A Sestina for Songbirds

Recently, while working through Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy with my mom, I encountered a new-to-me poetic form: the sestina. Jaouad’s book is a collection of creative enticements from writers and artists, musicians and teachers, and we’d come across Ann Patchett’s prompt, “The Mouse Sestina,” in the midst of a particularly hectic time. It was still winter, the radiant heating in my upstairs loft had sprung a leak and flooded the carpet, and I found myself replacing our flooring while my partner was on the other side of the planet. I responded to Patchett’s prompt, “Pick out a poetic form and give it a try,” by writing a haiku and calling it a day. I did not have the bandwidth to engage with a poetic form that she calls “ridiculously complicated.” A sestina is, indeed, a complicated form—six stanzas of six lines each, where each line ends in one of six words that appear in a bewilderingly specified arrangement. Assign each ending word a number, and the arrangement looks like…