Villanelle: Fixing freedom in five tercets and a quatrain

 

A word is dead
When it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
That day.

Emily Dickinson

Photo: “Emily Dickinson’s white dress“

Ursula K. Le Guin insister-ed that “love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new” (The lathe of heaven, 1971, p. 158) and our love for words as writers is the same – this too needs to be made anew over and again if the words we write are to live. Emily Dickinson’s poem “A word is dead” (The collected poems of Emily Dickinson, 2016, p. 219) is one I encountered when my own writing had descended into the murky depths of Cixous’ “School of the Dead”, scraping and scratching around in the dank mud with her in search of the “dead woman” who was preventing the live one from writing the words she loved (Three steps on the ladder of writing, 1993, p. 7). Lying at the bottom of the abyss, I imagine Emily Dickinson holding my head “just when the grave and I have almost sobbed ourselves to sleep” as I whisper to her, “Sorry I am dead again” before she bends down and softly recites “A word is dead” in my ear. I love the playful and arresting way Emily Dickinson begins this poem and the snub she sends to those who foolishly believe that performativity has no place in prose. Her words in this petite yet pointed set of six lines and twenty words, with lines one, two, four and five containing four syllables, and the third and the sixth only two and in rhyme, never fail to make me smile and renew my logophilic resolve to bring words to life.

But first, the craft of “finding” a poem

The three-ply of Le Guin’s writing on love as renewal, Hélène Cixous’ words on dying in order to live through writing, and Dickinson’s reminder that words come to life through performance, becomes a thick braid I willingly catch and whose line I now follow. Like Woolf’s fisherwoman’s daughter, I sit quietly on the banks and watch their words ripple the waves in my mind which are soon awash with love for and being in love with words by them. The unrestrained return of rhythmic flow in Hélène Cixous’ writing, the repeated patterns in Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the way Le Guin’s writing echoes with the world’s beats lead me to want to try my hand at poetry. Yet, I know I have much to learn about the art and craft of poetry. I have never formally studied poetry, although now I wish I had. For years I have been scribbling verses in secret in my journal – whimsical, impulsive yet serious observations of life as it passed by whose words attempted to take me far beyond themselves into a secret place where my felt senses purred, hummed, buzzed, and roared with something not known nor ever encountered before. I am reminded of poetic autoethnographer Sandra Faulkner’s (2007) yearning to write poetry that “[plays] to the senses so you feel a poem in your gut” (p. 226) and her insistence that enabling the meter of words to move us this way requires that we pay attention to “poetic traditions and techniques and study the craft” (p. 221) as we write. Le Guin adds her own refrain to this, suggesting that “once we’re keenly and clearly aware” of “elements of our craft, we can use and practice them until…they become skills. A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art…and that is the joy of it” (Steering the craft, 1998, p. xiii).

I love a lot of what Le Guin has to say about writing, and I particularly love the way she too insists on the importance of developing the skills and knowing the craft of writing – if you have a story inside that wants to be told, she says, you need to be ready to step into “the magic boat” (p. 126) and follow its movements when it comes by. Talking about poetry with David Naimon in Conversations on writing, Le Guin shares that for her, poems are vessels which arrive in their “own, different way. It tends to be just a few words or even just a beat, with a kind of aura about them, and you know then that there is the possibility of a poem there” (p. 59). As a poet and writer, she maintains that she is constantly seeking the sense of words by listening for the beat, the rhythm and the music that carries them – sometimes relishing the freedom of free verse and sometimes using the regularity and structure of form verse to find a poem.

Then there is learning the craft of the poem …

In the afterword to Late in the day: Poems 2010-2014, Le Guin confesses she never thought form verse would give her a poem, for after all, “A form has rules, and to write in form is to obey the rules. So why would you choose to follow arbitrary rules?” (p. 80) In her new book on of short essays on Australian poets, Fishing for lightning: The spark of poetry – a brilliant guide for readers who are “out of touch with poetry or who want to learn more about it, and even for those who think they hate it, as well as those who have already found a place for poetry in their lives” (p. 1), Sarah Holland Batt asks the same question, “Why bother with boundaries when you can do away with them?” (p. 49) As someone who takes pride in being an undutiful daughter of the academy, I ask myself, yes, why would I willingly choose a poetic form whose shape was selected and decided upon by someone else often times a long time ago? “Whether it’s as simple as a rhymed quatrain or as complex as a villanelle, only part of it is up to you: the words” (p. 80), Le Guin explains – the magic happens in form verse when “you realise that the content is finding itself through the form…the rhyme-pattern forces you to find it” (p. 81). She goes onto to describe writing form poetry as a game in observance of structure, and “a game’s only good if you play by the rules. And writing a poem in a strict, complex form such as the villanelle can be a terrific game” (p. 81) – a villanelle can in fact, as Holland Batt suggests, “be liberating” and a “moment to enter into conversation with all of the other poets across time who have used it” (p. 49).

