How I did it: I majored in formalist poetry. My approach may not be the most romantic, but my professor was ex-military and graded on adherence to structure and complete sentences, so I learned quite early that charting in a spreadsheet got me A's. You can use this for any formalist poem.

1. Chart the meter, rhyme scheme, internal rhymes, whatever you need. For a Shakespearean sonnet, this would be 14 rows by 5 columns, with the rows labeled abab,cdcd,efef, gg.

For a Sestina, which repeats rather than rhymes, unless you really want to impress someone, this will be 39 lines, labeled 123456,615243,364125,532614,451362,246531 for the first 6 stanzas. For the three line tornada at the conclusion, the first line is 1,2, the second 3,4, the third, 5,6. You can rhyme and meter them, but it's not required.

2. WRITE THE END FIRST! Write your last three lines. Say something profound.

3. The words at the ends of each line of the tornada are 2,4, and 6. Write them in the end of any lines marked 2,4, and 6.

4. Pick a word from the middle of each line of the tornada that will be easy to work around. These are, in order, 1,3, and 5. Write these words in your spreadsheet in the lines labeled 1,3, and 5.

5. You now have a blank sestina. Fill in the spaces with all the big words you like, and try to create complete sentences.

Lessons & tips: Use very common words in your last three lines, or words with common homonyms if you want to be clever, but save your big words for the rest of the poem. It also helps to remember the end of a phrase or sentence doesn't have to be the end of a line.

Resources: The New Book of Forms by Lewis Turco
The Word Finder
Graph paper or a spreadsheet
Pencils and erasers. Pens are fine for stream-of-consciousness. They are terrible for formalist poetry.

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Aug 14, 04:07PM PDT | 0 comments | 1 cheer