Contemporary poetry and the aesthetics of failure
[T]o be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail … all that is required now … is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. — Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues[1]
I.
In a recent essay, Stephen Burt notes a “miniboom” of poets writing sestinas, and claims they are drawn to the strict form as a way “to lament their diminished or foreclosed hopes for their art.”[2] This form in particular is attractive, Burt writes, because its repetitive structure (the same six words appear at the ends of the lines in each of the poem’s six-line stanzas) enables descriptions of “sorts of futility,” “the uselessness of verbal craft” or “art’s failure to find further use.”[3]