Experiment! I'm working on a sestina right now. A sestina is a 39-line, 7-stanza poem with six 6-line stanzas and one final 3-line stanza. Invented nine centuries ago in France by Arnaut Daniel, the sestina uses the six words ending each line of the first stanza to repeat in alternate positions in the following line endings of the next five stanzas, and the last 3-line stanza contains two each of those words per line, one at the middle and one at the end.
The sestina is the type of poem that might put off readers as too repetitious and irk writers as too complex and restricting. But poets should practice as many forms as possible in deference to their predecessors and in honor of the craft. I have written one before, 47 years ago, which appeared on the National Council of Teachers of English website in 2014. Notice the repetition:
On Living Near The Bronx Zoo: An Urban Sestina
This block where we live in the heart and the soul of The Bronx
You’d say is the last place you’d find any culture or art.
Eleven miles down the IRT tracks, the world
So lavishly watches the latest Shakespeare-in-the-Park,
A Mozart festival opening in Carnegie Hall,
Or a Jackson Pollock at the Whitney Museum. The streets
In what they call The City ain’t our streets,
Ain’t our city. We who live here in The Bronx
Don’t say New York’s where we’re from. Our screaming halls
Are us. Our neighborhood, yeah, is all about art,
From paisons playing softball on the asphalt park
To amigas taking the stoop as if it’s their world,
None too far from that fabled zoo, its monkey world
Screeching in sorrow but not as pained as the street,
Where hitters stalk hookers as darkness takes the park
And dropouts pipe ashcans in mailboxes. Our Bronx,
With blaring boom boxes making a nuisance of art,
Lives and dies like echoes through those empty halls.
And heading west you’ll find another Hall,
This one of Fame. It shows folks of another world,
Their busts marred with graffiti and bubble gum, this art
The boys be doing when they’re wilding the street
As off-duty cops drink pitchers in Chuck’s Bar. The Bronx
Belongs to these boys, they own the streets, the park,
The halls, and everything else but the animal park,
Where mandrills ape each other in the monkey hall,
The elder dragging his nipples through the dirt of The Bronx,
Face blue and red, conjuring still another world
Thousands of miles away without the streets
Covering the dankness, the rot. This human art
Of entombing earth so we could live; the art
Of growing trees from all the world in one park
To remind us the world is bigger than our fabled streets—
The mountains, the deserts, the oceans—as if our halls
Were not enough, as if the natural world
All boiled down to what you wouldn’t call The Bronx,
But it does: the ultimate art, the footsteps and echoes down the hall,
The breaking of benches in the park, the nickel-and-dime world
We call our community’s streets—that’s what we call The Bronx.
Back at the Ranch: A Pantoum
One birch bends, the other splits in two.
Upon both trees one cardinal nests;
A tabby scales both trunks in rue
And claws the roots and never rests.
Upon both trees the cardinal nests
Far from the tabby’s reach;
He claws the roots and never rests
And blanches the bark of each.
Far from the tabby’s reach
The cardinal flits from branch to branch
And blanches the bark of each,
Disturbing all the ranch.
The cardinal flits from branch to branch.
The tabby scales both trunks in rue,
Disturbing all the ranch.
One birch bends, the other splits in two.
