I’m going to do a poetry writing workshop on sestinas in about a month, and I want to offer my students more models than my usual suspects (Heaney, Muldoon, Bishop, Hecht, Plath, Kumin, Pound, Ashbery, Auden), so I’m eager to learn what sestinas you value and would be likely to offer as successful (i.e. not mechanical) examples. Since the form has long been associated with “academic poetry,” I’d especially appreciate samples of sestinas whose diction is more earthy or even twenty-first-century trendy to help them feel that the form’s requirements are friendly footholds rather than irritating challanges.
Sestinas You Have Known and Loved
R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.