Tag Archives: villanelle

Using form: Villanelle with a limp: Susan McLean, ‘Instructions for Climbing and Descending’

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Good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.
When every step torments and pain is chronic,
you can’t do as you did before you fell

and sprained your ankle. As the tendons swell,
don’t make things even worse. Learn this mnemonic:
good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.

Take one step at a time. Do not rebel
or grumble that restrictions are moronic.
You can’t do as you did. Before you fell,

you bounded up the stairs like a gazelle,
but now your gait is nearly catatonic:
good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.

You’ve always known it doesn’t help to dwell
on loss. You should let go, but (how ironic!)
you can’t. Do as you did before you fell,

but try to play it safe while getting well.
The best advice is simple, yet Miltonic:
good foot goes to heaven; bad foot goes to hell.
You can’t do as you did before. You fell.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I love villanelles. I like them partly because they are songlike and partly because they present interesting challenges for rhyming and for varying the repeating lines, known as repetends. I thought at first that I had set myself an impossible task with my “-onic” rhymes, but they kept surprising me and leading me in new directions. I was not planning to refer to Milton when I started, for example, but when I stumbled on “Miltonic,” it fit perfectly with the metaphors in the first line. When I started, I also didn’t realize how many ways the second repetend could be varied while still making literal sense.
“The idea behind the poem came from real-life experiences. I had sprained my right ankle once, and after I wrote this poem, I broke it twice. However, the first line, which is literally the mnemonic device offered by a physical therapist as a reminder of which foot to step on when going up or down stairs, was one I heard secondhand. My partner John was told it by his therapist when he had a painful foot. The rest of the poem is in lines with five beats (iambic pentameter), but that line has six. I decided to use it, nevertheless, because the extra beat in that repetend slows the line down, mimicking the slow gait of the person with the sprain. It also makes the line itself seem to limp.
The poem was originally published in First Things and later appeared in my second poetry 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: “How Many Times Do You Have to Fall Before You End Up Walking” by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: unrefrained Villanelle: Alexis Sears, ‘On Turning Twenty’

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One afternoon, my father chose to die.
He was like, See ya later, guys. I think
I understand, since I don’t know if I

can hang, myself. But hang myself? (Don’t try,
they whisper, spooked.) Too young to buy a drink,
but old enough to snatch one from a guy

who says, “I’m married, but–” His twinkling eye
is trained, you know, to tell me with a wink
I’ve made the cut. One hand explores my thigh,

the other fingering a Miller. Why
are men so callous? Nowadays, I sink
beneath the comforter. I’ll never cry

because my lover’s lover’s lovely–Thai,
with toned and skinny limbs, her cheekbones pink
and angular. Ohio girl, a Buckeye.

I’m from a land where bleach blond angels fly.
Beneath the moonlight, friends and I will clink
our cups; my wondrous-child eyes defy
adulthood, till I sip. It’s bitter, dry.

*****

Editor: The poem was originally prefaced with “There are those who suffer in plain sight. – Randall Mann”

Alexis Sears writes: “I wrote this poem on the eve of my 20th birthday; nearly a decade later, I still hold it dear. ‘On Turning 20’ made me realize that what I had to say may have been more meaningful than I’d thought.”

Alexis Sears is the author of Out of Order (in which this poem appears), winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and the Poetry by the Sea Book Award: Best Book of 2022. Her work appears in Best American Poetry, Poet Lore, Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BA in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Editor-at-Large of the Northwest Review and Contributing Editor of Literary Matters, she lives in Los Angeles.
https://www.alexissears.com/

Barbara Loots, ‘Villanelle for the Road’

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The true way may be found, but at a cost.
The dashboard deity presides and judges.
Recalculating really means You’re lost.

Is this a bridge that I’ve already crossed?
I wonder as the snake of traffic nudges
between the tollbooths.  What’s it going to cost?

I have my doubts, refusing to be bossed
by bland advice a nagging voice begrudges,
recalculating how you got so lost.

This muse would never suit you, Mr. Frost.
Bear left.  Turn right.  Take ramp.  She never fudges.
The road not taken clearly has a cost.

