Among other poetic topics, Koch explored with students the odd fact that, for him, the phrase "red rose" was so worn-out it didn't bring an image of a red rose to his mind, although "yellow rose" did. So he played with other ways of writing about roses, as in the title of his book.
He also played with poetic forms, trying to steer the kids away from familiar rhymes. (Perhaps he forgot that, for children, "The moon shone bright / on the warm June night" is still interesting.) One poetic form he invited children to play with was the sestina.
This traditional poetic form is relatively long and very hard to use well; for that reason, nobody expects it to be used very well. If you can assemble a sestina that makes sense in any way, cheers, you've made a sestina. In Renaissance Europe sestinas had rhyme--often all 39 lines had to rhyme with each other--and meter--the most "classical" meter for the language, and they were usually about Romantic Love and/or flattering the poet's sponsors or hosts. In the modern United States sestinas can include anything that has 39 lines, each of which lines ends with one of six words, in order.
Kids can do sestinas about as well as adults do. To prove this, Koch had classes of children, some still learning the primary colors, fill in the blanks and write sestinas in which the lines ended with six color names: pink, aquamarine, green, blue, purple, red; red, pink, purple, aquamarine, blue, green; and so on for the full 39 lines. He included about a dozen of these poems in Rose. Though none of them is among the Best Poems Ever Written in English, each of them does describe a child's world in vivid, colorful images.
I read these sestinas--years ago--and thought, "One of these days I will knit those colors into an afghan, and write my own sestina about it." So last Christmas I found the yarn on sale, knitted the afghan, and wrote the sestina. Here is...
THE COLOR SESTINA (for Kenneth Koch)
I picture roses red as well as pink
He also played with poetic forms, trying to steer the kids away from familiar rhymes. (Perhaps he forgot that, for children, "The moon shone bright / on the warm June night" is still interesting.) One poetic form he invited children to play with was the sestina.
This traditional poetic form is relatively long and very hard to use well; for that reason, nobody expects it to be used very well. If you can assemble a sestina that makes sense in any way, cheers, you've made a sestina. In Renaissance Europe sestinas had rhyme--often all 39 lines had to rhyme with each other--and meter--the most "classical" meter for the language, and they were usually about Romantic Love and/or flattering the poet's sponsors or hosts. In the modern United States sestinas can include anything that has 39 lines, each of which lines ends with one of six words, in order.
Kids can do sestinas about as well as adults do. To prove this, Koch had classes of children, some still learning the primary colors, fill in the blanks and write sestinas in which the lines ended with six color names: pink, aquamarine, green, blue, purple, red; red, pink, purple, aquamarine, blue, green; and so on for the full 39 lines. He included about a dozen of these poems in Rose. Though none of them is among the Best Poems Ever Written in English, each of them does describe a child's world in vivid, colorful images.
I read these sestinas--years ago--and thought, "One of these days I will knit those colors into an afghan, and write my own sestina about it." So last Christmas I found the yarn on sale, knitted the afghan, and wrote the sestina. Here is...
THE COLOR SESTINA (for Kenneth Koch)
I picture roses red as well as pink
or yellow. I can picture aquamarine
buttercream icing roses, with mint green
leaves, buttercream, on a cake that’s blue
vanilla. And the platter, of course, purple.
I wouldn’t bake it, though. I’d prefer red
in berries, cherries, on a cake, to red
of roses. Garden roses can be pink.
Most flowers in that pink-to-blue-to-purple
range are blue where I live. Aquamarine
is rare in nature, unlike green or blue.
Nature will juxtapose bright blue with green
with plenty of brown and grey, and shades of green
to make a backdrop for anything that’s red.
The trees are mostly green, the sky some blue
or other, except sunrise or sunset pink.
Blue and green paint blend to aquamarine.
Blue and pink mix to tint the violets purple,
and likewise iris, hyacinths, snowballs, purple,
a shade that’s lovely against any green.
But nature seldom mixes aquamarine.
Many times nature mixes white with red;
hence flybush, roses, rhododendrons’ pink.
And air itself always takes on a blue
tinge, whether light or dark or faded blue,
that soft and modest blue that shades to purple
in flowers that are purple, blue, or pink.
Nature can go almost too far with green.
Nature is usually temperate with red.
A few birds’ eggs are sometimes aquamarine
and the gem itself, of course, is aquamarine.
Nature mostly favors true blue or no blue.
Nature’s never minded mixing shades of red,
but spares the overall use of red or purple.
If one, why not a hundred shades of green?
Roses, azaleas show a single pink.
Hardly anything is really aquamarine.
The sky is rarely just one shade of blue
but a rose is often just one shade of red.
Then I knitted the blanket. Though shown here on a single bed, it's big enough for two people to snuggle under, or for one to wrap up in like a sleeping bag.
Then I wrote an article about how to knit your own Sestina Afghan. I offered it to a printed magazine that had asked for crochet patterns. They made an offer on this knitting pattern, then decided they didn't have room for it after all. So I'm publishing it here for copyright purposes. The instructions below were written with new, occasional, or very young knitters in mind:
1. Choose a size and shape. I knitted 14” squares to make a full-sized
bed/couch cover. You might knit 6” squares to make a crib blanket, or 8x12”
rectangles to make a kid-sized bed cover.
