A Single Day: Writing the Décima

prompts by Julie Marie Wade & poems by Julie Marie Wade, W.H. Auden & Lauren Shapiro

How might the form of the décima, with the guiding concept of “things that occur in fours,” elicit new and unexpected poems?

This week’s guest writer is Julie Marie Wade, author of QUICK CHANGE ARTIST, winner of the 2023 Anhinga Prize for Poetry

Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

From Julie: My poem, “Décima: November 8, 2016,” was written shortly after the presidential election in 2016. Michael Broder at Indolent Books was putting together an anthology titled Poems in the Aftermath and asked me if I wanted to contribute something. It felt so important then, just as it does now, to lean into creative rather than destructive impulses. So I went back to my notebook and began to consider all the details I had written down from that inauspicious day. I had the idea to write a poem that took place in the course of a single 24-hour period—from waking in the early morning on November 8, 2016 until I drifted into fitful sleep and oracular dreams.

Of course a poem can become unwieldy when the emotions fueling it are so strong. I was genuinely stunned by the results of the 2016 election, and I didn’t know if I could trust myself to bring that feeling—and all the others—to my page in a crafted way. I needed a structure that could hold the biggest and most tumultuous feelings I had.

This is the only décima I’ve ever written, but it’s a poetic form I’ve always been interested to explore. It’s comprised of a four-line stanza followed by four 10-line stanzas. That’s 44 lines total, but with the title on its own line, it reaches 45. We all know who became the 45th President of the United States, so I don’t need to type his name here, but that symbolism was something that helped my content and my form align.

I didn’t use every traditional requirement of this form, foregoing the rhyme scheme and using my first stanza as an opportunity to present different meanings of the word décima—all of which seemed to resonate with the poem’s content as well. The last line of this opening stanza introduces the form itself, and I hope that meta moment encourages readers to try writing a décima of their own.

Nota bene: “Décima: November 8, 2016” also appears in my new poetry collection, Quick Change Artist, winner of the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry selected by Octavio Quintanilla and was released on March 1, 2025.

Okay! Read to write?