I’ve been working on a Sestina, which is slow going. I’m playing around with form as I did with the previous ballad. The Sestina is a bit complicated, as it has 39 lines in six stanzas of six lines each, it is then followed by a final stanza of three lines.

There is no rhyme, but this is where is begins to get tricky: The same six end words have to occur in every stanza but in a changing pattern- this is called a “lexical repetition.” Each stanza follows the last with a reverse paring of the previous lines.
There is more. The first line of the second stanza must pair its end-word (s) with the last line of the first. All the stanza’s repeat this pattern, except the final three lines which are more of a wrap up of all of the repeated six end-words.

So it has been taking a bit of time. But there is a new poem in the works.