write a sestina

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,cd… Read how I did it…