The MIL...

A new Season. A new Cycle. A new Idea. An old Body. A new Body.

Spoons, Valerie Fisher

I want to thank BeBe Miller for all her brilliance and for sharing the Sestina with me. It has changed my performance making incredibly! This season of MIL is inspired by the poetic structure of the SESTINA. Here is a little bit of history about it:

The sestina is a complex form that achieves its often spectacular effects through
intricate repetition. The thirty-nine-line form is attributed to Arnaut Daniel, the
Provencal troubadour of the twelfth century. The name "troubadour" likely comes
from trobar, which means "to invent or compose verse." The troubadours sang their
verses accompanied by music and were quite competitive, each trying to top the
next in wit, as well as complexity and difficulty of style.

Courtly love often was the theme of the troubadours, and this emphasis continued as
the sestina migrated to Italy, where Dante and Petrarch practiced the form with
great reverence for Daniel, who, as Petrarch said, was "the first among all others,
great master of love."

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the
first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line
envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina
followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates
the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF 2. FAEBDC 3. CFDABE 4. ECBFAD 5. DEACFB 6. BDFECA 7. (envoi) ECA or
ACE

Spoons, Valerie Fisher

Here is an example of a Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop.

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.

She cuts some bread and says to the child,
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Spoons, Valerie Fisher