The villanelle

To write with words in rhyme
Because language is strange
A villanelle carries and beats in its own time

Repeat and return at the one and the three
Five threefold then a six with four
To write with words in rhyme

Learn the rules, take the rules
And follow them into a certain form
A villanelle carries and beats in its own time

In the mystery of the moment
The form hands freedom over to you
To write with words in rhyme

In a serious play towards otherwise
The waves in her mind signal their fear
A villanelle carries and beats in its own time

Her form carries her own duality
Kept ever so close yet apart
To write with words in rhyme
A villanelle carries and beats in its own time

“Villanelle” is a word made popular recently by the 2018 spy thriller TV Series Killing Eve, based on the novel series Villanelle by Luke Jennings. Killing Eve follows the British intelligence investigator Eve Polastri on her chase to catch the psychopathic assassin Oksana Astankiva, code name Villanelle. The “villanelle” that Le Guin and Holland Batt refer to is different from and yet perhaps shares a definitional shadow with Jenning’s slaying protagonist and a quick journey down into the etymological roots of the word explains why. I thumb through the yellowed-with-age pages of my beloved leather bound 1948 edition of my Pa’s unabridged Merriam Webster dictionary to search for the word “villanelle”.

I soon learn that at the root of the word villanelle there is danger, deviation and daring—villan-elle, the word itself embraces and emboldens trouble. On page 1917, there are 31 entries relating to villanelle. “Vill” extends to “villa” which expands to village and then to villagers who inhabit the collection of houses found in such places. “Villan” extends to “villanus”, a Medieval Latin term which describes the “inhabitant of a villa” or a “villager”, often used to refer to those people who were not free under English law but annexed to serve the Lord on whose soil the village was located upon. The power of I slips in and those with privilege who ruled the world and words at that time soon took control of its manners and morals and turned the already lower class word villain around to denote a vile, wicked and scoundrel-ous rascal whose very nature arouses trouble, dislike and disgust – perhaps it is here we find Oksana Astankiva gloaming her connection. Villanus leads to villainy to villanage and then to villanella; an unsophisticated light 16th century French and Italian song and dance style often displaying comic, sarcastic and rustic content intended to trouble the formal character of art music. From villanella I arrive at the poetic form “villanelle”.

I have Ursula K. Le Guin to thank for enticing me into the creative complexity of the “villanelle”. The villanelle, she explains, is a complicated poetic form fixed into five tercets (ABA) and a final quatrain running on two rhymes (ABAA) where the first and third lines of the opening verse recur alternately at the end of the others and comprise the final two lines. At first glance the formulaic style marks a villanelle as quite artificial and learning to write the beat of its rhyme is as difficult as it is slow. When you write a villanelle, “by golly” you write a villanelle, Le Guin laughs (Conversations on writing, p. 81). Holland Batt joins her – yes Ursula, “one of the trickiest forms to get right is the villanelle…much aligned for frequently producing bad poems” (p. 49). Although she herself did not ever compose a villanelle, yet constantly choreographed her words and works as a type of dance to better understand, experience and live the fullness of life and death, Simone de Beauvoir’s was fond favourite poem was Dylan Thomas’ well-known villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night”. In what would be his last set of verses, Thomas’ poem was inspired by the death of his father and juxtaposes the inevitably of death with the power of life to fight against it. Beauvoir places the opening stanza of Thomas’ villanelle as an epigraph at the beginning of A very easy death and foreshadows the pity, horror, disbelief and helplessness she experiences upon encountering her mother’s mortality. One of my favourite villanelles is “Mad girl’s love song” by Sylvia Path published in the August 1953 issue of the women’s magazine Mademoiselle:

 Photo: “Sylvia Plath, a Mademoiselle guest editor in 1953“, Landshoff/Mademoiselle, via Conde Nast.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The matter of factness in which she shares her experiences of isolation (“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead”) and denial (“I think I made you up inside my head”) as her heart breaks alongside draws me close, so closer to her and the reality of despair, love and loss. The repeating line structure of the villanelle, Holland Batt elucidates, suits and serves obsessive thoughts such as grief and lamentation very well and highlights how even though we are taught to avoid repetition, “there is power in deliberate repetition” (Le Guin, The wave in the mind, p. 84). The return of the first and third lines and the way they reappear in connection is also one the key characteristics of this highly structured form. Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali in their comprehensive collection Villanelles suggest that the key to a “good” villanelle is the attraction of the first line to the third whereby the two are in constant movement together and apart, sashaying in sensual suspense backwards and forwards and delighting in the surprises in meaning that each new coupling brings. The one is always situated in relation to the two, like words themselves dancing so close and against separation.

