An Announcement to the Canyon
I wrote a poem every first day of the month this year, including this sestina in November
In my last post, I mentioned that one of my 2024 ambitions was to write a poem on the first of the month through the year. Well, I did. I have always loved to write sestinas, this ambitious-in-itself form that asks, Can you revolve the same six words to end six stanzas, then knit them together in a seventh, too? The form goes like this, if each letter is a stanza-ending word—rather than typing this out, I cribbed it from the Academy of American Poets:
1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE
Like learning a card game, it’s better by example, and if you just get going. My favorite is “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” John Ashbery’s sestina about Popeye having drama in a thunderstorm. I want to screenshot the whole thing; it’s immaculate. Here is a two-stanza example of how the capstone words can melt into the verse.
Inspired by this, I wrote one some years back about a young person working as a Chuck E. Cheese mascot inside the rat suit. (Oh my god, my first published poem, ten years ago!) It’s called “Just 4 Kydz Fun Zone,” and out of everything—books and interviews with hunky celebs and criticism—it is still what I consider the closest thing to what I can do.
That heavy-ass proscenium pulled aside, here’s the sestina I wrote this year. I think it gets cooking around the third stanza. (Look for Gregory Corso and David Berman in here; I copy everybody I like.) Love you, heavy kiss.
X ARS
An Announcement to the Canyon
My job lately is buying concert tickets and blow-drying my hair,
If you happen to know anyone looking for a professional.
Finding comfort in the lamblike September weather,
But it’s October now. Again, I’m overtaken, arm-wrestled: Here’s the present.
Light on leaf through the graph of a screen. I can’t talk correctly, because
I consider the leaves my personal accomplishments somehow. I’m looking for you,
Honey. Trying to complete a delivery. Bringing my boundless crazy energy to you,
And un-solid, more stupid pursuits. Hitting on a woman at the book festival–“Great hair!”
Even though I am in serious love. Everything “just because.”
Backwardsness, happiness, unprofessionalism.
I want to get buff, so I drink a martini. I want to decisively eyeball the present
And stay free, so I look up fashion shows aimed into the hypothetical future of the weather.
Season by season. That actually works pretty well, lots to think about! I can’t tell whether
It’s to my taste that they are making the paintings and music into dresses now, would it impress you
To see a composer’s name gift-wrapping a thin woman, could I be that kind of birthday present.
Feet looking unusually normal in silver sandals. Pearl-drop earrings meeting the line of my hair.
Like me, the designers only seem to know one painter well: van Gogh. Professionally,
This never mattered, even when I pronounced it Arles-plural, not Frenchishly. Because,
Look: I scarcely research. I’m not a technology fan—I don’t think you can fault that, because
It took a lot away from me! But I love to think of a body as technological, whether
The data-processor of crossword puzzles, Grandma’s birthday, the profession
Of a toothpaste preference after sex in the morning; as a keeper of addictions. You
Feel me on this? So I’m a tech worker. I am the most fired woman in America. My hair
Also lost its job. I cut it all away with Fiskars after declining to work for a tabloid. Presenting:
Adam Ant. Introducing, on the main stage: Amy Rose, sans ambition, freaking it. Presentational
In lack itself, like a big-time canyon, one of the famous ones. It’s not sad when I don’t care whether
The situation gets how I want it: hairy!
Every morning, I look out the window and notice the day has arrived dressed in my power weather.
Every square in the screen, like me: beautiful hole, miniature frame for the leaves and for you.
O, to have been a Professional,
It was a lot of fun, for years, the pantomime: some gradebook-brandishing professor
Just over my shoulder, with me sweating, clutching a #2 pencil to its breaking point. Present!
O, no one was there. Then the bells chime, in order to announce your
Big debut, designer backpack in the workplace hallway, the wackest grid. With the weather
Irrelevant, and the carpet providing its underqualified understudy inside. Because
There is never a way out, and half your life is spent on an appropriate wardrobe, plus hairstyle.
Man, I’d never profess the need for an exit. Just a difference. Kind computer, I love you.
With spiky hair, like Calvin, I accept even what I don’t, Calvinist cartoon in my future-present.
I think all the time about what I will think later. Because who ever knows whether.