I wrote my first sestina in 1977 or 1978, as an exercise (strictly voluntary!) in a year-long poetry workshop given by Dr. Christopher Wiseman (a well-known Canadian poet originally from England) at the University of Calgary. He began the year, despite (or especially because of) the preponderance of contemporary free verse, discussing and detailing various formal verse forms. This is something I had never learned in school, something my friend Laurie Roberts had always had a talent for, but something I never could seem to get the hang of. I tried most of the forms we studied: some with success (at least technically), some never got finished (though I finally finished my Petrarchan sonnet a few years later).

After completing my first sestina, which was successful only as an exercise, I was on the lookout for a subject or theme worthy of the form.

I found learning the basics of poetic metre (or rhythm: the ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM of poetry) extremely helpful. I also fell in love with obsessive verse forms (perhaps my French ancestry rearing its head). I wrote a villanelle and a sestina, and became addicted to refrain lines (repeated lines, like a one-line chorus), even in my free verse. This passion for the power of rigidity and repetition gripped me hard, and has me still in its clutches: the epitome of this formality is my poem The Shadow, technically free verse, in that it is no recognized form, but actually a poem so formal that the form allows almost no room for the essential variation.

So, what is formal verse? What are obsessive verse forms? And what the heck is a Sestina? Formal verse doesn't have to wear a tux, but it has a particular shape, which can include a rhythm with a certain number of rhythmic units (feet) or beats per line, or sometimes syllables per line, often a specific number of lines per stanza (poetic paragraph), and often a particular rhyme scheme. Obsessive verse forms use repetition more than rhyme, and are often unrhymed. The repetition can be of certain lines or words in particular places. The villanelle has two refrain lines that occur in the first and last stanzas, then alternate as the last line in the middle stanzas.

The sestina? It dates back to the thirteenth century, popular in both Italy and France, and was used by both Dante and Petrarch. R. F. Brewer, in his Orthometry: The Art of Versification and the Technicalities of Poetry, with a new and complete Rhyming Dictionary comprising 6000 words (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1931) says, "Some writers claim for it the supreme place in poems of fixed form -- above the sonnet even." The sestina is a 39-line poem, with six stanzas of six lines each, and a final stanza of three lines (the envoy). It has a rigid order for the repetition of its six end words.