LITERARY CRITICISM
Composing a New Poetic Form
14 Jan 2025
First, how dare I?
And I answer, the only step I have taken differently from every poet ever is to give my new effort a name: the “fingertrap” sestina. In this sense, it is scarcely a new form at all but a hybrid, a variation of quite a classical form.
“All poets experiment in form, in structure. Some, in more open structures (free verse, for example), create rules to suit a particular poem’s needs. They select stanza lengths, make enjamb choices, rhyme or alliterate, based upon the demands of meaning–that is, if they are conscious of their strategies. For poets writing more formally to begin, they either accept the given form (as they have been given or selected it) or they (more commonly) make variations major or less than to accommodate.
So my own step here, modest as it is, I call first “experiment” before “invention.” I had a desired meaning or conceitIn literature, allowing a metaphor or unexpected comparison ... More to which a form was required. Having found none to suit, I worked with what the classical tradition offered.

Arnault Daniel in my mind probably looked exactly like a John Cougar cover artist while creating the sestina.
No one is taking credit for this image.
Poetry in Invention
Indeed, poets are creating new forms all the time. We just may not live/browse in the same communities where they are invented. Just because we all have not heard of the Cyhydedd Hir, Huitain, or Masnavi does not make them forms existing outside of traditional cultural history–just not in mine. And just because we have not read the more modern Monotetra, Paradelle (invented by the Poet Laureate Billy Collins), Roundabout, or ZaniLa does not mean that they are not vividly alive wherever new poets are posting, acquiring, shaping, and revising anew.
The sestina choice is eminently classical. Invented by Arnault Daniel in the late 1100s, it is a poem of revolving repetitions, six-line stanzas that each end with one of six words. The order of the repetitions across its six stanzas is mathematically determined into a kind of elegant and closed loop. It has no other set meter or rhyme scheme, so its form underscores this seeming harmony in its circular nature.
Dialog, Tension, Resistance
Variants in poetry, of course, can always indicate merely a desire for the new, but as often poets in the act of creation are in some kind of dialogue, even resistance, to the forms that went before. Variant forms, in particular, are ever in this dialogue: What elements of the (almost always) Western traditional form failed to satisfy the poet and why? Perhaps it was the Western tradition itself, or the question of its literate elitism, or its patriarchal nature. Certainly hundreds of minority or marginalized poets have done this very thing. For instance, see Kimiko Hahn, Ann Carson, Teju Cole, Maggie Nelson, Bhanu Kapil, and hundreds of others.
In my case, the sestina came packed with its own tensions, those of a psychology I have enjoyed exploring, the closed-loop, obsessive paralysis or entrapment of thought common to the sestina’s speakers, where even the topic of the poem is in some way built athwart that mental state. More, the mathematical “perfection,” the beauty of the structure, builds its own tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More as well. As convoluted, disjointed, entrapped, frustrated as our speaker might be, there is still a fundamental “harmony” or tidiness/order to that seemed chaos or loss.

How I imagine myself in poetic dialogue with tradition.
Subversion & Thought
As one case, author/translator Katie Ferris says that hybrid writing offers a needed and significant kind of play, a word she uses closer to its theoretical definition. She says in one interview:
I don’t mean play as something simple, flippant or facile, but a necessary, even lifesaving creative act, the exploration of a relatively uncharted terrain, and respectful curiosity about, and engagement with identities and language and forms that we’ve never before encountered.
In describing her 2019 work boysgirls which explores gender fluidity, she offers one explanation for her seeming prose poem hybrid form:
a piece of writing that looks like prose but subverts our expectations, opening up the possibilities of what it can accomplish—a poem in the skin of a paragraph, a rebel sneaking in under the guise of a businessperson.
In the book’s introduction, she writes:
In this world (of which I am the author), I am not the only denizen, citizen, harlequin, or doyenne. I have invented myself, surely, who hasn’t, but I, unlike (perhaps) you, have also invented others—assorted godlettes, hopefuls, poseurs, and freaks. Still, we’re closer than you might think, reader. In fact, if you take this opportunity to examine yourself in the mirror, is that not me, there, in the shadow of your nostril, or setting free those pesky strands of hair around your part? Don’t be afraid! I know my place. Let me entertain you! I’m only here to make you smile, never to think, never to think.
We can never trust the speakers of poems, not entirely. IronyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More surrounds speaker. If the speaker is not herself untrustworthy, the poet exacts a certain distance from her, anyway, betrayed by the crafting of form for reading and hearing, if nothing else. Too, the traditions of form work as expectation for or against that speaker as do the dynamically shifting expectations of readers. Poets oblivious to these dynamics miss only opportunity and the reality of the poem’s installation. The idea that a poem “merely entertains,” Ferris and I think, is absolutely delusion. Structure is a foundation, or it is a guise, or some inter-involvement of the two.

Myself in poetic dialogue with tradition.
Closing In & Tightening Down
What are we to do, after all, with a poem like Anna Maria Hong’s “English Mole” which marks itself as a sonnet? Whatever else we may find in the poem’s 14 lines, it is difficult to ignore its title, its opening lines:
To push and push with raw pink claws hands of shin.
To tunnel my love through wet
earth, wet stars — no one needs the underneath
like me.
or its closing: “To work myself forward like a noun or an entry.” as not in discussion with the English tradition of language and meaning. (And check out her “Irritation Odes,” too!)
And so, pre-packed with the kind of tensions and traditional expectations I love, my “fingertrap sestina” doubles down on the interlacing of tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More and harmony, placing two speakers in juxtaposition, dividing/sharing 12 repeated words between them (each a relational pair), yet unifying their discourse in the final three-line envoi which is identical for each. Like the famous childhood fingertrap toy, as we pull upon either, the other closes tighter still. In some ways, it seems the perfect hybrid to place speakers who ironically comment on the traditions I have inherited.
I confess the form is far from perfected, I having just begun playing with its possibilities. (Heck, even Shakespeare wrote a 15 line sonnet once.) But enough. I’ll try to demonstrate its creation in the next post.
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