Collaborations: “The Circle of Exchange and Renewal” and The Sestina Challenge

“When the world falls apart, people come together,” said Jon Mooallem in the Sunday, March 15, 2020 New York Times. So I am proposing a game, a writing game to pull people together.  It is called The Sestina Challenge.  The challenge is fulfilled not just by writing a sestina but by writing a sestina collaboratively, with one other or several other people.  Yes, it is a game and like all games this one is serious!  (Think about it.)  This sestina challenge is also fun and leads to the discovery of heretofore unknown or unimagined stories. Or as a wise man said “Technique is discovery”!

Writing collaboratively so that the energy, thoughts, and words of one are modified by the other, or several others, in a “circle of exchange and renewal” is not a new practice. Throughout time, as evidenced at least from the ancient Greeks, collaborating with other persons or mediums has produced some of the most inventive, useful, even life-saving results.

At this time, the time of the coronavirus pandemic when we are urged to isolate for fear of passing on disease, collaborating — working and creating together — has never been more important not only to continue to produce vital and imaginative works but to maintain our humanity. And now with the web, the Internet, facetime, videos, cell phones and so forth, we can achieve this collaboration as we carefully restrict our movements and stay at home.

 Writing collaboratively also belies the all too popular concept that one person is responsible for a work of art or a scientific invention.  “If we are alive to the world, we are always relating to and collaborating with something whether it is another art form or artist or the very air we breathe — with history or possibility.”[1] 

For example, the ancient Greeks practiced Ekphrastics that in the 5thC B.C. was a rhetorical device, largely descriptive, in which the collaboration is between a painting and a poet. Also in ancient poetry we have the Japanese Tanka. Two Buddhist monks, working together devised a scheme that the first would write a haiku of 5-7-5 (5 syllables on the first line, 7 syllables on the second line, 5 syllables on the third line).  The second person would add a couplet of 7 syllables for each line: So 575-77.

The essence of collaboration is to receive from the other and to add to it; shifts in thought and image are permitted, even encouraged, if they emanate from the communication and subsequent enlightenment.

Early 20C Surrealist games like those practiced by Tristan Tzara and the DADA movement, relied on chance associations between people, objects, poets and painters, etc., and worked out schemes to codify what began as pure chance.

In 1971, Renga,[2] a book length chain of linked poems was published, written by four major twentieth-century poets: Octavio Paz, Edoardo Sanguinetti, Charles Tomlinson, and Francis Ponge. Instead of a Tanka sequence, the sonnet was the agreed upon collaborating form.  Since they were each from different nations, the sequence, and the interaction was not only collaborative in thought and technique but in four different languages: Spanish, Italian, English, and French. Yet the sequence evolved as a unified work.

In 1974, Nimrod International Journal always alive to developments in the world published an entire issue devoted to collaborative writing including translations (Vol. 19, No. 1).  As Octavio Paz said, in translating we are not only joining languages but also “we change what we translate and above all we change ourselves.”

And should we not always be open to changing ourselves, to multiplying sources of expression, to discovering not only technique or fact but self and the other that lives within us?

I live in an actual village, a complex of 900 apartments spread over acres of ground in Marina del Rey, California.  I am, I believe, at 86 the oldest resident here.  That’s the way I like it! I am for the most part healthy and active.  I walk my dog Pete at least four times a day (he too is elderly).  I exercise and eat right except for the occasional brownie. Yet it is only recently, since the outbreak of the Coronavirus that I have realized that the phrase “It takes a village!” has become a resounding truism.

Every day someone knocks at my door (then wipes the knob with disinfectant) or sends a text or email asking if I need help: “Toilet paper perhaps?” “Water?” “Dog food?” Most rewarding are the text messages that suggest ways to fill my time since I am the one confined to solitude as age predisposes me to the virus.  We, in this village, are clearly becoming “a circle of exchange and renewal.”  We are collaborating freely and with care, respect, and imagination. Each person is discovering new ways to cope, a new vision — and sharing it.  Then those new ways of seeing are developed further as they link with someone else’s insight and create a chain reaction of positivity and hope. 

For my temporarily suspended class at the Rancho-Palms Library and my friends in the village I have of course suggested that this new found solitude and seclusion is the best time to write. What a gift: hours to remember and record; hours to find the right word and the appropriate tone and point of view; hours to watch the water wave at the children scooting by on their bikes and the children waving at me — through the closed door of course.  Most important — hours to connect!

Connections, collaborations, are not always easy no matter how much time we have. One has to really look and see and hear and virtually touch so that we feel a loved one’s arms around us, see a cat’s eye in an ornate ceiling, hear the whispered words of a daughter to her homeless father.  But we can and will do this now that we have the isolation, solitude and time. It does take time.

So do not shy away. Reignite the collaborative process, emerge from behind your solitary screen and reach out to clasp the virtual hand of someone who might join in our creations.  Email and the many other possibilities of the web makes this easy but often we are so busy digging into our own thoughts that we forget to grab the sustenance of the other.

I invite you to do just that: grab what’s out there and bring it into yourself, as you simultaneously join the Sestina challenge.

