Also, this afternoon in my meeting with students,
we mentioned the Sestina, which is a form that I sometimes
assign to students because I feel
that it's constrictions actually have a liberating effect
rather than what you might think.
And it's a form in which there are six stanzas each
with six lines.
And there are the word at the end of each of the six lines
is repeated in a complicated fugro pattern
until the end when you have a short three line
stanza in which you fit both of them into two of them
into one line.
And this one is about Popeye.
And for those who would like to follow
the fluctuations of the Sestina, the words that are repeated
are thunder apartment country, pleasant, scratched,
and spinach.
The title Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.
The first of the undecoded messages read.
Popeye sits in thunder unthought of.
From that shoebox of an apartment,
from livid curtains hugh, a tan Grammy emerges, a country.
Meanwhile, a sea hag was relaxing on a green couch.
How pleasant to spend one's vacation in La Casa de papy
Popeye.
She scratched her cliff chin solitary hair.
She remembered spinach and was going to ask Wimpy
if he had bought any spinach.
My love, he intercepted.
The planes are decked out in thunder. today.
And it should be as you wish.
He scratched the part of his head under his hat.
The apartment seemed to grow smaller.
But what if no pleasant inspiration
plunge us now to the stars for this is my country?
Suddenly, they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a no two can of spinach.
When the door opened and Sweet Pea crept in.
How pleasant, but Sweet Pea looked morose.
A note was pinned to his bib.
Thunder and tears are unavailing, it read.
Henceforth, show Popeye's apartment
be, but remembered space toxic or salubrious whole
or scratched.
Olive came hurtling through the window.
Its geraniums scratched her long thigh.
I have news she gasped.
Popeye Faust as to flee the country one
must see gusty evening by the screams
of his wizened duplicate father.
Jealous of the apartment and all that it contains myself
and spinach in particular.
Heaves bolts of loving thunder at his own
astonished becoming rupturing the pleasant arpeggio
of our years.
No more show pleasant rays of the sun
refresh your sense of growing old.
Now, the scratched tree trunks and mossy
foliage only immaculate darkness and thunder.
She grabbed Sweet Pea.
I'm taking the Brat to the country.
But you can't do that he hasn't even
finished his spinach urged the sea hag looking fearfully
around the apartment.
But olive was already out of earshot.
Now, the apartment succumbed to a strange new hush.
Actually, it's quite pleasant here thought to see hag.
If this is all we need fear from spinach,
then I don't mind so much.
Perhaps, we could invite Alice the goon over.
She scratched one Doug pensively.
But Wimpy is such a country bumpkin always burping
like that.
I knew it at first, the thunder's
soon filled the apartment.
It was domestic thunder, the color of spinach.
Popeye chuckled and scratched his balls.
It sure was pleasant to spend the day in the country.
I think the influence on that poem
was a play I read in French class
in high school are lazy in, which I often study,
which is about a woman who's the main character in this play.
But who never appears in it.
Everybody acts in function to her.
But she like Popeye proposes.
And man does the other way around.