Monday One Stop Poetry form - Villanelle guest post by Luke Prater

One Stop Poetry Form

We want to encourage you to explore different poetry forms over the weeks and months to come. We will spend the first "session" describing the poetic form and the second week will be a time for the individual poet to do exercises with the form and an experienced poet. Please have fun and remember we are learning together! 

Welcome to our second Villanelle Monday!

For part two of our Villanelle class, I would like to introduce Luke Prater.
Many of you will know him already from One Shot Wednesdays. Luke was also featured several months ago on One Stop Poetry with one of his Villanelles. Luke has written many Villanelles and is very familiar with different forms of poetry.

Luke, I want to say a big "Thank you" for doing this. I very much appreciate your hard work for putting this together for us.

~ Claudia

Now I'd like to hand you over to Luke...enjoy..

I avoided poetry throughout my teens and wrote prose instead (occasionally; I was very lazy), but when I finally got to University/College to do my Bachelor's in English Lit with Creative Writing, poetry really grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. When we learnt about the villanelle form, it stood out immediately as being both evocative and compelling due to the repetition, and in possession of far more musicality than most other forms I had encountered. The repetition of the two alternating refrains being one reason, but two other aural poetic devices are also very much present: rhyme, and meter/rhythm. Being a musician as well as a poet, aural device has always won me over, as opposed to visual device (metaphor, simile, personification, etc, though of course these are important also). It's a case of the 'three Rs' - Rhythm, Rhyme, Repetition.

Varying one of the refrains (the second (A2), preferably), can be very effective, however. It depends on context/theme/tone, and can lend the Narrative aesthetically pleasing variety and more sense of movement. A favourite villanelle, Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, does just that, and it's worth mentioning that varying/semi-repeating a refrain isn't out of the question, yielding fine results in many cases. As you can see here, it allows the piece to progress and be wrapped up with a varied A2 refrain appropriate for the closure.

   

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.

I am a poet who tries as many forms/genres as possible to stretch myself; many I will never return to, but I will always come back to the villanelle. I'll leave you with one of mine that you may not have seen, and that also isn't inappropriate in theme/tone/language (!)… in fact it's a rewrite of my very first I wrote at University all those years  ago, re-versifying it in iambic meter (pentameter), which, if you can manage it, will guarantee a smooth flow, and leave the reader in no doubt whatsoever as to how your lines are to be spoken/read rhythmically. This is why iambic meter become so popular, and the norm with form poets in English; also because it is the closest meter to how we naturally speak, with its lilting alternation of unstressed and stressed syllables.

An example for iambic pentameter (5 beats) would be:

do NOT | go GEN | tle IN | to THAT | good NIGHT

        1              2           3           4                    5

The First Day of Spring

by Luke Prater

Embittered Winter cast Himself away

upon a gale, and swept elsewhere on it.

The Sun shone brightly, Summer’s bold foreplay.

I wished the madding Springtime to betray

His colder cousin, knowing time befit;

embittered Winter cast Himself away.

The trees, they danced in wonderful ballet;

the singing breeze was happy to admit

the Sun shone brightly, Summer’s bold foreplay.

The Birds, they felt the change by break of day,

and joined the breeze in strains, pale-morning lit.

Embittered Winter cast Himself away.

And you and I, socks off, we tread the way

across the grass, and under trees we sit.

The Sun shone brightly, Summer’s bold foreplay..

Old man, invigorated, bright, though grey,

he mumbled praises like some Jesuit.

Embittered Winter cast Himself away;

the Sun shone brightly, Summer’s bold foreplay.

We are learning together..

Last week we said, we would take one of the Villanelles, have a closer look and give detailed feedback.
Adam Dustus (of One Stop Poetry) volunteered with the very first Villanelle he has written and Luke took the time for a detailed critique.

 Adam's original poem:

Once we have learned our lonely dreams can be
Oh God not knowing where or how to start
When all I ever want is you and me

Blank canvas drips like a soaked willow tree
Save in found comfort assembling shared parts
Once we have learned our lonely dreams can be

Until feeling lost can’t tell you are free
No flow chart off course for a bleeding heart
When all I ever want is you and me

Rudderless ships carry skeleton keys
Her lip-curled smile trumps my so-called art
Once we have learned our lonely dreams can be

Our last taken breaths, which death guarantees
Molecules boil over, anger departs
When all I ever want is you and me

Vision focused now, our present to see
For love a sincere gift, fair will imparts
Once we have learned our lonely dreams can be
When all I ever want is you and me

Hi Adam -

The central aspect here which, in my humble opinion, needs addressing, is the meter. Your two refrains flow well and scan five (pentameter) fine.

