Recipe for a Canzone

(A form of verse from Italian literature. The word is derived from cans, a song.)

First canzones usually consisted of 9, 10, 11,13, 14 or 16 verses.)

Any number of stanzas (many modern canzones use 5 verses of 12 lines and the a 6th verse of 5 lines)

Each verse must be 12 lines

Last stanza is 5 lines

Select words that go at the end of the line

In the Canzon to the left, which poet Marilyn Hacker titled simply Canzone, the poem uses 5 words that go at the end of the sentence in a specific order. The order is the trick. Try to write in the scheme outlined below.

In Great Day Canzone on the home page I used  8 words.

Hacker's words:

(1.) stories, (2.) street, (3.) add, (4.) turn,

(5.) learn

Note: The stanza following has the last word of the last sentence of preceding stanza as the first word of the first line in its stanza

In the first stanza, the scheme is:

1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 1, 4, 4, 1, 5, 5

In the second stanza, the scheme is:

5, 1, 5, 5, 2, 5, 5, 3, 3, 5, 4, 4

In the third stanza the scheme is:

4, 5, 4, 4, 1, 4, 4, 2, 2, 4, 3, 3

The fourth stanza:

3, 4, 3, 3, 5, 3, 3, 1, 1, 3, 2, 2

The fifth stanza:

2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 2, 2, 5, 5, 2, 1, 1

The sixth stanza:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5

VERY CHALLENGING: I found myself writing in ways I'd never thought of before.

Canzone

Late afternoon, a work-table four stories
above the rain-slick January street
– and words begin to slide into a story
someone told once. Repeating well-known stories
with new inflections, does the teller add
a nuance or a chapter to the story--
the teller's own, or a recounted story--
so that it takes an unexpected turn
and doesn't, like a child from school, return
at the same time, to the same place? History
cycles over in place, unless we learn
something from the cycle--learn to unlearn

what's overdetermined. The child learns how to learn
from listening to, embroidering on stories
repeated to delight, to soothe. She learns
from delight, from repetition, learns
syntactic play, learns courtesies the street
exacts (accepts, rewards when they're well learned),
learns over time how much there's still to learn.
At eight, eighteen, you promise that you'll add
a word to your lexicon each day, add
a book to your bedside reading, start to learn
a language. Now, like a trip, you plan return-
ing to a book read once, think how you'll turn

that page down, give the writer one more turn
to teach what you were not prepared to learn
in adolescence, stubborn, taciturn
inclined to shut the book, mentally turn
on your heel, exit the uncongenial story
which did not give your idée fixe a turn
to play the diva. Less inclined to turn
on Flaubert, having walked down the street
Mme. Moreau lived in, you know your street
is also paved with stories. If you could turn
doors and windows back like pages, had
a listener's wit, there'd be nothing to add.

But even a silent interlocutor adds
something to a narrative, which turns
in spirals, auricular labyrinths, to add
conjunction and conjecture. (The teller adds
specifics, so the listener will learn
extreme attention.) Remember how you had
smiled & hummed the line you knew on the ad
in the métro, history and a story
Clément wrote, Montand sang, and, one more history:
the passage from commune to commuter. Add
the station's name, a grassy path, a street
whose western limit is your own home street.

Life hums, a wire pulled taut between that street
and one across an ocean. Stretch back, add
East Fifth, East Sixth, East Tenth, Henry Street,
Perine Place, Natoma Street, Paddington Street.
In dream-labyrinth nights, I turn
a corner, one street becomes another street
in another country, yet on that street
doorway flows into hallway: no need to learn
my way; I know the way. Awake, I earn
the daily recognition of the streets
I live on, dual, counterpoint, their stories
enunciate a cautious history.

Now and from memory's clerestory,
my vision of that palimpsest, a street,
(as fading daylight, gold on velvet, adds
textured layer) turns outward as streetlights turn
on, lights cut out lives, limits: What can I learn?

—Marilyn Hacker
The Yale Review