Write a sestina with someone else using an interchange of your devising: over the phone, internet, face time, facebook, video, and so forth. Create your own system of writing together.  For example, one person writes one line, the second the next.  But you can be more inventive than that!

SO WHAT IS A SESTINA?

The sestina is, like so many poetic forms, a long-time practice that began we think in 17C France.  It ultimately tells a story. But right now you don’t know what that story is. You and your partner or partners will discover your story as you follow the rules of the game, a game that is a tradition, that is serious, time-demanding fun.            

            To begin:

THE SESTINA CHALLENGE:

The Physical Exercise:

Pull back your hands to your shoulders, palms facing out.  Slowly push the air at the end of your palms away from your body; feel the air at the end of your fingertips. Repeat the movement even more slowly, stretching a little further each time you return your hands to your shoulders, palms still facing out, and press the air away from your body.

By the third repeat or so, close your eyes and feel the air out there, feel whatever seems to be out there.  Grab it!  Bring it into your body as you cross your arms over your chest.

This exercise is all about reaching and risking.

The following end-word game will become the first stanza of your sestina.

END-WORDS: WRITING A 6-LINE POEM

“Sometimes we do our best work when we don’t know what we are doing.”

e.e. Cummings

I am going to give you 6 words,  . . . MAGIC WORDS that will become words that end a line of words. (You’ll see what I mean in a minute.)   Turn your paper horizontally and write these words in a column going down the right hand side of the paper, that way you will be giving yourself plenty of room to reach for the magic word.

In the future when you play this game with someone else, always ask the other person for your end-words; caution that person against making the words seem to go together; the more disconnected the end-words, the better the results will be. It is also helpful if one of the words is unfamiliar. Feel free to look up the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

HERE ARE THE WORDS:                                                                 

                                                                                                                                    AIR

                                                                                                                            MEMORY

                                                                                                                                  PLACE

                                                                                                                                    RED

                                                                                                                           POSSIBLE

                                                                                                                              BATTLE

All I want is for you to reach for the first word with a sentence or part of a sentence of at least 10 syllables (or else the repeats will come up to frequently).  When you reach the word, you may end stop the line with a period or partially stop the line with a comma, if the sense calls for it, or you may “run-on” (an enjambment)  to the next line and end the sentence in the middle of the line.  Then reach for the next “end-word.”  Naturally, you will be relating one of my words to several of yours and then to the next set of mine and yours. (Clear? REACH for the end of the line; turn; REACH again.)  For example, if the first word at the end of the line was “elephant,” you might write: 

Yesterday, I went to the zoo, and there, standing before me, grey and omnipotent, was an elephant

who beckoned to me with his long trunk.   . . .

NOW LET’S SAY THE NEXT END-WORD WAS “PERPLEXED,” I might then add . . . moving toward that word:

Yesterday, I went to the zoo, and there, standing before me, grey and omnipotent, was an elephant

who beckoned to me with his long trunk.  It seemed that he knew me, a recognition that perplexed . .  

YOU GO ON UNTIL YOU HAVE ABSORBED ALL THE WORDS I HAVE GIVEN YOU.

YES, YOU MUST USE THEM IN THE ORDER GIVEN.

YES, YOU MAY  USE A NOUN AS A VERB, OR MAKE SINGULAR PLURAL, OR PAST TENSE . . . PRESENT.

WRITE . . . WRITE NOW . . . FOR ABOUT 10 MINUTES.

Now, let us say that you have part of a poem (a stanza) of 6 lines, each ending with a different “magic” word. Let’s take this stanza and turn it into a Sestina.

THE SESTINA

The sestina is an old French form, usually narrative.  It is a poem that tells a story in 6 stanzas plus a 3 line envoi (or last stanza) IT SEEMS LIKE A GAME! It is and it isn’t.

As we all know, games are serious.  (See if you wish: Johann Huisinga, Homo Ludens.) We might think of this game as weaving down the court . . . each player (end-word) remaining the same, but changing positions.

Using the end-word stanza that you have just written as a pattern reach for the sestina.

For the Sestina, the six words that end each line of the end-word poem or first stanza (each line being approximately 10 syllables long) are repeated in the next stanza according to a pattern that might be described thusly:

The 6th end word moves to become the end word of the first line in the next stanza; the end word of the first line becomes the end word of the second line of that stanza, and so forth.

So:                                                                                                                               AIR      1

                                                                                                                            MEMORY    2

                                                                                                                                  PLACE    3

                                                                                                                                    RED       4

                                                                                                                           POSSIBLE      5

                                                                                                                              BATTLE       6

BECOMES:

6 goes to 1st            So the second stanza end-words would be:    battle

1 goes to 2                                                                                                        air

5 goes to 3                                                                                                        possible

2 goes to 4                                                                                                        memory

4 goes to 5                                                                                                        red

3 goes to 6                                                                                                       place

and then you continue with the next stanza, always using the previous stanza as the pattern for the next, and always continuing the narrative (because the sestina is a narrative poem, a poem that tells a story) shifting positions of the end words until you complete the 6 stanzas.