'Blank canvas drips like a soaked willow tree' (line four) > it took me several attempts to be able to speak/read this as five stresses. It's not obvious at all where the stresses should fall. Some may try and force the third stress onto 'a', which certainly doesn't want to be stressed, 'soaked' is probably what you intended? Viz - 'blank CAN | vas DRIPS | like a SOAKED | WIL low | TREE'. This line would flow better if you stripped one of the two unstressed small words there ('like' or 'a') and made 'soaked' into the continuous tense 'soaking', something like this -

Blank canvas drips; a soaking willow tree [pref; or] Blank canvas drips like soaking willow tree
'Save in found comfort assembling shared parts' (line five) > I'm having real difficulty with this line, metrically/rhythmically. You are relying on either the 'in' to be the first stress (which, being a preposition, it really doesn't want to be - we can only stress in poetry what we naturally stress in our language, or it renders lumpy lines, iambs or not), or 'found', which is OK, but requires the reader to realise that you're starting the line with a trisyllabic foot, like this -

'save in FOUND | COM fort | as SEM | bling SHARED | PARTS' ... this is still unwieldy rhythmically and many readers will be lost on the meter and struggle to feel where the beats fall. The fact that you have two stressed syllables to end on doesn't help either. Suggest (and just a suggestion, as always :) -

Except in comfort assembling shared parts [or] Except in comfort gathering shared parts  [this pref. 'found' is redundant and 'assembling' too many syllables in that particular place in the original version of the line]

'Until feeling lost can’t tell you are free' (line seven) - also struggling with the meter here. To count as five, it requires the first word's stresses to be reversed in relation to how we normally speak them, ie - 'UN til' rather than 'un TIL'. The flow is generally difficult in this line, but if you made a simple change in the right places, it would look completely different, eg

Until you're feeling lost, can’t tell you're free [if you're loathe to use 'you're' twice, substitute the first with another appropriate monosyllabic word]

'Our last taken breaths, which death guarantees' (line thirteen) - the number of stresses here is ambiguous - it could be read as four or five, depending on the reader (such is the problem when writing in meter but not strictly iambs or trochees; often lines depend of being spoken/read a certain way to scan). I assume you mean it to read like this -

OUR last | TA ken | BREATHS which | DEATH gua ran | TEES? but it could easily be read like this -

our last TA | ken BREATHS | which DEATH | gua ran TEES = tetrameter (fours). Think it's ok though, the majority of readers will see it the first way. And either way, it does flow, but 'which' is redundant and it would be less ambiguous regarding how to read/speak it with that word removed, ie -

Our last taken breath, death guarantees [also removed the 's' from 'breaths', it eases the flow and highlights the breath/death internal rhyme]

'For love a sincere gift, fair will imparts' (line seventeen) > this scans fine, but I wonder what you think of the notion of making it smoother by altering the front end slightly to 'For love's sincere gift...' etc? Or does that change the meaning? It eradicates the indefinite article 'a' (always good to rid these small 'filler' words if possible). The line would look like this -
For love's sincere gift, fair will imparts

You have many fine lines here Adam, and overall the premise/message is solid and clear. I particularly like the 'soaked willow' image, and this line is striking and provokes thought: 'Rudderless ships carry skeleton keys'. If it were mine I'd use lowercase at beginnings of lines (bar following a period, obviously, actual or implied by stanza-break); the form is old, but you're writing in modern language (for the most part; phrases like 'fair will imparts' seem a little archaic and slightly incongruous with the tone of the rest), no caps would suit in my opinion but it is merely a taste thing. In the old days poetry was always always capitalised, but most of it now is not. Your refrain -

'Once we have learned our lonely dreams can be' - I'm not sure I understand it. Do you mean 'Once we have learned how lonely dreams can be'?

One or two areas I would consider cliche in phrasing, but that's probably just me :) ('Oh God' and 'bleeding heart' stand out as such, but to some they may be fine). I could go deeper, but I think this is enough on one piece; nice villanelle, sir, especially if it's your first and these are all merely my opinions, to be taken or left as you choose. Thanks for allowing me to take it apart, Adam. I hope it was useful to you.

Are you in for some more practicing on Villanelles?

Once again, you will have the possibility to write a Villanelle and link up with us. Have a look at last week's Villanelle class for details like structure and writing tips.
Luke and I will try to make our way around but may not manage to visit each of you and, as Villanelles are quite complex, we won't manage to give a detailed feedback on all of your linked up poems (form, rhyme, correct meter etc.)

But if you want a detailed and honest feedback, please leave us a comment here in the comment section and we will have a closer look at what you came up with.