tap and push" to refer to a careful choice of words in poetry. (Source: A Dream of Red Mansions) A famous American poet (I think it was T.S. Eliot, but I can't find the quote so I don't know for sure) talked about spending all day trying to decide whether or not to keep a comma. The flow of sounds is as important to a poem's memorability as the meaning. Consequently, word choices that would be completely inconsequential in prose will make or break a poem. Add to that that words considered synonyms have different shades of meanings, different connotations, and different allusions that shape the impression and overall meaning of a poem, and it's easy to see why making good poetry is such a challenge.

A basic knowledge of linguistics can be helpful in figuring out why one word works better in a poem than another word. One poem I wrote, for example, had a line that didn't quite sound right. It was "the sunlit frosts which rob the breath". I never have had a very good handle on which contexts take "which" instead of "that," so I wasn't sure which word I should use. But looking at the phonology of the words, I decided that "frosts that rob" sounds better than "frosts which rob," since the the distance in the method and position of articulation between the alveolar affricative "ch" and the retroflexive glide "r" is a more difficult transition than the final "t" in "that" (which becomes a glottal stop in this context, at least in my dialect of English) and the "r". And it could sound like "frost switch"

The latest draft of the poem in question:

Yesterday it snowed all day,

And then the storm was past.

It is the still and cloudless colds that last,

The sunlit frosts that rob the breath,

Taking life without bringing death,

That stay, and stay, and stay.

Honkadori

Since long before the written word was invented, humans have been making poetry, usually in the form of songs. Given that probably a few billion poems have been composed, is it possible to create one that's fresh and original? Should a modern poet even try?

I would say the answers to those questions are "probably" and "yes." But anyway, even if every topic or rhyme you can think of has already been used, and as disappointing as it can be to realize a line you thought you made up was actually one you read somewhere, there is something to be said for variations on a theme.

In traditional Japanese theater, the goal of the performers was not to be innovative in their role, but to perform it with as much precision and attention to detail as possible (see Donald Keene's Japanese Literature). Similarly, haiku and tanka poems didn't strive to be original or experimental, just perfection of form and evocative in imagery. They commonly took conceits or  lines from earlier poems, giving them new contexts, or invoked an older poem (which the poet assumes the reader will recognize) to set a certain mood. This kind of allusion is called honkadori.

As an example, consider Seidensticker's translation of Kokinshu 292, by the poet Henjo:

The tree denies the fugitive its shelter.

It sheds its scarlet leaves, and so rebuffs him.

And the tanka I wrote in response, finding Henjo's tree to be a bit mean-spirited:

Only the maple 

gives the wretched fugitive

shelter from the rain.

And even its scarlet leaves

are beginning to scatter.

Sometimes connections between poems are not direct allusions but purely coincidental. Because so many poets deal with the same themes, it's not unusual to come across poems very similar in images and sentiments written by poets who are cultures and centuries apart. Compare Melville Cane's "Snow Toward Evening":
 

Suddenly the sky turned grey,
The day,
Which had been bitter and chill,
Grew soft and still.
Quietly
From some invisible blossoming tree
Millions of petals cool and white
Drifted and blew,
Lifted and flew,
Fell with the falling night.
 

And Kiyowara no Fukayabu's "Kokinshu 330":
 

It's winter now, yet
From the skies blossom
Comes fluttering down;
Beyond the clouds
Can it be spring already?

It is of course possible that Melville Cane read Fukayabu's poem somewhere, but the comparison of snowflakes to falling petals is such an obvious one that it's probable many poets independently came up with that image.

Any literary work, like any idea, owes its existence to a number of previous sources which rarely appear explicitly enough to be counted as allusive. Because the vast majority of words and phrases used by writers have been used before, its impossible to write something that has not been influenced in one way or another by what has been written or said before, even (perhaps especially) if the poet isn't consciously aware of it.

Professor Wright and I used to give each other lists of random words that we would use write something to share the next time we met. From one of these lists I wrote the following tanka:

 Under the lime tree
I sought clemency from the
 serene citrine sun,
But thrice I heard the cock’s crow
At the gate of Osaka.

This poem has three influences I'm aware of. One is a famous poem by Sei Shonagon, which appears both in her Pillow Book and the Hyakunin Isshu (this translation from One Hundred Poems from the Japanese):

Though you can tell me
You heard a cock crow
In the middle of the night,
The guard at Osaka Gate
Will not believe you.