It is with these “villanelles-tic” tendencies and techniques in mind that I compose my first villanelle “Her villanus work” in homage to Simone de Beauvoir and the public response she received upon publication of The second sex:

Her words, they said, are untrue and unkind
In naming woman as the second sex
Her villanus work troubled their mind

She was taken aback by the fuss she provoked
They cried in rage and pointed accusing fingers
Her words, they said, are untrue and unkind

Friends she would lose and enemies she would make
The first sex declared her a hundred times aborted
Her villanus work troubled their mind

With averted eyes they declared her shocking
Neurotic, repressed, frustrated, cheated, envious, embittered and indecent
Her words, they said, are untrue and unkind

She discovered her ideas as she wrote them
For woman to become aware of herself and her situation
Her villanus work troubled their mind

Writing the second sex went beyond her own liberation
She raised the banner of revolt on and for her own
Her words, they said, are untrue and unkind
Her villanus work troubled their mind

One of the reasons I love the villanelle is precisely because of the danger such word play embodies by focussing on the ways in which patterns of injustice, oppression and violence, like the first and third lines themselves, keep on reappearing. The repetition inherent in a villanelle is a reminder that such social ills are still with us. Prompted by radical academic writer and sister-in-arms Emma Cooke to play creatively with the word “hector” (n. bully or braggart, v. behave in an arrogant or intimidating way, or intimidate or harass by bluster or personal pressure), I decided that a villanelle was the perfect way to pay and draw attention to the sexism and misogyny that still exists within and which many of us experience in Australian universities today. Let me introduce my 21^st century version of a Virginia Woolf’s Professor von X – “Professor von Hector”:

He waved his hands this way and that full of swagger
Professor von Hector, I shall call him,
Dick-tating and dom-man-ating, what a fucking bragger

So little lady, are you looking for a seat at this table?
2 PhDs and 2 babies, what makes you think those numbers quantify – I mean qualify you
He waved his hands this way and that full of swagger

If you are going to join this academic procession you must dress like a smart lady
Strike a power pose, assume the mantel of capital T testosterone, I mean truth he mansplains to me
Dick-tating and dom-man-ating, what a fucking bragger

Now, that’s better sweetheart, what a pretty thing you are!
Lie back and think of Descartes, Freud or Strauss any master will do you
He waves his hands this way and that full of swagger

Once we have penetrated you with our phallanges of logic
You will see your fallaciousness as failure, he assured me
Dick-tating and dom-man-ating, what a fucking bragger

Professor von Hector turned to walk away but then turned as I attempted to speak
Hush now, be a dutiful daughter and don’t make a fuss
He waved his hands this way and that full of swagger
Dick-tating and dom-man-ating, what a fucking bragger

She returns

I wasn’t searching for fixed form villanelles but they arrived, and once found, fixed themselves firmly onto the “waves in the mind” (after Woolf and Le Guin) of my insister-ed writing with the words and worlds of women. I am now fixated on writing villanellestic words in response to their work and the world in which we find ourselves; villanelles become my secret fix. I fix the villanelle with my full attention, intent on fixing one set of rhyming words to the first line, another combination to the third line, and try not to get myself in a fix worrying by the importance they hold to the composition as a whole and in reprise. Nineteen lines later – voilà! – she is fixed firmly in place and my sights are fixed on the arrangement of more. I do not profess to be “any good” yet at writing villanelles but I am taking villanellestic pleasure in the process of practising this complex fixed poetic form. I scribble villanelles about the extra-ordinary life of death in the everyday in a yearning to find my poetic voice– the deadly attraction of quiet city streets at 5am as I run, running out of milk on Monday or Tuesday and whose death will compensate for this crime, the death of bell hooks, and what it would take to run away from this dead woman writing. Writing villanelles expresses at once an understanding of the ways in which words are constrained and contained and a yearning to abandon caution and embrace daring in my academic writing to set words and the world free – perhaps it is this kind of unfixing where the possibility of movement towards something else lies – in the art and craft of, and with love for poetry. To share my reverence for the fixed form villanelle, I offer my own imprecise way of seeing and freeing her – “She returns” – by way of closing:

She is fixed in form and arrives without warning
Do not go gentle into that good night , she whispers, for this day is just begun
Her nineteen lines and alternative rhyming sweep away my mourning

Her pastoral feet have carried her peasantry far within and against the law
Her villanus smile sings and dances wide as she does easy
She is fixed in form and arrives without warning

When you write a villanelle, Ursula K. Le Guin laughs, by golly!
Five tercets, one quatrain and a swing in time on the first and third
Her nineteen lines and alternative rhyming sweep away my mourning

She does not deviate but delights in her dangerous repetition
In the art of her obsession she closes her eyes and the stars go waltzing
She is fixed in form and arrives without warning

The first desires the third as the two become one
I watch her shyly as she charms so close and against separation
Her nineteen lines and alternative rhyming sweep away my mourning

“Come and float on the waves in my mind”, she beckons, “and together we shall not grow old”
I pack my world into a carrier bag of words and take her hand
She is fixed in form and arrives without warning
Her nineteen lines and alternative rhyming sweep away my mourning