First Place Winner, December 2005 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

First Place Winner, December 2005

GREGORIAN SESTINA
Esther Greenleaf Murer
(Poets.org)

Wearing a rented tuxedo
one night in Monterey,
I’m sitting with my friend Jimmy
on a state-of-the-art sofa
stirring a cup of miso
with what looks like a platinum spatula.

Jimmy’s girlfriend Ella
lives in this fancy condo
with a loft she calls an “entresol”
oh my deah it’s tres tres
chic, you’d have to look very fah
for anything like this, mon ami.

The wallpaper is ramie.
I guess the place is Shangri-la
to her, but I could think of half a
million better uses for all that dough.
But well, bully for her, hooray.
Not my idea of soul.

Well, I sit there and console
myself thinking of my old army
days, especially my buddy Ray
and a goodtime girl named Stella
we picked up in Laredo
one night--she sure was a laugh a

minute, got to swinging off a
chandelier and landed on the console
of the Hammond organ, waving a dildo
in time with--none of your smarmy
dinner music, but a tarantella.
Then we made a foray

outside, offering stray
passersby a puff of a
joint, hoping they’d (Insh’Allah)
sing: even with a voice only so-so
one can manage a chorus of “Mammy”
or caterwaul a glissando.

I’ll take doughty graty voices
singing meaty fatty salty tunes
any day over Ella’s tra-la-latte.

Judge Ravi Shankar’s comments: “12th century Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, who makes an appearance in Dante’s Divine Comedy as a sex-addled poet doing penance for lust, riddled his contemporaries with the invention of the sestina, still one of the most complicated contemporary forms, and this poet uses the architecture of the form to embark on a idiosyncratic recreation: the Gregorian Sestina. If we take this sestina, like Gregorian chant, to be marked by plainsong, by monosyllables sung across succeeding notes, then this is a deft reinvention of the form, taking the repetitions inherent in the sestina form and using rhyme and assonance to substitute for the repetition of the word itself. So ‘tuxedo’ becomes ‘condo’ becomes ‘dough’ becomes ‘dildo.’ The charm of the piece is its inflections of humor--the dildo is used as conductor’s baton, army buddies are conjured and dismissed, and the signifiers of disparate cultures and dictions (‘miso,’ ‘mon ami,’ ‘tarantella’) collide to create a heady, musical pastiche that ends with a cavalcade of adjectives that describes, again with wit and verbal flair, the Prufrockian absurdity of ‘doughty graty voices singing meaty fatty salty tunes’.”