Sunday, March 2, 2025; 1 - 3pm
Sliding Scale: $15/$20/$25
While poetic forms impose a certain amount of constraint upon the writer, they can also lead to greater abstraction. In this class, we will experiment with a short-form of the sestina called the questina. The questina form was devised by Sonoma County Poet Laureate Dave Seter while attending the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference.
The questina is patterned after the sestina, but with four end-words instead of six. The four words must appear in each stanza, ordered in a specific pattern. Ezra Pound is said to have described the sestina as “a thin sheet of flame, folding and infolding upon itself.” The same flame-like intensity may be achieved in the questina form by choosing end-words that are in tension with one another.
In the first thirty minutes of the class the instructor will discuss the idea of abstraction through form in poetry. He will then cover the rules governing the questina form and share examples from his own work. For the following thirty minutes, participants will work with the form with the goal of completing one or more draft questinas. In the final sixty minutes, participants will be given the opportunity to share and discuss their work.
About the Instructor: Dave Seter is a poet, essayist, and author of the poetry collections Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010). His poems have won the KNOCK Ecolit Prize and placed third in the William Matthews competition. He is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations. He has been an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has served on the Board of Directors of Marin Poetry Center. He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. He has previously been a guest instructor and panelist at the Dominican University of California Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has been named Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2024-2026.