But I’m footloose again, my baggage tossed
behind me.  Good-bye, all you drudges!
Recalculating, nothing to be lost,

I roll along the road, a stone unmossed,
a stubborn certainty that never budges,
finding my way regardless of the cost,
recalculating, yes, but never lost.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “A villanelle seemed like the perfect form to capture the frustration of getting around (or going around and around) with the “help” of a technology I reluctantly employ. This poem and another villanelle of mine appear in Extreme Formal Poems (Rhizome Press). I’m also pleased to be among the 60 poets in Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle (Kelsay Books), an anthology as delicious as it sounds.”

Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. She is a frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her three collections are Road Trip (2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020), at Kelsay Books or Amazon. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com

Photo: “gps fail” by marichica88 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: Villanelle: Discoveria, ‘October 7’

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Your actions have unleashed a living hell.
Each day Israelis, Palestinians die;
Netanyahu, Hamas: go fuck yourselves.

October 7: gunfire and the smell
of death in the kibbutzim testify:
your actions have unleashed a living hell.

The siege of Gaza, ground invasion, tell
the UN of the “risk of genocide”.
Netanyahu, Hamas: go fuck yourselves.

And when the hospitals are bombed as well,
and there’s no water, food, or power supply,
your actions have unleashed a living hell.

Across the world the rage and hatred swell
and everyone feels forced to pick a side.
Netanyahu, Hamas: go fuck yourselves.

This one cannot be silent, for the bells,
they toll for everybody; none shall hide.
Your actions have unleashed a living hell;
Netanyahu, Hamas: go fuck yourselves.

*****

Discoveria writes: “I wrote this piece as a response to what was, at the time, a perception that people were being demanded to pick a side in the conflict between Hamas and the Israeli government, leaving no room for legitimate criticism of both. I wanted to express my anger and frustration at the situation, in which both sides have chosen the path of death and cyclical violence. The repeated refrains in the villanelle form emphasise these emotions. The piece was written overnight and posted in the early hours of Remembrance Day, 11/11/2023, after a little doomscrolling. I cannot pretend that there is much subtlety to the poem; it is what it is.”

Discoveria publishes much of their work at AllPoetry, saying “Due to the politically sensitive topic of the poem I would prefer to be credited under my username.”

Photo: “17 year old boy killed by Israeli army during demonstration in solidarity with Gaza” by ISM Palestine is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Using form: Stretch Villanelle: Maryann Corbett, ‘Pictures of Ourselves at 21’

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a meditation on the current Facebook meme

Those were the days we had amazing hair.
And bodies. And ambitions. Chutzpah, too.
“Look on our manes, ye mighty, and despair!”

we cry, smirking disdain like Baudelaire
from yearbook-picture ranks and files. We grew
it lush, that long-ago amazing hair,

while choruses wailed Gimme down to there
hair! Though in our hippie hearts we knew
we’d have to tame it someday soon, despair

spared us. In shoulder pads, Dynasty flair,
the Farrah Fawcett shag, the Rachel do,
we offered up our still-abundant hair

to workdays. To quotidian wear and tear,
crimpers and curling irons, styling goo.
And then one day the mirror sighed: Despair.

Are these our offspring, whose inventions blare
from TikTok posts in floof and curlicue,
strange new explosions of amazing hair

half-shaved, half rainbow striped? (Try not to stare,
though they return your gawk, peering straight through
your brow lines, fashion failures, gray despair …)

Who were we? Do we remember? Do we care,
you with your naked pate, I with my two-
toned thatch? Is time the low road to despair?
Look at us, though: we had amazing hair.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “Every week, the magazine Rattle publishes a ‘Poets Respond’ feature, a poem that reacts to one of the previous week’s news items. For several days at the start of February, I’d been seeing posts by Facebook friends of photos of themselves at the age of 21; it was clearly “something happening” even though it didn’t seem to be a news item. I decided I’d try a poem rather than a picture and I’d aim it at Poets Respond. Over and over, I’d see replies to the posts that exclaimed about the hair, its style or its sheer abundance, so a refrain suggested itself. I went for a villanelle (on the model of Bishop’s ‘One Art’) but found I needed extra space to fit in all the allusions I wanted to the pop culture of the past several decades. We can call it a stretch villanelle, a term Susan McLean gave me. I found out after the fact that there had been a news story about the meme, but the poem prevailed at Poets Respond even without one.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Using form: Villanelle: Barbara Loots, ‘Docent’

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The art museum behind the big bronze door.
The yellow buses lining up outside.
The little children eager to explore.

