Meta-Sestina

Writing a Sestina,

Is like shooting fish in barrel.

Just throw in some classic

troupes, rhetorical devices, and your six words.

Absence of originality,

Stick to clichés.

Roses are cliché,

Violets have been done,

Sugar is sweet,

but so bad for you.

Putting together a sestina

is pretty simple poetry.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote Poetry.

Shakespeare invented iambic pentameter.

Frost took the road less traveled.

All so worthy of the title "poet",

I'm guess I'm in the club too.

Even though I'm using the formula.

Creating a formula,

for an awesome Sestina.

Only gets easier,

as I near my fourth stanza.

Need another allusion,

Since any good Sestina is Self-referential.

Meta- Sestina means to be referential,

to refer to all poems,

a bunch of other poets,

reoccuring themes in all poems

(life, love, redemption, growing up)

and above all remind the reader they're reading a poem.

But what is a poem....

a sample of writing, perhaps cliché?

that captures something of nature through poetry.

Is always metaphorical but not always a formula.

Containing meter, rhyme, and stanzaic structure not in a referential way.

For all one knows a poem is just something that arouses emotion through beautiful use of language, unlike this horrible meta-Sestina!