Myth of Arrival

… crawling through the poetry guidebooks so you don't have to …

Surprisingly, there is a large selection of websites devoted to the villanelle. True, most of them contain the exact same examples of good villanelles (you'd think besides Dylan Thomas there were only four other villanelle-poets in the whole, wide world: W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and Oscar Wilde, for the amount their poems get referenced) but if you have patience to re-read the same explanations as to what the rules of villanelle writing are, there are some interesting gems hidden here and there.

Start with the The Academy of American Poets; then move onto BellaOnline. They have a humorous and interesting guide to writing villanelles. Several professors have set up websites to explain to students what a villanelle is; Damon McLaughlin, Conrad Geller and Alberto Rios are all worth checking out.

But, you ask, are there other villanelles in the world worth reading? I recommend looking at Peter Schaeffer's minimalist villanelle, One Drunken Night, Wendy Cope's Reading Scheme and Donald Justice's Villanelle At Sundown.

Perhaps Jazz Poetry might not be the way to go for a villanelle? It is hard to say, what with the need to hear a refrain half a dozen times. Isn't that the soul of jazz, though? The mind-blowing refrain that is at once modern and classical, hep and primitive, old and new? What kind of couplet, duet, a little bit of synergy worth repeating could I come up with? It is a bit like that Psycho Killer song by The Talking Heads: "say something once, why say it again? … fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better qu’est que c’est."

First we need a couplet. I shall try to keep it in iambic pentameter, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. It's more than just an easy beat, there is something wave-like about the sounds generated by a villanelle in iambic pentameter; the way the lines repeat themselves, like an opiate, narcotic, almost hypnotic, in its repetitions. The poet Jack Spicer throws everything into his ode to Charlie Parker in his: "Song for Bird and Myself" — "distrusting the reality/ of every note" to "chewing angels" to blowing "sentence pure and real." And while the poem is not a villanelle, this is where we shall find our couplet, somewhere with the figure of Jacob wrestling an archangel, cherub, holy guardian, seraph:

Jacob wrestling/ loose belly cherub/
Jericho bebop/ Blue Arab Nightclub/

That sounds purposely obscure enough to be interesting. Let's not worry what it means. It is like what Spicer said, acting as a "radio" to pick up messages from Garcia Lorca, Billy the Kid and Martians; he felt "the personality of the poet … should be kept out of the poem as much as possible." I agree with this, this negative ecstasy. It is far more interesting to see how the poet can shape the words before us like a musician shapes notes. Here is the outline of the poem, with the rhyme scheme. Suddenly one realizes that what might have sounded like an amusing riff¹ takes on a heavier importance when repeated:

Line one (A1) Jacob wrestling/ loose belly cherub/
Line two (b) huffing the orchestra/ across his back/
Line three (A2) Jericho bebop/ Blue Arab Nightclub/

Line four (A2)
Line five (b)
Line one (A1) Jacob wrestling/ loose belly cherub/

Line six (A1)
Line seven (b)
Line three (A2) Jericho bebop/ Blue Arab Nightclub/

Line eight (A2)
Line nine (b)
Line one (A1) Jacob wrestling/ loose belly cherub/

Line ten (A1)
Line eleven (b)
Line three (A2) Jericho bebop/ Blue Arab Nightclub/

Line twelve (A2)
Line thirteen (b)
Line one (A1) Jacob wrestling/ loose belly cherub/
Line three (A2) Jericho bebop/ Blue Arab Nightclub/

Call it what you will — fakir smack — dervish bop — morocco t jam — someone, somewhere in the Middle East is starting a jazz combo. Someone, somewhere is playing a low, blues tune, crooning above the wind; listening to old 78s and giving those sounds a North African twist. Since we are on the subject of Bird and his Holy Trinity of Saxophones, I found this fascinating recording: 1946 Compact Jazz: Charlie Parker Plays the Blues from Verve Records. The last cut on it, "The Closer," is how I imagine euphoria should be — smacking with the audience responding to everything.

Jacob wrestling/ loose belly cherub/
huffing the orchestra/ across his back/
Jericho bebop/ Blue Arab Nightclub/

and you and me/ drunk on fever/ washtub
gin/ the whole world/ wrestling in flashback/
Jacob sparring/ with jewel palm cherub/
over and over/ the sax's toll: "Arab
- Cherub - Arab"/ recorded on playback/
Ho! Jericho/ O! bop/ Arab Night/ dub

the drums in/ the yaw of yazz/ the hubbub
of the audience/ calling: "Go!"/ Bareback
Jacob/ wrestling loose/ "Arab - Cherub
- Arab"/ [it's a wonderful refrain]/ scrub
the snazz til' it sizzles/ Jacob's bone black
blues/ Jericho's jive/ Arabesque Blues Club/

Fakir smack/ Jacob his fatigue/ his rub/
his last note/ hanging/ "man, that's fakir smack,"
you say/ some new angel/ Jacob's cherub/
Jericho bebop/ Blue Arab Nightclub/

In the spirit of jazz, I had fun playing with the repeating lines (A1 and A2). Isn't jazz a new form of systems-synthesis, discipline-incorporation, world-making? Tweaking existing systems through dream and song? Maybe this is along the lines of what William Blake referred to when he searched for a system: "that Reason may have ideas to build on."

