amandafrench.net

modern life = villanelle

January 1, 2008 – 4:01 pm

My dissertation is a history of the villanelle, the 19-line alternating-refrain two-rhyme poetic form best known as the form of Dylan Thomas’s 1951 “Do not go gentle into that good night” and Elizabeth Bishop’s 1976 “One Art.” I’m not sure I ever say this explicitly in the dissertation, but I think that one reason contemporary poets have started writing in tight fixed forms like the villanelle is that these forms are a metaphor for life in the modern age. Ensconced as I am in higher education with its proliferating policies and politics, and with anyone’s ordinary experience of things like Comcast customer service agreements and bank loan application procedures and state emissions inspection sticker requirements, I feel rule-bound pretty much all the time. The main skill an adult needs in contemporary America seems to be an ability to pick one’s way through all these separate stern commandments and their accompanying paperwork and due dates. Writing something “strict” and “complicated” like a villanelle feels very natural — feels to me just like trying to exist in the strict and complicated world. The elusive trick is to say something human and graceful and crucial and true anyway.

Poets who hate strict forms like the villanelle also hate the complicated strictures of modernity, so, in their poetry, they just opt to be free of such things. And why not? It’s certainly true that when I write a villanelle, I choose to constrain myself. Why should I choose to, if what I really want to do is be human and free and so on, without stricture? Well, the fact is, I chose to sign up for Comcast internet; I applied for that bank loan; I bought a car. It’s not as though those constraints weren’t also chosen.

Anyway, those are relatively old thoughts. I thought them when I was writing poetry and when I was writing my dissertation: to choose and stick to the form A’bA” abA’ abA” abA’ abA” abA’A” is a lot like choosing and sticking to the requirements of my PhD program, for instance, in which I needed to take four courses in my chosen literary period and two courses each in contiguous periods, plus certain specified courses, plus pass a foreign-language exam, plus write a dissertation, which had to be printed double-spaced on 8.5″ by 11″ acid-free watermarked paper with citations in MLA style.

What occurred to me the other day is that right now I need to lean more on the modern life part of the equation than the villanelle part: the villanelle is like modern life, sure, and with work and attention I know how to write a good one. But at the moment I’m so hemmed in by what seem to me to be horribly excessive requirements, requirements hooked onto something that I absolutely chose, opted in to, made happen through my own will — which of COURSE makes it worse, not better — that what I really need to do is bring some of those villanelle-writing skills to bear on my life as it is right now. Accept the chosen constraints (for now) and make what I can of them, despite them or even from them.