(This poem is itself alluding to a reported incident in Chinese history in which a political prisoner escaped by having one of his men imitated the crow of a rooster, which tricked the gatekeepers into thinking it was dawn and opening the gate).

The other allusion is to the O-Zone song "Dragostea din Tei." The title translates as "Love under the lime (linden) tree."

Often it is not specific words or images in a poem that inspire imitation but its structure. After all, every fixed poetic form (e.g. sonnet, haiku, sestina, villanelle) was invented for the first time by someone, and usually modeled off some previous form. Trying to avoid any kind of emulation would limit a poet's creative freedom as much as deliberately copying another poem.

I was inspired to write this poem by Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

Shades of Lavender:

The thunder clouds choking the sky
This morning are faintly lavender .
 

Murasaki tells us the hue of the troth

Is lavender.

 

Over there are bare brown vines.
They drip in summertime with lavender wisteria.

  

 It was love at first sight, I thought
As I held the lavender rose.

I open a dusty book, and out falls
A single lavender valentine.

Taking a walk in the chill air,
I pass a door painted lavender.

Will the bee fly to the crimson rose
Before the somber lavender?

I used to see him here.
Tie me a lavender “forget-me” knot.

The influence of previous works is usually subconscious. There was a haiku that came to me once, and I was sure I had not actually made it up but remembered it from somewhere else, but after searching for it and not finding it, I decided to take credit for it.

Why do you,

of all the seasons,

have two names?

It refers of course to autumn, also known as fall. Autumn was the favorite season of many Japanese poets, because the decline and silencing of life that occurs before winter embodies some of the culture's traditional aesthetic ideals, such as mujo--the bittersweet impermanence of things--and the related wabi sabi, the beauty to be found in tarnish, decay, imperfections, and forlornness. And the explosion of vibrant reds, yellows, and oranges preceding the withering has its own entirely different appeal.

 I told Professor Wright this haiku once, and he liked it so much he later asked me to write it down for him. I was at work at the time, so I jotted it down on a piece of receipt tape, which he found amusing. He taped it up on his kitchen wall.

It didn't take me long to find the unremembered poem that had inspired my haiku: Kokinshu 839 by Mibu no Tadamine, which I had read in the Tale of Genji:

Why did he die in autumn, of all the seasons?

In autumn one grieves for those who yet remain.

Like many others, this poem took on deeper meaning for me after Professor Wright's death. He died in autumn, of all the seasons.

The brain is an amazing thing. We are influence by everything we've read, heard, or thought in the past and everyone we've ever met, whether we remember them or not.

Structure and Form

My senior year of college, I took a class called Honors 212: The Arts in Performance. The day we started the section on poetry, the professor started out by asking the class if someone could give a definition of poetry (I think he was expecting that we wouldn't be able to come up with one easily), so I said "Words arranged in a structure for an aesthetic effect." Even the professor accepted that definition without challenge.

The first poems I ever wrote rhymed, but had no fixed meter. They were, not uncoincidentally, rather terrible. In my defense, I was in elementary school at the time, and didn't even know what meter was. A lot of people don't, even though meter is a more important component of poetry in the English tradition than rhyme. One of my classmates that day in Arts in Performance admitted that she didn't understand meter at all; people could tell her what it means but she just couldn't pick up on it. Meter, in poetry, is the emphasis placed on syllables, the distinctness and loudness with which a syllable is enunciated, also known as syllabic stress. And even if English speakers don't know what the term means, we can all hear it, because in English stress is phonemic, which means it can change the meaning of the word.

Linguists determine if a sound in a language is phonemic by finding minimal pairs, two words that native speakers can distinguish as separate words which differ only in one sound. Think of the word "defect" when it's a noun meaning a flaw, and when it's used as verb meaning to leave your country or team for another. The difference between the pronunciation of these words is that the noun has emphasis on the first syllable and the verb has emphasis on the second syllable. The noun form is a trochee: a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. The verb is an iamb: an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable.