The chirpy docent: Who’s been here before?
Please pay attention. I will be your guide.
At this museum, behind that big bronze door,

there’s nudity, depravity, and gore
to take your little psyches for a ride.
You children will be able to explore

the beauty born of fear, of faith, of war,
of ancient ritual and genocide
that cannot hide behind a brazen door.

Beheadings hardly happen anymore.
Most artists have avoided suicide.
You children are encouraged to explore

the human drama we cannot ignore,
the shape of visions and the forms of pride
collected here behind the big bronze door.

You’ll find despair, anxiety, and more.
Your eyes will bleed. Your skulls crack open wide.
Have fun. Enjoy yourselves as you explore
the art museum behind the big bronze door.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “I have served fourteen years as a volunteer Docent at the renowned Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. For our school-age visitors, the methods we use to encourage looking and thinking are prescribed, professional, and age appropriate. However, often on my mind are the dark, unspoken underpinnings of art. The repetitive nature of museum tours suggested a villanelle.”

Barbara Loots resides with her husband, Bill Dickinson, and their boss Bob the Cat
in the historic Hyde Park neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri. Her poems have
appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and textbooks since the 1970s. She is a
frequent contributor to lightpoetrymagazine.com. Her three collections are Road Trip
(2014), Windshift (2018), and The Beekeeper and other love poems (2020), at Kelsay
Books or Amazon. More bio and blog at barbaraloots.com

Photo: “Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA” by ernie_nh7l is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Using form: Susan Jarvis Bryant, ‘A Monosyllabic, Monorhyme, Valentine Villanelle’

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I ache to take your hand. My head says no –
You’ll sway me, play me, then you’ll let me go.
My heart says take a chance. Dance long and slow.

Which one (my head or heart) is in the know?
Fazed by your blaze, I melt like sun-soaked snow.
I ache to take your hand. My head says no.

Your wish, it heats the breeze. I hear it blow.
Your beat thrums though my veins. I feel the flow.
My heart says take a chance. Dance long and slow

Through moon-licked hues of blue as night skies glow
And gleam in scenes that steal the bright-star show.
I ache to take your hand. My head says no.

In dreams neath cream silk sheets you are the beau
Who draws my lips and hips to yours and oh…
My heart says take a chance. Dance long and slow.

But still my thoughts are skipping to and fro.
The dos and don’ts won’t stop. They grow and grow.
I ache to take your hand. My head says no…
My heart says take a chance. Dance long and slow.

*****

Susan Jarvis Bryant writes: “I like to set myself challenges when writing poetry. I’m fascinated by French lyric poetry and love a good villanelle. My Muse couldn’t resist this challenge… it was a little tricky, but I enjoyed every minute of composition.” The poem was published in this month’s Snakeskin.

Susan Jarvis Bryant is originally from the U.K., but now lives on the coastal plains of Texas. Susan has poetry published on The Society of Classical Poets, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin , Light, Sparks of Calliope, and Expansive Poetry Online. She also has poetry published in The Lyric, Trinacria, and Beth Houston’s Extreme Formal Poems and Extreme Sonnets II anthologies. Susan is the winner of the 2020 International SCP Poetry Competition and has been nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize. She has just published her first two books, Elephants Unleashed and Fern Feathered Edges.

Photo: Snakeskin

Using form: villanelle: Ann Drysdale, ‘A Harmless, Necessary Cat…’

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(Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice, IV, I)

Sing, in the season when convention brings
Frivolous gifts and merry masquerade,
A song of harmless, necessary things.

See how each household purposefully strings
Its fairylights, a debt of honour paid
To obligation that December brings.

Joy to the world! Hark how the welkin rings!
Joy to the merchant and his stock-in-trade!
Let us not think of necessary things!

Across the world the timeless story sings:
A homeless baby, refugees afraid,
The human need that dispossession brings,

Yet round and round the hurdy-gurdy swings
And up and down the characters parade
With scant regard for necessary things.

