So, Write a Villanelle a Day & Check Out of the Sickery

“That should get the juices flowing for those of you with any interest in composing rhyming poetry, and in struggling within the constraints of chess, corsets, cross-stitch, and cricket . . . all at the same time. Free verse? Pash. Give me to work with a maddening, ‘foreign’ rhyme scheme, a specified repetition of a paltry number of rhymes, and a rhyme-poor language such as English, and I’m as happy as Br’er Rabbit in his briar patch.”—By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“The language of poetry, after all, is ordinary language handled in an extraordinary way.”—George B. Woods

The villanelle “is a form that seems to appeal to outsiders, or those who might have cause to consider themselves as such,” having a “playful artifice” which suits “rueful, ironic reiteration of pain or fatalism.”—Stephen Fry

“. . . to use a very strict form is a help, because you concentrate on the technical difficulties of mastering the form, and allow the content of the poem a more unconscious and freer release.”—T.S. Eliot

Ruminant With A View

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

 

BRIDGE & TUNNEL New Jersey—(Weekly Hubris)—8/18/2014—In 1958, George Benjamin Woods’ 28-page chapbook, Versification in English Poetry, first published in 1936, was reissued (in a revised edition) by Scott, Foresman and Company . . . at about the same time I was studying penmanship and Time for Poetry, compiled by May Hill Arbuthnot, at Pasadena Town & Country School.

I’ve just checked, and Woods’ book (well, “book” is too spacious a descriptor) is still available. As a sometime poet, and a writer of what is termed “formal verse,” I find this something of a miracle, that this concise, dry-as-bones manual on versification (“the act, art, or practice of composing poetic verse; the construction or measure of verse or poetry; metrical composition”) . . . still has legs (or feet: iambs, dactyls, trochees, anapests, etc.), and that the metered, rhyming poetry that I first loved in the nursery and, later, in the academy, is still being written, and read (if by fewer and fewer).

My own slight and flimsy copy of Woods’s manual, brought out on January 1 of the year its author died, now dog-eared and coffee-stained and worn away at all its seams, has been with me since my freshman year at the University of Georgia, Athens, where I suspect it was put into my hands by an Irish instructor I remember only as Mr. Leman, the man who first taught me Yeats . . . and who so inflamed my passion for Eire that I took off, in 1969, for University College, Galway.

In Mr. Leman’s classes (and in all the other English Lit classes I took at Georgia), I had never before been “so awake”; nor have I been so awake since.

If you can snatch up a child at 15, fill her ears with poetry, and leave her absolutely no time for anything else, you will have won her over (or ruined her, depending on how you look at it) for life. As a child, I began writing haiku (and folding Origami) in Pasadena, and found the strictures, the limitations, the rules . . . liberating.

In college, with all the sturm und drang of the 60s and 70s blaring around me, I could retreat to tinker, tinker, tinker with a sonnet, a series of triolets, or a villanelle, and escape the present tense altogether.

Villanelles, in fact, are still my refuge of choice.

Wikipedia has a nice entry on the form . . .

“A villanelle (also known as villanesque) is a 19-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.”

. . . and a nice short history on the modern, English-language history of the originally French form:

“Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all. Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote villanelles in the 50s and 60s, and Elizabeth Bishop wrote a particularly famous and influential villanelle, ‘One Art,’ in 1976. The villanelle reached an unprecedented level of popularity in the 80s and 90s with the rise of the New Formalism. Since then, many contemporary poets have written villanelles, and they have often varied the form in innovative ways; in their anthology of villanelles (Villanelles), Annie Fitch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali devote a section entitled ‘Variations on the Villanelle’ to such innovations.”

That should get the juices flowing for those of you with any interest in composing rhyming poetry, and in struggling within the constraints of chess, corsets, cross-stitch, and cricket . . . all at the same time.

Free verse? Pash. Give me to work with a maddening, “foreign” rhyme scheme, a specified repetition of a paltry number of rhymes, and a rhyme-poor language such as English, and I’m as happy as Br’er Rabbit in his briar patch.

Two of my own efforts follow here below. The first, written c. 1976, in 15 minutes’ time, on an Atlanta Airport bus, was dedicated to poet Henry Taylor, and collected, in final form, in The Crowded Bed: Erotic, Light & Formal Verse. The second was composed in April of this year, here in New Jersey, and not in 15 minutes.

Poets, N/B: it was never enough for me to have just those accursed, few end-rhymes to deal with: I just had to make them three-syllable rhymes, as well.

“An Awful Piece of Trickery”

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring 

Yes I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery
But I am sick of sonnets, sighs, sobriety and celery
And this is something pleasant, if a little Hickory-Dickory.

I will not write another one. I swear it (Knock on hickory.)
I’d rather turn out mysteries (like Agatha and Ellery).
Yes, I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery.

But it can save your sanity: with this you cannot dicker.
Reason tells us silliness keeps bats out of the belfery,
And this is something pleasant, if a little Hickory-Dickory.

My measured, structured zaniness is gigglable and snickery
And exorcises more than costly analytic teller
Though I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery.

So follow me through ins and outs, through thinness and through thickery,
Through poetry as purple as the buttercups are yellery
For this is something pleasant, if a little Hickory-Dickory.

Just write a villanelle today and check out of the sickery!
And give up sonnets! Spread some peanut butter on that celery!
Oh I admit this poem is just an awful piece of trickery
But this is something pleasant if a little Hickory-Dickory.

“Temperomandibular”

By Elizabeth Boleman-Herring 

My temperomandibular is shot. No shit. It’s history.
Some 60 years of hoof in mouth have left me in this quandary.
If you could see my teeth and jaw, it wouldn’t be a mystery.

I need to get me hence (to either nunnery or sistery),
and silent be, alone and still, my tongue no longer wandery:
My temperomandibular is shot. No shit. It’s history.

They wouldn’t stay in place, my bones, so powerful and glistery,
but moved at will (and willfully), all hithery and yondery:
if you could see my teeth and jaw, it wouldn’t be a mystery.

I click and clatter and complain; well, frankly, I’m off-pisstery!
Of speaking, chewing, yawning, kissing, I’m no longer fondery.
My temperomandibular is shot. No shit. It’s history.

And nothing helps, not quacks, not crack, and, hell, not modern dentistry.
No wonder in this fix a woman gets a little ornery.
If you could see my teeth and jaw, it wouldn’t be a mystery.

I need to stop this belly-aching; open up a ministry,
or off myself (and come back as a slack-jawed, brain-dead blonderly).
My temperomandibular is shot. No shit. It’s history.
If you could see my teeth and jaw, it wouldn’t be a mystery.

And here, for dessert, is one for the ages, from a master, whom I met so, so long ago now, while studying under James Dickey at The University of South Carolina, Columbia.

“One Art”

By Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Note: “One Art” may be found in Elizabeth Bishop’s The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983).