#1 (What's the deal with the sestina?)

I wanted to post about the very interesting (and admittedly frustrating) nature of the sestina. When I first read about this form in the packet, I immediately wrote it off. It was "too hard," as the whiner in me would say. I don't think that I even understood it completely until we discussed it in class. While I did find the examples in the packet to be awesome, I didn't think that a student poet like myself would be capable of producing comparable (or even adequate) work. I imagined that I would get completely stuck after a stanza or two and then the poem would either collapse upon itself or maybe even implode! This sounds dramatic, but it seems like most of us felt this way. After hearing the other student sestinas in class and writing one myself, I discovered that this form is not the complete horror that I suspected. Even though it is still difficult, it produces very interesting results that I do not think could have been created without the use of this form. However, the utter fear that I had before I was forced to tackle this form is something that I am curious about. Was I scared of the repetition in this form? We had already covered forms such as pantoums that had repeating structures, so this answer didn't make sense. Was it the sheer length of the poetic form? I had written poems in the past that were longer. Was it the "limitation" of only having to incorporate six distinct subjects throughout? This was definitely a new element to me, and although I was initially weary of this "limitation," I discovered that it really allowed for very interesting expansions about the subjects that I would not have thought of otherwise, so that proved to be a positive experience. In the end, I think that sestinas are kind've like vampires. They can be really scary, especially when you don't know them, but they might just turn into someone you love! (or at least they will if you're Bella...)