Form: The Sestina

There's always a choice. How do I write this thing that itches in my brain and turn it into a poem? Sometimes it's a bit the opposite - I've found an interesting technique or form, and I want to do something with it. It's a bit like writing a song: Sometimes you are mucking around and get an interesting riff, or chord progression or melody, and you try to fit words to match it. Other times you write lyrics and try to find the music to fit underneath it. With "The Way", the first thing was with the form of the sestina.

When I encountered it, it was different from the type of thing I had written before. Six stanzas of 6 lines each, followed by a three line final voice (termed an envoi.) There is no rhyme scheme. Instead, the end word of each line is repeated in all of the six main verses, and two of them appear in each of the 3 lines of the envoi. And the repetition follows a particular pattern:

Stanza A: 1-2-3-4-5-6
Stanza B: 6-1-5-2-4-3
Stanza C: 3-6-4-1-2-5
Stanza D: 5-3-2-6-1-4
Stanza E: 4-5-1-3-6-2
Stanza F: 2-4-6-5-3-1
Envoi   : 2 & 5; 4 & 3; 6 & 1 - The first of each pair in the middle of the line,
                                the second at the end.

Part of the process is choosing the six important words that you can use in multiple different lines. In this particular poem, the words that inspired me were those that Jesus spoke: "I am the way, the truth and the life". I could have left it that way, but thinking about where the poem was going, Pilate's "What is Truth" had me turn it round to how I put it in the poem, and gave me two words: way and truth. The other two I chose to be contrasting pairs: alone & crowd; spoken & silence.

With the frame work of the gospel stories, the rest was fairly simple. Take six different scenes and write about them in the context of those words. It turned out easier than I thought, probably because I didn't have too much to invent.

On editing, I originally didn't change much - verses 2, 3 and 4 started with "Then", "But then" and "And then" - sloppy work that I had not paid enough attention to.  Verse 6 repeated "waiting" within a couple of lines. A few other words were changed to be a bit stronger - when we teach literacy, we always tell them to try and use a more specific or more imaginative word, so I took the same advice. 

In the middle of 2023, I joined a poets' site called "All Poets", and month or so later a sub group called "Constructive Criticism" and submitted this sestina. Once again I rewrote more generic verse, changing good words for better. Several other poems suggested areas that might be fixed and words to consider, and so this has been highly polished a second time. I think it has grown much better.