After writing the 6 stanzas in which the end-words remain the same, but shift in the order of their presentation;

Write a 3-line envoi using all 6 of the end-words in any order. You might end up with something like the following (but only if this ending fits the context of the preceding stanzas:

“The memory of that place, filled the air

with a battle-cry, fiery and cacophonous                 (run-on line is ok)

as the red dress she wore, whenever possible.”

Remember that in the 6 stanzas the pattern stays the same though the end-words shift.  Remember too that the first stanza becomes the ordering reference (or whatever) for the second stanza, the second the pattern for the third . . .  and that a line may not only run-on to the next, but from one stanza to the next.

Let’s Clarify if necessary by again using a Physical Exercise:

Choose 6 PEOPLE (Ask for 6 volunteers. During this critical time, doing this exercise outside or using stick figures to illustrate would be good. Each person should be 6 feet from the other.  They will line up facing the rest of the group (or virtual group). EACH PERSON REPRESENTS A WORD; EACH WORD/PERSON SHIFTS his/her PLACE ON LINE ACCORDING TO THE PATTERN ABOVE: : 6 goes to 1, and so forth.

 EACH PERSON MAINTAINS HIS OR HER WORD THROUGHOUT THE PROCESS OF THE 6 STANZAS, HOWEVER, EACH PERSON’S NUMBER CHANGES IN EACH subsequent STANZA.

This will all become clear; believe me.  It is a form much like a puzzle at first.  The challenge is not just to fit the form but to bend the form to fit you, and to make the repeated words as innovative and unobtrusive as possible while still having the whole seem natural and inevitable.  And, of course, to end up with a poem that is not just nonsense, but meaningful and fun to write as well as to read.

As you now understand the process, you might wish to write a sestina with 2 or 3 other people, using a system of interacting of your own devising (In other words, this would be a collaboration.) For example, one person could write the first line, the other, the second.  Or you could alternate stanzas; or you could just have a free-for-all slam session.

THE FOLLOWING IS A SESTINA I WROTE ON A LONG TRAIN RIDE. MY HUSBAND GAVE ME THE 6 END-WORDS.  (It is always a good idea to have someone else give you the 6 words and to insist that they do not go together in the giver’s mind.)

I wrote the first stanza reaching for the end-words I had been given. THEN I WENT ON USING THE PATTERN AND THE EMERGING NARRATIVE TO GUIDE ME. When I got stuck I asked my husband for a suggestion.

SESTINA: ICE JOURNEY                     

What is it to ride a train to nowhere through snow

and ice and have it turn suddenly to water smiling and carving tracks

into the ridge of rock?  Land’s End, shaped like a shoe

standing at the edge of time — distant and cold.  We find a stove

at the station, huddle around its bulging sides.  Out there, on the water, yards

of sail whip in the squall, and on a small toe in the land, popping into sight, the purple thistle

speak reminding us of Scotland, the Isle of Skye, where thistle

poked up between every rock, and though it rarely snowed

the iced air pushed us to the shops for wool shawls and frocks and yards

of soft tightly woven cotton to line our beds like tracks

to the sun.  You built a fire in the stove

of our small dacha, a cabin no bigger than a shoe,

and we whiled away the winter reading, making tracks on the damp earth with our shoes,

tracks that paved a path back from our daily walks through the thistle,

only to crouch thankfully around the stove,

speak of the day and perhaps of days to come bringing snow

crystals to the land, bringing fresh drinking water, and creating clear tracks

to the lives we wanted to lead, tracks, perhaps, to flower-filled yards

with a profusion of yellow budding rapeseed, dusty purple heather, and spots of orange    

         poppies here and there like Sheena’s yard

in Wroxton, Oxfordshire.  There, dressed in her Chinese kimona and delicate silk shoes,

she paints poppies, lifts butterflies and birds from the air.  On her canvas, they track

delicate markings in gold and inky black, imprints of centuries of crafting even thistle

into fine brushes to capture not just a world but a vision occasioned by snow

and defined by patient monks whose faint thin music we still hear singing from the stove.

How easy it is to come upon clarity and vision when we do not shun the warmth of a simple stove,

nor pull back from idleness and just let time stretch like yards

of Chinese silk spun by a magician of infinite invention out of snow

or worms or silent moments during which we breathe deeply, then put on shoes

of softest leather lined with fur to walk out there within the thistle

and rocks down to the water.  The tide high, we cannot find our tracks

from the last venture, wander aimlessly creating new tracks

in the wet ground.  The surf soaks our feet; we run for the comfort of the stove

and rub each toe so it shines like a bright penny.  We throw all the thistle

we had gathered into the flames to stoke the fire and run to the yard

hunting twigs and fallen branches.  There, in a pile of brush, a pair of old wooden shoes

becomes timber for our fire, and, prepared, we sit to rest ourselves and welcome the snow.

If thistle and even old shoes can create 

a fire for our stove, what else can we find

in the yard in the snow that tracks our mind?

Copyright c 1996 Francine Ringold

[1] Francine Ringold from the Introduction to The Way We See Now: A Collaboration of Photography and Poetry, Francine Ringold and Sam Joyner, Coman & Associates, February, 2020.

[2] Renga (New York: George Braziller, 1971).