PSA: "Prose sestinas" and other stuff I made up

In college, I wrote a rambley, two-page, impossible-to-title thing that ended up getting published in the Minnemingo Review (semiannual campus literary magazine), as "untitled."

It rambled on a few topics, bringing them up in different orders and contexts, including Captain Picard from Star Trek TNG, a deer heart, earl grey tea (obvious connection to Capt. Picard, there) and salvation. It was weird, but I liked it.

I mainly liked that it seemed to have a structure behind it, despite its being freewriting and essentially unedited. (I changed two words in the last line.) I decided that since it came back to the same topics repeatedly, I'd call it a prose sestina. I'll never write a real sestina -- a medieval form poem that follows a complicated pattern of end-words through six stanzas and a tercet -- and it seemed the closest I'd ever get.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote what seems to be the most famous sestina, about a grandmother, a stove, an almanac, tears, a child and a house. I'm not sure whether nouns are mandatory for end-words, but they do seem like a good idea when you're going to have to use them six times.

The challenge of a sestina seems to be in getting things to stay interesting the whole time, in moving on with only the same words to help you express yourself. Maybe that's why I like it so much. Using old materials to make something new seems to be a theme in my life.

Anyway, it's mysterious, the reasons for liking things and for writing what we write. I write prose sestinas to see what I think, not to tell what I've thought.

So yesterday's "prose sestina" I call the second one, thanks to Capt. Picard and the deer heart, and I understand that it's not very well-structured. It's cheating.

But it's surprised me by being concerned with what I've been concerned with, recently and in general. It comes as close to a manifesto as I have right now, in its obsession with seeing -- correctly and incorrectly; supposing we see but not, really -- and hearing, interacting with the environment, in its quotidian detail, and it's all 100% true.

I have always been concerned with truth.

The next one is all true, too, and its structure is better.