2. Choose yarn. Here are six options:
* Red Heart Supersaver acrylic is easy to find in aquamarine, blue,
green, pink, purple, and red. I used 14 ounces of each color to make 39 14”
squares.
* Cotton is available in bright colors too. Knit cotton squares
separately to wash out surplus dye before sewing them together. One 50-gram
skein of a cotton yarn like Sugar’n’Cream is more than enough to make a 6”
square. Use the extra yarn for sewing.
* If you don’t live near a wool shop, you can find wool yarn in six
colors at a wool spinner’s website. Ask how much wool you’ll need for the
blanket you want to knit.
* You can change the colors in your Sestina! For a luxurious,
sophisticated, non-scratchy blanket, use six shades of undyed Shetland wool.
* The Philosophers’ Wool Company sells undyed yarn that picks up bright
pastel colors when it’s simmered in unsweetened Kool-Aid. This process is
explained in Fair Isle Sweaters
Simplified.
* You could use only one color and repeat six different stitch
patterns, instead of colors.
3. Choose a stitch pattern or patterns. Just knitting every stitch in
every row makes an interesting, colorful blanket. If you use different
patterns, knit the first and last two stitches in each row in the first strip,
making a garter stitch border.
You could crochet some or all of your squares. I didn't, but you could. Crocheting generally makes a denser fabric that takes more yarn than knitting.
4. Check your gauge by knitting about 30 stitches and 30 rows. Multiply
the number of stitches per inch by the number of inches you want across your
squares (or rectangles). Cast on that number of stitches. I cast on 54 stitches
in pink to make a 14" square.
5. Make a pink square. On the next right-side row, change to
aquamarine. Make an aquamarine square above the pink square. Then add a green,
blue, purple, and red square. Bind off in red.
6. Hold the strip with the pink square nearest to you (“at the
bottom”), right side facing up. Attach red to the cast-on loop at the right
side of the pink square. Cast on as many stitches in red as you did in pink.
Work across these stitches until all the red stitches are on the right-hand needle
and you come to the bottom edge of the pink square. Each two rows of the garter
stitch border at the right side of the pink square form a “bump” of yarn.
Beginning at the top, run the left-hand needle through each bump.
The bumps form a line that's perpendicular to the cast-on or knitted row from the next square, on which you're now working.
7. Now turn your work so the working yarn is facing you, and slip one
of those loops of pink yarn onto the left-hand needle. Use the right-hand
needle to purl this loop together with the first stitch in red. Knit the next
stitch in red. Finish the row. Repeat this procedure to join each wrong-side
row of the red square to the edge of the pink square as you go along. When the
red square is complete, change to pink and join every wrong-side row of the
pink square to the aquamarine square.
8. Work the remaining squares in the same way, in order:
(1) pink, aquamarine, green, blue, purple, red
(2) red, pink, purple, aquamarine, blue, green
(3) green, red, blue, pink, aquamarine, purple
(4) purple, green, aquamarine, red, pink, blue
(5) blue, purple, pink, green, red, aquamarinne
(6) aquamarine, blue, red, purple, green, pink
9. Now make three more squares in a separate short strip of aquamarine,
blue, and red. Fold two of these squares together and sew up both sides. Fold
the third square over to form a pouch pillow.
10. Use remaining yarn to decorate the edges of the blanket. Knit,
crochet, or embroider a border around each edge. Embroider flowers, initials,
or other motifs if you like.
RESOURCES
Here are some books that explain more about the techniques I used in
the Seamless Sestina Blanket:
How to cast on and knit: (The Usborne Guide to) Knitting, by A. Wilkes and C. Garbera. (This is not the prettiest first book of knitting, but it's the most concise and likely to be the best bargain. Well, likely...I just checked...the hardcover first edition, which is what I have, is listed for $280 on Amazon. Consider this paperback reprint.)
Or: Kids Knitting, by Melanie
Falick
How to use math to design anything you want to knit: Knitting Without Tears, by Elizabeth
Zimmermann
How to dye wool with Kool-Aid: Fair
Isle Sweaters Simplified, by Ann and Eugene Bourgeois. (Note that Kool-Aid was not used to make the cover sweater. You use quite a lot of Kool-Aid to dye wool in bright pastels.)
How to knit lots of different patterns: A Treasury of Knitting Patterns, by Barbara Walker. (This is actually the first book in a set of four.)
How to knit seamless pieces by knitting into the bumps, or, failing
that, how to sew washed cotton squares together invisibly: The Knitting Experience, Book 1, The Knit Stitch, by Sally Melville
Here are some yarn spinners’ websites:
Red Heart acrylic: https://www.redheart.com/yarn
Philosopher’s Wool: https://www.philosopherswool.com/
Brown Sheep wool and mohair: http://www.brownsheep.com/
Jamieson & Smith Shetland wool: http://www.shetlandwoolbrokers.co.uk/
Alafoss Iceland wool: https://alafoss.is/
Lion Brand spins lots of different kinds of yarns. Their selections vary from year to year, sometimes including good cottons and wools as well as Vanna's Choice acrylic. Their prices depend on how much you order, so stores that sell yarns tend to be able to resell yarns at a better price than the company gives online shoppers for just a few skeins of yarn. After viewing the selections at www.lionbrandyarns.com, compare prices with www.michaels.com.
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