1. I like what Drew Gardner writes about, concerning John Godfrey poetry: "The lines in the book are like a metal grating through which thought and sense pour. They are mostly paired-down to single word and two-word movements, a condensed economy of vocabulary, like Eigner, but heavier." [back]

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?

1. 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]

This morning it is raining. There is a smell in the air I associate with larger cities and their aging struts, domes, turrets and stones — terrible permanence? mellow decrepitude? unending yearning? — whatever it is, rain seems to release it. I smelled it last time I was in Chicago with Shelby. We had gone to see Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro" performed by the Chicago Opera Theater. It was marvelous! Mezzo soprano Sandra Piques Eddy played the "perpetually amorous" Cherubino. Wayne Koestenbaum insists that every Opera Queen must have a diva to obsess over. I think I shall choose Piques Eddy. She plays a hormonally-infatuated boy fabulously. It is this meditation on how aroused, feverish, intoxicated s/he always is that moved me: "and if no one is can hear me/ I speak of love to myself."

E se non ho chi m'oda,
Parlo d'amor con me!

I think that is how I should approach the villanelle; this strange form I am attempting to master. What do we know about the villanelle? Is it, as Shelby suggested said, an evil sonnet that kidnaps maidens? I found the following instructions in Strand and Boland's The Making of a Poem (2000):

* It is a poem of 19 lines.

* It has 5 stanzas, each 3 lines, with a final one of 4.

* The first line of the 1st stanza is repeated of the 2nd and 4th stanza.

* The 3rd line of the 1st stanza is repeated as the last line of the
3rd and 5th stanza.

* These two refrain lines follow each other to become the second to
last and last lines of the poem.

* The rhyme scheme is aba. The rhymes repeat according to the refrains. (page 5)

Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is one of the most famous villanelles I can think of. Unlike other forms of poetry that allow a narrative flow ("woke up, got out of bed/ dragged a comb across my head") the villanelle repeats its two key themes over and over. They say the form originated in Italian fields, with workers singing to each other and calling back a chorus. And it turns out almost everyone has written one. I found many examples at Villanelle Central. Looking at some of these poems, as with so much of modern poetry, certain poets have taken greater liberties with their diction and syntax in their refrains. That leads to an interesting question: why write a villanelle if you are not going to use the form as intended? I am not sure if there is an easy answer to this, since where the villanelle fails is when it is used,or so it seems, to convey some sort of narrative line and loses the power of its repetitious nature. Not all the poems at Villanelle Central, I think, are good. But it seems that there are so few good examples that poets and critics are eager to embrace anything, provided someone has called it a villanelle.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines poetry as: “an instance of verbal art, a text set in verse, bound by speech.” Emily Dickinson added: “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

The poetry that interests me, in fact everything that interests me in “Myth of Arrival” is in the tradition of “negative ecstasy,” or “negative capacity.” It is a poetic stretching from Saint John of the Cross through John Keats, Willis Barnstone and others who believe that the poet is nothing more than a void. That is, in order to create the poet requires a willing release of the ego and self, which will in turn allow that void to be filled with the verse. This appealed to me, for I had been feeling like a void on a daily basis for rather long time. It is a method we can use so that works, ideas and even lives that once appeared as imperfect or failures, are, by their very nature, simply unfinished acts of construction.

Some critics argue that modern “Poetry” is in trouble (poetry with the capital P … one of the three P-words that get people all hot and bothered). Or, that there are too many MFA courses being offered and thus too many poets without Serious Things To Say. Or, that _____________ School of Poetry just plain sucks (fill in the blank with whatever form of poetry irritates you at the moment: Slam, Language, Confessional, etcetera). I say, what a great time to be alive! We do have so many different ways to express ourselves. Groovy! As long as we are drawn toward the union of the unknown, steeping aside to let the unknown in, to fill us, to create what we call poetry through us, anything is possible. Coleman Barks has translated the Sufi mystic poet Jalâluddîn Rumi. There are hundreds of Rumi poems advising us to go towards this unknown (some call it Nature, others God or Allah or the Goddess, some the Creative Principal) but this one example, I think, sums up what poetry should be all about better than any other:

“One night a man was crying, ‘Allah! Allah!’ His lips grew sweet with the praising, until a cynic said, ‘So! I have heard you calling out, but have you ever gotten any response?’

The man had no answer to that. He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep. He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage.

‘Why did you stop praising?

‘Because I’ve never heard anything back.

‘This longing you express is the return message.’

The grief you cry out from draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help is the secret cup. Listen to the moan of a dog for its master; that whining is the connection.

There are love-dogs no one knows the names of. Give your life to be one of them.”

Friends, is poetry,“that whining connection”? Is it then a myth that we can never arrive at that union? Or is the myth that once you lean forward, stepping toward the divine, you’ll be able to stop? Is it in the same manner that we constantly turn to all beauty, everywhere, to all things that make us feel as if the top of our head have been taken off?

Perhaps, as poets and readers of poetry and thinkers about the art, we should try to live like that. Let us embrace this union, this longing, this desire, this myth of arrival.