Seagull Seguidillas

Jake Sheff:

I came to learn about the seguidilla first by reading Jean Froissart’s The Chronicles on a train from Paris to Lyon. Later, I’d learn that as a member of Queen Philippa’s court, the French historian crossed paths with Chaucer and Petrarch, and that he too was a poet, with several virelais. Upon returning stateside, I tried my hand at the virelai, in a series of death-songs. (Shortly before traveling through France, I was introduced to this genre by Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.) Alas, a language like English, with its paucity of rhymes in comparison to its Romance counterparts, struggles with the form’s demanding rhyme scheme. But it was in researching the virelai that I discovered the seguidilla. Here was another form inviting me to try it, but as a seagull. (Initially, it seemed, alliteration was its sole reason.) I’ve now been working on this project for nearly a whole year, with only one interruption: to compose The Zebra’s Hebrew Melodies, a poem whose sonic structure is borrowed from Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib. I’ve done this in my usual way: by jotting down ideas all week, then, in my free time, consulting those notes as I strive to create something captivating (in the way the ocean’s captivating when it reflects the stars). When I listen to this seagull, it’s hard to imagine that he’s not the child of Emily Dickinson and Paul Muldoon. He must be the rarest of birds, because whenever I sit down to write, I do so believing it impossible that he exists, but with each seguidilla, I find myself proven wrong.