So, this form birthed a few years ago from an admittedly overly geeky, slightly masochistic brain, when I was attempting to think of the most ridiculous form I could think of. There are variations, and I’ll talk about those later, but the basic idea is that you write a double sestina where those 12 repeated...Read More

Let’s talk Sestinas. The Sestina is an complex form based in intricate repetition. It’s a 39 line poem attributed to Arnaut Daniel from the late 12th century, of Medieval French origin. The original Sestina is 6 stanzas of 6 lines and a concluding triplet envoy, where the end words, or teleutons, of the first stanza’s 6 lines are repeated throughout the...Read More