[joint post] give us your words by Fatima A. '25

Alan: Hi! You have words—

Fatima: and we want your words—

Alan: for our poetry.

Fatima: For the past semester, Alan and I have been reading poems that I write for my poetry workshop class and Alan writes for their writing thesis. 

Alan: Every Sunday, Fatima brings a poem which is invariably in some new form, as the class requires. Every Sunday, I bring a sestina.

Fatima: If you didn’t know, a sestina is a poetry form consisting of six sestets, having the same six end words in each of the stanzas, but in a different order. The poem ends with a tercet which has two of the end words per line. 

Alan: Sestinas are an…interesting form. The constraints are fairly lax but the form is long and repetitive, forcing you to return to a topic over and over again. It is a form whose flexibility I adore,⁠01 </span><span style="font-weight: 400">including writing <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/id-like-to-write-a-happy-post/">one on the blogs</a> last semester! and, for this year, my goal is simply to write as many sestinas as I can.

Fatima: Last week, I also had sestina as the prompt for my poetry class. On Thursday, Alan and I stayed up till 3 and competitively wrote a sestina each. By competitively, I mean, we were trying to see who would finish first(I did). While writing it, we decided it would be fun to exchange the words in our poems and write another sestina with the end words that the other person’s first sestina used.   

Alan: So, on Sunday, we competitively wrote sestinas with each other’s end words—a race which I won. We have started gradually converting the rest of 4W to the cult of poetry (and sestinas in particular), and, now, we are starting on the blogs.

Fatima: Once again, we want your words—

Alan: and we want them now in the next two weeks!

Fatima: We will write one, or two, or three, or—

Alan: We will write a few sestinas each with the end words which you give us, and then we will return to the blogs, and I will figure out if it is okay for portions of my thesis to be under a  Creative Commons – Non-Commercial – Share-Alike license.

Fatima: Have fun with the words, we will have fun with the poems! 

Alan: Just remember, in a neighboring room, someone is always cutting an absurd amount of cilantro!