A Publicly Constructed Scrabble Sestina

 
 

From a game played on 2/5/2011

Thus far asking the public to help out hasn't worked out too well, but I am both persistent and hopeful. I will start this Sestina out by constructing the first stanza of six lines plus the first line of the second stanza of six lines. Before I get ahead of myself, I'll explain (to the best of my ability) exactly what a Sestina is and its most basic form.

A sestina is a thirty-nine line structured poem built out of six preselected words. It contains six stanza's of six lines (a six line stanza is also called a sestet) plus a three line envoy (also called a tercet). Throughout the structure those six preselected words will each be repeated seven times. In each sestet stanza, the last (or end) word of each line will be one of the six preselected words. In the envoy tercet, two of the six preselected words will be repeated in each line: one near the middle and the other on the end. Now the only aspect of a sestina that is not structured is the length of the line. They can be as long or as short as you like.

I hope that my directions are comprehensible. If they are not click on the hyper-linked "sestina" above for another set of directions as well as a boring illustration of a sestinic narrative (prose) poem.

Diagram of the preselected word placements:                                                

                                 6 stanzas of 6 lines
     1 2 3 4 5 6 - End words of lines in first sestet.

     6 1 5 2 4 3 - End words of lines in second sestet.

     3 6 4 1 2 5 - End words of lines in third sestet.

     5 3 2 6 1 4 - End words of lines in fourth sestet.

     4 5 1 3 6 2 - End words of lines in fifth sestet.

     2 4 6 5 3 1 - End words of lines in sixth sestet.

                                + the 3 line envoy

    {6 2} {1 4} {5 3} - Middle and end words of lines in tercet.                  
                                                                                                                    

The six preselected words were chosen from this oozing cesspool

The scrabble word pool we are going to choose from are the following: cow, god, dote, tire, see, she, files, seer, road, box, yid, and lab. (Ahmed and I didn't get a chance to finish the game due to work issues, thusly, these will have to do. Just in case you were wondering at the time we quit, I was ahead by 27 points, but that doesn't mean I would have won). The words we will be using were chosen at two o'clock this afternoon at Cafe Racer in the Ravenna neighborhood. I chose four and Ahmed chose two of the words. Thus, the words below, with their corresponding number, will be repeated seven times each throughout a sestinas 39 line structure.

(1) Cow, (2) Box, (3) Seer, (4) Dote, (5) Road, and (6) Lab

Next let us begin composing this poem. As you can see below, the line length is all over the place. Also, you do not have to concern yourself with rhyming words. Further, in penning a line you can change the tense of the preselected word or make it plural or add prefixes and suffixes in order to fit the word into the narrative. (FYI: I spent about five minutes on these first seven lines and almost eight hours writing this post)

At Yid’s market Za’er bought a half dead cow.

As Za’er opened up Is'eem's gothic box

to crack open a fortune out of a cookie, Is'eem, a mystic seer,

gave Za’er a stern warning about the practice of doting

on strangers. As Za’er drove down Turnbuckle Road

she thought about George the bull being chased by Charlie, her big black lab.

Yesterday, there was this funny incident that happened at the bovine laboratory.

Kassiopeia, a narcoleptic mucker, fell asleep on the job and the cows

escaped. All thirty of them were found wandering down the road

Milky, the prize milker got hit by a tractor and was put in a coffin shapped box.

by Mo Ron the trucker. Kassiopeia felt so guilty she doted

on Milky until she was so exhausted she received a vision like Nostrum the Seer.

{(: Some Nice Person named Carla from Facebook added these lines 2/21}

She told her boss, who nodded sympathetically while seeing the future as his own seer.

This was not a job for the laboratory.

  As much as he understood on her cows she doted,

 in the end, a cow was just a cow.

 After sending her home, he removed Bessy (because Milky sucks) from the box,

And loaded her on the butcher's truck and waved it down the road.


{Yeah!!! stanza 4 was added by an unknown viewer see comment #1}


But this was no healthy, sylvan road;
Tight-lid skies had turned it harsh and seer.
The dust, noxious and aggressive, seeped into the truck's gearbox.
The machine faltered, spluttered and then died. Driver Jack Ennui climbed from the cabin and up a nearby hillock, atop which perched a federal lab.
Through the heat, his secretary's nagging hit his ears; she'd been right, the cow,
It was foolish for him to shun the engine and always on the lacquer dote.  

(Anonymous added this stanza June 20, 2011)

Do you remember what it meant to be a doter
a hitchhiker wandering down stray desert road
Leading on a long chain a mad cow
If you went to the psyche seer
She flipped a card that sent you to the lab
that’s not the worst of it she said reading from the Wheaties box

The final six line stanza will have these end words:

(Line 31 ends with the word: Box)

(Line 32 ends with the word: Dote)

(Line 33 ends with the word: Lab)

(Line 34 ends with the word: Road)

(Line 35 ends with the word: Seer)

(Line 39 ends with the word: Cow)

Bon appetit. Write me some delicious lines. Thanks!! Please have fun with it. And look we are almost done....