Forms (#3)

I wrote a villanelle* for my youngest nephew on the occasion of his 16th birthday. I searched and searched for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. I do remember, because of the first few lines I wrote and the villainous rhyme scheme of villanelles, that I was challenged to find words that rhyme with “oyster.” Three I remember using were “cloister,” “moister" and "roister."

Although I was unsuccessful in finding that villanelle, my search did turn up a list of things I wanted to incorporate or turn into short stories. One was an anecdote recounted to me by a former coworker: “Grandmother going through menopause during Lord’s Prayer in church one Sunday. Could precisely time the event because she had one hot flash and that was it.”

*Some notes on villanelles (directly lifted from Wikipedia):

With reference to the form's repetition of lines, Philip K. Jason suggests that the "villanelle is often used, and properly used, to deal with one or another degree of obsession"^[24] citing Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song" amongst other examples. He notes the possibility for the form to evoke, through the relationship between the repeated lines, a feeling of dislocation and a "paradigm for schizophrenia".^[24] This repetition of lines has been considered to prevent villanelles from possessing a "conventional tone"^[25] and that instead they are closer in form to a song or lyric poetry.^[25] Stephen Fry opines that 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".^[26] (In spite of this, the villanelle has also often been used for light verse, as for instance Louis Untermeyer's "Lugubrious Villanelle of Platitudes".^[27][28])

On the relationship between form and content, Anne Ridler notes in an introduction to her own poem "Villanelle for the Middle of the Way" a point made by T. S. Eliot, that "to use 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".^[29] In an introduction to his own take on the form, entitled "Missing Dates", William Empson suggests that while the villanelle is a "very rigid form", nonetheless W. H. Auden—in his long poem The Sea and the Mirror—had "made it sound absolutely natural like the innocent girl talking".^[30]