Sestina project

A couple months ago, my good friend Lynn Kilpatrick had a sestina published in The Incredible Sestina Anthology (edited by Daniel Nester, a Write Bloody Book.) Her sestina is called "Francis Bacon Sestina" and was inspired by a quote about his own painting, from Francis Bacon . It's not unusual for Lynn to be inspired by visual art, and it's not unusual for me to be inspired by Lynn. (That's been going on practically since the first moment I clapped my eyes on her.)  I like to think it's mutual. Anyway, what  Lynn's sestina inspired in me was really more sestina than Francis Bacon. She has another sestina with which I was already familiar, in fact, I appear in a footnote of that one. But I didn't really know much about the sestina form until I got the Incredible Sestina Anthology and read the intro, wherein, Daniel Nester draws a little diagram of a spiral. Nester says, "Believed to be invented in he 12th century by Arnaut Daniel, a troubador who influenced Dante, the sestina is a 39-line patterned form that has spiraled into new life in English in the past 100 years or so." Yes, he said "spiraled" which in context is a terrible pun, but also a forshadowing of what the form looks like when drawn down in a pattern for use as a visual. And I know this because I did it. 

Now I have to decide what to do with my draw-down. Of course, it could be a weaving, but I am not sure the weaving is what I want to do. Decisions about scale, media, and so forth will probably be determined by a particular sestina - whether it's one of Lynn's or not. Maybe I'll write a sestina for my "Sestina"?  I do like some of the words that come from Lynn, one of which is "time." In my diagrams I assigned a color to each of the six repeating words (in the sestina form, the last word of the line in the previous stanza is the last word in the first line of the next stanza, all other word orders fall into place based on where the numbers fall now on the spiral.) 'Time', in this case, turned out to be yellow, but I wrote, "The color of time?" on my notes to myself because, maybe time isn't yellow? Color may also be determined by my media. There's work to be done, here, surely.