I have been grappling with the sestina as of late. My attempts have been less than successful, so I've decided to step back and try a simpler form, the tritina.
Helen Frost has a number of worksheets on poetic form on her web site. She suggests starting with the tritina since the sestina is a more difficult form. What a great idea! Here are the nuts and bolts of the form.
10-line poem made of three, 3-line stanzas and a 1-line envoi
There is no rhyme scheme but rather an end word scheme. It is:
A
B
C
C
A
B
B
C
A
A, B, and C (all in the last line/envoi)
So, your challenge is to write a tritina. Leave me a note about your poem and I'll post the results here later this week. Have fun!
Ocean
ReplyDeleteI used to live very close to the ocean.
It was only a ten-minute drive to the beach.
Sometimes, at work, I thought of breakers and sand.
Now my plane arcs over the sand
to cut out a semi-circle of ocean,
before heading east, away from the beach.
We fly far, leaving the breathing beach.
We dive over mountains, landing in desert sand.
A million years ago this place was ocean.
I've lost the ocean. I want to sit on the beach, watching waves come in to the sand like planes.
--Kate Coombs, 2011, all rights reserved
Stars, Skies, Bowl
ReplyDeleteBy Steven Withrow
I ate the stars
and now the sky’s
an empty bowl.
I broke the bowl
and now the stars
I ate are skies
themselves. A sky’s
a broken bowl
of swallowed stars.
My stars are hollowed skies, a fallow bowl.
©2011 Steven Withrow, all rights reserved