Tag Archives: rondeau

Susan McLean, ‘My Evil Twin’

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My evil twin is full of feminine
self-deprecation. Don’t be taken in
by her rapt nods and deference, which mask
her sly, satiric humor. While you bask
in her respect, she’ll turn away and grin.

You think you’ve won an argument? Her chin
is cocked. She’s packing nitroglycerin.
Why can’t she let the matter slide? Don’t ask
my evil twin.

One minute she’s as sweet as saccharin,
but then, like any snake, she sheds her skin.
If you suspect that it’s a hopeless task
to coax this genie back into her flask,
you’re right. But don’t be fooled: I’ve always been
my evil twin.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I have always loved the French repeating forms for their songlike appeal. The villanelle is my favorite among them, and I have also written a fair number of triolets, but the rondeau is a form I have rarely tried. At fifteen lines long, with only two rhymes, it is extremely demanding to write, since in English most words have relatively few rhymes. That difficulty made for a fascinating challenge and some unusual rhymes. It’s hard to imagine another poem in which I would use both ‘nitroglycerin’ and ‘saccharin.’

Twins have a long history of featuring in comedies of mistaken identity, from Plautus to Shakespeare and onward, but the ‘evil twin’ is a relatively recent development, I think, with origins in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Soap operas, comic books, and serial dramas are full of them. Yet in real life, most people behave differently at different times and with different people. Actors often prefer playing the villain to playing the hero; viewers love to watch characters who break taboos with impunity, a sort of vicarious release from the inhibitions of civilized life. So, is this poem a self-portrait? More a self-caricature, but caricatures are often more recognizable than photographs.

This poem was originally published in the online journal Umbrella, and it also appears in my second book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “(Be Gone) Evil Twin Gum” by found_drama is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Potcake Poet’s Choice: Juleigh Howard-Hobson, ‘I’ll Keep My Ghosts’

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“…presence, if it has been real presence, does not ever leave.”
–May Sarton

I’ll keep my ghosts. Each morning down we go
Through the hallway, where they begin to show
As grey reflections of themselves in frames
That do not answer when I call their names
But swirl and curve around me, to and fro.
Sometimes, in this house that they used to know
So well, their unseen numbers swell and grow
Until I am overwhelmed. All the same,
I’ll keep my ghosts–
By choice–for what else would I have? Hollow
Spaces between walls? Albums? And sorrow
That has no feeling to it left? Who blames
Me for my preference? I make no claims
That they bring only joy, but even so
I’ll keep my ghosts.

Juleigh Howard-Hobson writes: “It’s so hard to name a favorite poem of my own, (after all, they are all my favorite poetic children!) but this one, written a decade ago, is a little closer to my heart than the others.
Over time, I’ve collected quite a few post-card sized Edwardian portrait photographs, with their original frames, so I can hang them on my walls. These stranger’s images mix with my own vintage family photographs and after a while, they stop being photographs of strangers, they become photographs of familiar faces. After a longer while, some join my family ghosts. Which I find inspiring, if slightly unsettling. This rondeau owes its existence to my collection, both related and adopted.
The Rondeau, with its self-imposed restrictiveness that limits how far a poet may go before she or he must return to the refrain and readdress it, is one that I’ve always been fond of. When I was 16 I came across Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” and immediately sensed that the Rondeau was the perfect form for conveying the complicated simplicity of life (granted, I was a strange 16 year old). This one first appeared in Poets’ Touchstone 2010 having won 1st Prize in the 2010 Poetry Society of New Hampshire National Contest; later collected in my book The Cycle of Nine (RavensHalla Arts, 2012).”

Juleigh Howard-Hobson’s poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Mobius, The Lyric, Dreams and Nightmares, 34 Orchard, Capsule Stories, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (Great Weather for Media), Lift Every Voice (Kissing Dynamite) and other places. Nominations include Best of the Net, the Rhysling, and the Pushcart. Her latest book is the Elgin nominated Our Otherworld (Red Salon). English born, US/Australian raised, she currently lives on an off-grid homestead in the middle of a dark woods in the Pacific Northwest USA, with her husband and her ghosts.

Contact: “I maintain an irregular Twitter presence as ForestPoet@PoetForest https://twitter.com/PoetForest where I follow every writer who follows me.”

The Best Short Poem Ever: “Jenny kiss’d Me” by Leigh Hunt

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Leigh Hunt, young

Leigh Hunt when young

Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add
Jenny kiss’d me.

I love the sentiment, the versification, the tightness, the back story, everything. If you erased everything else Leigh Hunt ever wrote, this poem should still be in every anthology of English poetry.

As the Poetry Foundation says, Hunt was “a central figure of the Romantic movement in England, but he was not, as he wished to be and knew he was not, one of its great poets.” But he was the author of Abou Ben Adhem (often taught in schools for its quietly uplifting morality); The Glove and the Lions (ditto, for its more boisterous morality); and the Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard (taught less often, as schoolchildren hardly need encouragement in the heightened pleasures of theft).

Jenny kiss’d Me was originally entitled Rondeau, but the poem doesn’t really meet any of the various definitions of the form. It rhymes ababcdcd instead of holding to the rondeau’s tighter requirements of rhyme and repetition, but the alternating feminine and masculine rhymes give it a strong rhythm that is tightly adhered to. It has four feet to each line, but only two in the last, and the effect of the poem is heightened by the fact that, when reading the poem aloud, you can’t help creating a longer pause than usual before the last line – it is as though Hunt has dropped the first two feet, not the last two in that line. That last line repeats the first words of the poem (which is common in a rondeau), but does it as a fresh punch line. It is a remarkably effective piece of versification.

Jenny Carlyle

Jenny: Jane Baillie Carlyle, née Welsh

The back story is that Hunt had been severely ill during a flu epidemic, but, recovering, paid an unexpected visit to Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Jane being “Jenny”. The Carlyles had a difficult relationship to each other and the world in general. Samuel Butler once remarked “It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four”. But clearly Jane Carlyle was capable of showing affection and making an impression. Hunt at that time was no longer young.

Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt at about 66

The poem manages in its eight brief lines to touch on themes of time, age, mortality and failure; also on affection, love, spontaneity and success; and to combine them all into a single image. I cannot think of a more perfect short poem in English.