The units of syllables that make up a poem's meter are called feet. The other disyllabic metrical feet are the spondee, with two stressed syllables, and the pyrrhus, with two unstressed syllables. Trisyllabic feet include the stressed-unstressed-unstressed dactyl, the unstressed-stressed-unstressed amphibrach, and the unstressed-unstressed-stressed anapest. There are also tetrasyllabic feet, but they're not used much in English poetry, as it's difficult for us anglophones to put three syllables in a row without stressing one syllable more or less than the others.

Incidentally, the most common vowel sound in the English language is one we don't have a letter for: the schwa. It's the vowel in the second syllable of "cactus", "dactyl", "second", "vowel", "syllable", and most other unstressed syllables. In the International Phonetic Alphabet it's represented by the letter ə.  

Getting back to poetry, the most common foot in traditional English metrical poetry (or at least the most famous one) is the iamb, especially familiar in the iambic pentameter, lines consisting of five iambs each. Shakespeare's plays, most sonnets, and heroic couplets employed iambic pentameter.

Many traditional poetic forms have a fixed meter, though of course most have exceptions and substitutions somewhere in their rhythm. I used to believe great poetry was pure inspiration, pouring from the poet's mind without any deliberate attention given to form. But the truth is, writing poetry with no understanding of the language you're using is like trying to paint in the dark. It's a lot easier to come up with euphonious lines when you can see what you're doing.

Writing poetry in a fixed form, such as a tanka or a sonnet, at first seems like it would constrict creativity, limit what the poet can express. I've found that's not the case. Usually a poem begins as an image, or one or two lines that just come to you. The rest of the poem takes work. Having a fixed form makes that work easier. As your mind searches for rhymes to fit the pattern or the right arrangement of words to fit the meter, ideas and images arise that would not otherwise occur to you. A fixed form doesn't limit creativity; creativity expands to fill it.

The following is a Spenserian sonnet, a poem consisting of three quatrains (stanzas of four lines) and a concluding couplet (two rhymed lines) in iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of abab bcbc cdcd ee. I wrote it as a gift for my professor. I chose the title later, when I realized that I hadn't even had the story of the flood in mind when I wrote it, which just goes to show that even the poet herself can read more into a poem than she originally intended it to mean.

No Relation to Noah

Look outside; it’s raining once again.
No shadow moves against the silver tide.
On days like this, one must wonder when
Life will manifest again outside.

When will the weeping sky’s blue eye be dried?
And does the sun, unseen, still send its kiss?
A disconcerting secret seems to glide
Through rain and life’s disrupted synthesis.

And there have been storms lonelier than this--
Uncaught, unheard. What color was the world
Unseen by eyes? I think the rains might miss
The time before Earth’s strange surprise unfurled.

And what does this resentful rain portend?
All life began, so must it also end?

The Tanka

In ancient Japan, the language itself was thought to have mystical powers (as the great poet Kakinomoto Hitomaro wrote in Manyoshu 3254, "The Land of Yamato is a land/Where the word-soul gives us aid"). Perhaps as a consequence, the art of poetry achieved a reverential, almost religious status. Japanese is not the only language regarded as uniquely suitable for poetic expression (I've read the same claim applied to English and Farsi, and I'm willing to bet the poets of many other languages have held the same belief), but in my opinion the history and refinement of Japanese poetry and poetic theory are such that modern poets the world over should look to Japanese poetry for the essence of poeticness, and the Japanese language for the vocabulary to describe it.

The most significant ancient Japanese poetic form is the tanka, a short poem consisting of 31 syllables (or, more accurately, morae. A mora is a length of sound corresponding to a syllable of one consonant and one short vowel. A syllable with a long vowel or one ending in a voiced consonant is two morae long.) The first part of the poem, the hokku (from which haiku is descended), is seventeen syllables arranged in lines of 5-7-5. The second part, the ageku, is two lines of 7 syllables each. The tanka in ancient Japan was quite strict, not only in length but in the words and subject matter allowed. Puns and other forms of wordplay were commonly employed. As with poetry the world over, the most common topics were love and nature. Influence by Buddhism, a melancholy appreciation of the transience of the world is a thread that runs through Japanese poetry from early times to now, giving many poems a lonely, bittersweet flavor.

