“’One wants to feel in control,’ Hecht said of his work in an interview with the New York Times last year. ‘If you are writing in free verse, what makes it a poem? A number of my contemporaries wrote in free verse, but it became random jottings from their minds. Some enjoyed a period of celebrity. I don’t think they are going to be read very long. It’s as if someone says, ‘I thought of a butterfly,’ and it becomes a poem because it’s sanctioned by their own brilliance.’”

–From “Anthony Hecht, 81; Confronted Brutality Through Visual Verse” in the Los Angeles Times, Oct. 23, 2004

Philip Hoy: “Maybe I can quote from an earlier passage in Kafka’s diaries than the one I was alluding to just now, only I’d like to hear your reaction to what he says there:

‘Have never understood how it is possible for almost everyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of undergoing them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness, in all likelihood with my head still smarting from unhappiness, sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with as many flourishes as I have the talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal, or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain; it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of surplus is it?’”

Anthony Hecht: “I fear that I have never been granted Kafka’s bountiful surplus of energy that he was able to call up during crises or depressions. I can think of few things more enviable. I have no reserves of imaginative energy to draw on in periods of darkness. Ransom, who proposed what might be thought of as a doctrine of ‘aesthetic distance’, which I found easy to adopt, used to say that the poet who wanted to write a love poem would be well advised not to do so in the first fine frenzy of his passion. He would be too close to his experience, too giddy with its pleasing chaos and turbulence to be able even to understand himself, let alone to put his feelings and thoughts into some disciplined order. The writer, Ransom would maintain, who can best create powerful feelings in his reader is precisely the one who has mastered these feelings before trying to set them down on paper. And Eliot would add to this that the writer can also describe and evoke experiences he’s never actually had – a matter that the stunning variety of Shakespeare’s and Dickens’s and Browning’s characters ought unarguably to demonstrate, though the tendency in our era is to regard lyric poems as purely the seismography of the life of the individual soul. Flaubert wrote to his mother in December, 1850, expressing much the same requirement of absolute personal detachment that Ransom recommends, though in Flaubert’s case, far more severely, and by way of explaining that he was determined never to marry, feeling that his vocation as a writer forbade it. He wrote, ‘You can depict wine, love, and women on the condition that you are not a drunkard, a lover, or a husband.’”

–From Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy, 

Given Sandra’s reflections on sestinas in her earlier post, I thought the following quotes from Jules Nyquist on James Cummins in “Fame and the Lonesome Sestina“ might be appropriate: 

Sestinas can mock you.  It is partly about the meter, the sound, the word repetition, but it’s also much more about how the poet handles the form itself to make it interesting, to use the form to its best advantage. James Cummins says: ’The sestina has everything to do with whether or not you can get said what you thought you wanted to say, as you find out what it is you can say.’

He also says, ‘A hundred sestinas must die, so that one may live’, which I personally relate to.
Cummins says writing in the sestina form is ‘humiliating.’  He has a wonderful sense of humor about the writing process and as a result his sestinas have a playful quality about them.
   
He says,  ’The sestina resists your choosing it as the appropriate vehicle for your material; it laughs at the whole process that puts composing words in a box. Because the sestina doesn’t fit these ideas, people who need the notion of ‘mastery’ find the sestina odd and confusing.’

It’s an embarrassment to formalists.

Personally, I have to agree with that last sentiment. I’ve blushed at every sestina I’ve tried, but there are some formalists there who are crazy enough to brave the sestina for the rest of us: for example, Sandra Beasley. Read one like “Sestina Inviting My Sister to Become a Pirate” and then I dare you to accuse me of flattery.

However, if you’re up for an old favorite, check out “The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina” by Miller Williams, or for a good time call on McSweeney’s and their collection of sestinas. Personally, I’d recommend “Get To School (A Sestina)”, especially if “you read poetry as fast as a running cheetah.”