A Poetry Algorithm: The Sestina
Taught by Regan Good
Regan Good is a poet living in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her book The Atlantic House was published in 2011 by Harry Tankoos Press. She thinks Marianne Moore’s lines “Ecstasy affords/the occasion and expediency determines the form” are as wise a thing ever written about the act of writing a poem.
John Keats famously wrote that a poet must be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Can such a poetic state be achieved through formal constraints? The seemingly counterintuitive answer is: Yes.
What we’ll do in this class is write a sestina very quickly, so quickly, in fact, you’ll have to use another part of your brain to create the work—the part Keats wrote about. The six end words will be provided as well as their proper ordering in the sestina’s six stanzas and final three-line envoi form. No need to write in iambic pentameter. You will leave with a rich piece of writing to be further polished at your leisure.