A placid cat, angels with cardboard wings
And all things heaven-given and home-made
Are at the heart of what this message brings.
I wish you harmless, necessary things.

*****

Ann Drysdale writes: “It was originally written as a Christmas card and was circulated only among friends. Compliments of the season to you and yours.”

Ann Drysdale now lives in South Wales and has been a hill farmer, water-gypsy, newspaper columnist and single parent – not necessarily in that order. Her eighth volume of poetry, Feeling Unusual, has recently joined a mixed list of published writing, including memoir, essays and a gonzo guidebook to the City of Newport.
http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/anndrysdalepage.html
http://www.shoestring-press.com

Using form: Susan McLean, ‘Cul-de-Sac’

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The man who had a perfect lawn
forced his three kids to toil outside
till every dandelion was gone.

His wife, gentle and put-upon,
dusted the trophies of his pride
(for tennis, not his perfect lawn).

His son, advancing like a pawn
to keep his father satisfied,
chose, when his girl and job were gone,

to hit a bridge (or gun) head-on.
The neighbors whispered “suicide”
while walking past that perfect lawn.

The youngest, timid and withdrawn,
lived with her parents till she died
of cancer, but the oldest, gone

for decades, had skipped town one dawn.
When she died too, her parents lied
that she was fine. Their perfect lawn
remains. But all the kids are gone.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “From the ages of six to sixteen, I lived on a suburban cul-de-sac, a more elegant term for a dead end. The neighbors I knew best, whose three children were around the same ages as the oldest three children in my family, came to symbolize for me the dark side of suburbia, the disturbing realities that lie behind the manicured exteriors and are never spoken of. Not until the father of that family died did we learn, from his obituary, that his oldest daughter, the one who was my age, had died several years earlier, of undisclosed causes. The mother, who played bridge weekly with my mother, had always said when asked about that daughter that she was ‘fine’.

I chose to tell this story in a variant on a villanelle in which only the last words of the repeating lines reappear: ‘perfect lawn’ and ‘gone’. That loosening of the form allowed more narrative to fill the lines, but the tolling repetitions of those words encapsulate, for me, the irony and tragedy of keeping up appearances in suburbia. The villanelle itself can be a straitjacket of a form, and the short tetrameter lines tighten it further, till it feels as though there is no way out.”

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

“An 8 Bedroom Vacation Rental” by Discount Vacation Rentals Online is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Using form: villanelle: Melissa Balmain, ‘Villain Elle’

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Whenever I wake up and don’t feel well,
I like to read a women’s magazine.
I know that I can count on Vogue or Elle,

Cosmo or Glamour, Self or Mademoiselle,
instead of pills, elixirs or caffeine,
whenever I wake up and don’t feel well.

Page Eight has bathing suits that look just swell
if you’re six foot and live on Lean Cuisine.
I know that I can count on Vogue or Elle.

Page Nine’s a list of “wardrobe musts” that sell
at reasonable prices—for a queen.
Whenever I wake up and don’t feel well,

Page Ten says how to age, yet stay a belle.
The photo? It’s a model of eighteen.
I know that I can count on Vogue or Elle

to make my time in bed such living hell,
I’m out of there in sixty seconds clean.
Whenever I wake up and don’t feel well,
I know that I can count on Vogue or Elle.

*****

Editor: The villanelle is a highly structured poem, its two key lines rhyming and repeating several times. One of its challenges is to make each repetition fresh and interesting, either by developing and deepening the context, or by varying the repeated lines slightly or, as with this one, by having the same words resonate differently. Here “I know that I can count on” gives an initial impression of a favourable attitude to women’s magazines, but at the end the words show total disgust. This ‘Villain Elle‘ is typical of Balmain’s twists and puns and absolute control of form.

Melissa Balmain edits Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse. Her poems and prose have appeared widely in the US and UK. She’s the author of the full-length poetry collection Walking in on People (Able Muse Press), chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award, and the shorter, illustrated The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy-Tale Reboots for Adults (Humorist Books). Her next full-length collection, Satan Talks to His Therapist, is due out in fall 2023.

‘Villain Elle‘ is from Walking in on People © Melissa Balmain, 2014. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.

Photo: “304/365 – 8/8/2011” by GabrielaP93 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.