'Supposing that there is a meaning to the almost-circle’: a creative practice perspective of the sestina as besieged by circular anticipations

Session 1/ Panel B: Formal impulses

If poetic forms reflect ways of human thinking, the sestina embodies our tendency to obsess over potentiality in language and its arrangements. One perspective of the form’s strategies, rooted in Arnaut Daniel’s first Provençal examples, sees the sestina enacting obsession as a mind ‘besieged’ by competing linguistic impulses: the vertical, paradigmatic anticipation of free association between terms, and the horizontal, syntagmatic anticipation of syntactic logic.

Unlike much recent practice of English sestinas, this approach emphasizes selection of six end-words for implied schemes of narrative logic, determinacy or indeterminacy, and subtle relations between one another. Among these catalysts structuring the poem vertically, a single term needs an unstable, fluid identity and status as anomaly to drive the primary narrative. End-words also influence horizontally, alongside the poet’s syntactic strategies for completing each line, acting as forces of free association that create the syntagms’ scaffolding around the terms’ recurrences in each stanza. Ultimately, potentialities overpower conclusiveness. Each end-word’s repetition forecloses anticipated meanings and initiates ever-newer suppositions. The outlier end-word destabilizes sense through its own indeterminacy. There’s never narrative conclusion, but always repetitious recirculation, a fixation on imagining, potentiality.

This refined understanding of narratively complex and imaginatively dynamic sestinas was lost as it moved from European languages into English, and though later rediscovered by insightful twentieth century practitioners like Auden and Bishop, contemporary practice could benefit from renewed attention to how imaginative anticipation can transform hierarchies of narration.

Contemporary poets Reetika Vazirani and Deborah Digges engaged these nuances of circling and narration, turning over their own obsessions and adapting these strategies for open forms. My paper will analyze their complex deployment of end-words, arguing that their works call for a revival of this rich, overlooked approach; that thanks to an obsessive eye and ear their poetry circles back to original ways of being overcome with language’s possibilities.