Due to the large number of homonyms in Japanese, the common wordplay in Japanese poetry, and the brevity of the poems, the meaning of a poem can be largely impressionistic. Poetry in every language is more subjective than prose: poetic symbolism depends on an individual's own unique combination of knowledge, thoughts, viewpoints, and past experience. What a poem means to a reader can even change based on that reader's mood. While this is a strength of poetry, it adds to the difficulty to translate it, as do different requirements of poetic structure in different languages. For example, in Modern English much poetry is rhymed, but finding rhyming vocabulary when translating it into a different language may require completely changing the meaning of the poem. People who translate tanka into English need to choose between staying true to the form of the poem (syllable arrangements of 5-7-5-7-7) or trying their best to preserve its meaning (which often requires choosing one meaning for a word when more than one meaning is visible in the original Japanese). Take for instance Kokinshu 325 by Sakanoue no Korenori, rendered with the original syllable count in the Rodd and Henkenius translation of the Kokinshu:

the white snows must be

piling thickly on lovely

Yoshino Mountain

for in the old capital

a bitter cold penetrates

And the same poem translated by Thomas McAuley, which does not strictly adhere to the syllable count:

 On fair Yoshino
Mountain white snow fall
Drifts high, it seems,
For in this ancient place the chill
Grows ever stronger.

Both translations capture the poem's basic meaning. Which translation method creates the superior poem in English depends on the specific poem.

The platitude that something is always lost in translation may be true, but something else is always gained in translation, even if it's just a wider audience for a treasure of world literature. The tanka is a poetic jewel that I believe can sparkle as brightly in English as it does in Japanese, with of course different facets bestowed on it by our language and traditions.

Which do you prefer:

the blazing sky at sunset

--waves of orange burn--

or that same sky, at sunset,

in a pool of melting snow?

The Cento

I discovered Japanese literature from reading the Seidensticker translation of The Tale of Genji in high school. I had read a few haiku before then, of course, but never really appreciated them. The Tale of Genji was written by a lady-in-waiting a thousand years ago. It is considered by many to be the world's earliest novel, and one of its greatest. At the time, composing poetry was a common pastime for the upper class. The novel is replete with poetry contests and love poems, as well as frequent allusions to older poems, including many that are no longer extant. These caught my fascination: over a millennium ago, poems were composed that are now lost in the mists of time, save for a single line or phrase preserved in this book. The people who wrote them have been entirely forgotten, in many cases even their meanings are only hinted at by the contexts in which they are quoted. The thought of them made me sad, so I wrote a poem for each one. I called the project "Adopting Orphaned Poetic Allusions." None of them were particularly distinguished, but the idea stayed with me.

There is a kind of poem called the cento that is composed entirely of lines from other poets. When I learned about this form, I thought of course of those misty lost lines from the Genji. I ended up making four centos from them. This one is my favorite; I call it "Parenthesis":

Sadly, sadly we have journeyed this distance
(Might I have it back again?)
Past Karadomari we row, past Kawajiri,
Hid behind eightfold mountain mists
(Mists are as unkind as people),
The pines of Ota,
The Silent Waterfall
(It falls from above),
The cypress pillar on which she had leaned,
And an angler might have wanted to have a try at the waters by her pillow
(But the strings are broken.)
It was worse than if the jewels upon the silken sleeve had been shattered to bits.
The grass first greens on the general’s grave
(The seed that falls upon good ground)
If he does not come,
And I am afraid that it would only be cause to remember
(But so to think was, after all, to think.)
When I think of her,
I am almost sorry that we were so close.
(But not even that was permitted her.)
Is she the rain, is she the clouds? Alas, I cannot say.
The wild goose in the clouds--as sad as I am?
(In a village where it does not sing.)
A person even longs for the pain,
Like the pain, perhaps, of awaiting a visitor who does not come,
(Where would you have me turn?)
Meeting and not meeting.
It was only yesterday, you think, and already thirty years and more have gone by.
(And whose is the more sorrowfully injured name?)
And in more recent times?
The rains are as the rains of other years
(Each year brings rains of autumn.)
One becomes fond, after a time, of sea and strand,
The wrong trees, the wrong fence
(A bridge that floats across dreams?)
We love while we live.
Even as I spoke,
(Were I to join them…)
The cherries coming into bloom and already shedding their blossoms,
A blossom of the deepest hue, and yet--
(How well one knows)
They bloom for the morning.
And the cherry, among them all, seems right for the bird of spring
(The cuckoo of the grove of Iwase).
So you really are going to send me off into the dawn? It is new to me, and I am sure to lose my way.