The Villanelle (cont.)
The world is full of bad villanelles but good dim sum. It seems a safe estimate to make from a simple glance at what we have available to us.1 Perhaps the trouble lies when poets who normally work in free-verse attempt a bombastic, mannered and flamboyant form? Ronald E. McFarland, in his book, Villanelle: The Evolution of a Poetic Form (1987), suggests:
"modern poets have tried the villanelle merely to demonstrate, perhaps to themselves as much as to their readers, that they can write not only conventional accentual-syllabic verse, but also that they have so mastered the craft that they can write a good poem in one of the most demanding of all conventional forms." (page ix)
I use these words, "bombastic," "mannered" and "flamboyant" on purpose because what the form needs in many cases but rarely gets is a might injection of camp humor; or to be more exact, irony, wit and the ability to make interesting rhyming couplets that say something?
Perhaps the trouble first started with Ezra Pound? His poem Villanelle: The Psychological Hour, is one in name only. Where does one even begin? If we look at the first italicized refrain, we might be see the start of the customary form: "Beauty is so rare a thing./ So few drink from my fountain." And if we add the beginning lines of the second italicized refrain — "'Between the night and the morning?'" — we might find the rough conceit Pound was working with, that dim aba tercet, that led him to call this a "villanelle." We might, indeed, if we are willing to work that hard. But why work? Life is too short and poetry, as the old saying goes, far too long.
Instead, let us look at Marilyn Hacker's Villanelle for D.G.B. McFarland interviewed Hacker for his book. She commented:
"I like the challenge of repetitions, seeing what ripples a repeated word, or, in the case of the villanelle, a repeated line, sends out, not on the surface but through the body of a text." (page 100)
It is this rippling Hacker uses with great success with the juxtaposition of "every day our bodies separate," with refrain of "… not understanding what we celebrate." I think Hacker's villanelle is a bit more successful at conveying the emotional nuances of separation than if the poem had been written in free verse. With its repetition the bodies separate and the lovers are skeptical as to what their love exactly was. Next, the alienated bodies find themselves cut off even from their pragmatic lives with its "unlettered power." By the forth stanza the bodies' "separate/ rountine" breaks down even further in the "wordless darkness." Finally the refrain "what we celebrate" undergoes the change into "how we celebrate" "our bodies." McFarland states:
"Hacker introduces a caesura in the closing couplet to provide a crucial shift in meaning. Whereas the poem begins with the separation of bodies, it concludes with the separation of selves." (page 102)
What with the villanelle's ability to intensify emotions through repetition, what I am surprised no poet has attempted to write is a jazz villanelle. Jazz poetry, with its experiments in form, riffing on a theme but returning to that theme, seems ideal to the villanelle. Yet this is where many poets who attempt to use the form seem to fail; they use the villanelle for more narrative purposes. Or worse, they create refrains that sound heavy handed, isolated from the rest of the poem. I see the tautness of a well-written villanelle functioning in the same way the manner jazz should function. True, jazz is not the only medium to use repetitious, cut rhythms and divergent beats to create drama, but what it brings to the written word with its sense of animation, energy and tension, can aide us.
I am not an expert on jazz – there are countless other critics far more versed on the subject. I found Sascha Feinstein’s and Yusef Komunyakaa’s The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) fascinating. Still, the one thing many of the poems in it did not contain was structured form; it was as if the poets, hearing the riffing of the saxophone, wanted to strike out for higher ground without building up their momentum first. Robert Hass is quoted in as saying:
“… the only thing like [Charlie Mingus’s Blues and Roots] I can think of in literature … is the Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury … you only know he’s howling because everybody’s saying to him, hush up now, while this cascade of images is going through his head.” (page, xx)
If jazz is about pressure and conflict, a “cascade of images,” returning in a cyclical manner to the theme, progressive yet unpredictable, then is not the villanelle the form of choice to convey such emotions?
- It might seem a non-sequitur to compare the two, but the mastery of any art can carry over into other fields. The Washington DC poet Deborah Ager writes: "If you want excellent dim sum any night of the week, visit A&J in Rockville or Annandale. When I ordered a bowl of millet at A&J, I received an entire bowl full of yellow mush. I have no idea how anyone could ever finish such a huge portion. The waiter and I had a good laugh over me not being able to eat it all." Perhaps if we spent more time working on our cooking skills our poetry would turn out better? [back]