Wednesday 4 April 2012

We Have No Sestinas Today [BEDA: Day 4]

Well, that was disappointing.

I really wanted to get a sestina done for the BlogHer.com contest, but didn't have time. Still studying for my exams.

A shame. I was liking the one I was working on when I wasn't hitting the books.

And this online Sestin-a-matic I found was freaking awesome. Seriously helped a lot. I found the changing order of the end-words freaking confusing.

Would it be cheating though if I appropriated something from public domain for the first stanza? Like using the first six lines of Hamlet's 'To Be Or Not To Be' soliloquy and then going from there. You're not exactly plaigarising per se. You're only using it for the first stanza, the other five have to be your own original work, 'cuz Shakespeare definitely didn't write the next 33 lines in sestina form. And it is public domain after all, and you've gotta be a very poorly read person if you don't know where that comes from.

And public domain means no copyright issues, so is it really plaigarising.

I think the proper word may be adapting. Like adapting Poe's poem 'The Raven' to an short animated segment on The Simpsons. The text is there, it's just told in a different way.

Though if you do really want to be negative about it, you can just call it 'lazy' and 'unimaginative'.

Actually, the public domain lines I picked weren't from Hamlet, but now that I think about it, 'To Be Or Not To Be' would be some pretty cool lines to sestin-ize... sestina-ize...

There's probably no official term for adapting something into a sestina, but for the record, I think 'sestinized' sounds pretty cool.

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