Dear Readers,
My computer screen turned green and magenta about six weeks ago. I have been traveling so much I haven’t had time to get it fixed, as well as finishing two book manuscripts. All this has delayed my promised blog entry about the West Chester Poetry Conference...
and in the interim I participated in a very fine panel on the villanelle at our summer Stonecoast residency. How could I resist the chance to link the paradelle and villanelle?
So here are some thoughts on paradelles and villanelles,
but first, a note re the West Chester Conference:
I had prepared some remarks on the paradelle for a panel organized by Theresa Welford for the West Chester Poetry Conference. My thoughts there were somewhat upstaged by an incident for which I have promised my old friend Sam Gwynn I would apologize here, so here is my apology: “I would like to take the opportunity to apologize for causing Sam Gwynn embarrassment on the paradelle panel at the 2006 West Chester poetry conference, when I said I was offended by two of his jokes. I used bad judgment and phrased my remark too bluntly. I have known Sam for over 14 years, since we were both on the faculty at the Ur-West Chester conference, the conference on formal poetry that Jack Butler organized at Hendrix College in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1992. He is a staunch supporter and fan of many women poets, even obscure ones, both living and dead—not to mention one of the most gracious and longstanding male subscribers to the WOM-PO listserv for discussion of women’s poetry.”
And now:
Thoughts on the Paradelle
As many people now know, the paradelle is a form invented by Billy Collins as a parody of the elaborate forms used by the Troubadours. Each stanza repeats two lines exactly, then repeats two more lines exactly, then mixes up all the words in those lines—and no other words—to create two more lines.
There is a paradelle of my own on this website, from my book Calendars (Tupelo Press, 2003), and an entry about the form written by Billy Collins, along with several examples, appears in An Exaltation of Forms. However, if you are going to get one book about the paradelle, it's easy to decide which one: Theresa Welford’s anthology The Paradelle (Red Hen Press, 2006) is the definitive (and only) anthology of the form, and well worth the read. I mention it as one of the most interesting books I've been reading this year in the roundup at the poetry site Third Factory,run by the redoubtable Steve Evans.
Herewith, a superdistilled precis of a couple of the thoughts I presented at the panel:
1. It is difficult to write a paradelle that makes linear sense; this form would have been hard to invent before the age of the refrigerator poem. This fact, combined with its self-conscious post-historical origins, seems to define it firmly as a postmodern poetic form. In fact, it is the only postmodern form I know of to have been widely adopted by a broad range of poets. The other forms I would classify as postmodern have generally been nonce forms, used for one poem only or at most a group of poems by one poet. I would venture that the paradelle may, ironically and appropriately in view of Collins' terminally ironic relationship with the traditions of his art, turn out to be his most lasting contribution to poetry. And it will be no small contribution.
2. Collins points out that the form alternates radically between kindergarten poetics (exact repetition of a line) and graduate school poetics (writing lines that use only the words from the other lines, which requires considerable ingenuity as well as patience). It strikes me that this radical alternation oddly mimics the experience of the metrical foot itself, the alternation of unstress and stress, lull and intensity. Perhaps this echo leads to some of the subliminal appeal of the form.
Part 2: Stonecoast, the Villanelle, and the Villanelling of the Paradelle
At Stonecoast, just a few weeks after the paradelle panel, I participated in a wonderful panel on the villanelle with Charles Martin and Richard Hoffman. A recording of the lively question and answer session following the panel will be posted this fall (link will be here).
First we considered the history of the villanelle. It was first written in English only extremely self-consciously, as is the way with any newly introduced poetic form. Charles reminded us that the first triolets written were inevitably about writing triolets; I recalled the early Sapphics in English, such as Swinburne’s, and their self-conscious focus on classical Greece. The villanelle had a similar history. Charles and I both made the analogy with the paradelle, and the way that the villanelle only began to come into its own, to reach maturity as a form, if you will, when it began to be used for serious subjects that had nothing to do with the villanelle form itself. It is surprising how quickly that point is being reached with the paradelle; no doubt the speed of contemporary communication, online networking, and publishing has a lot to do with this.
The most inspiring point about the villanelle that was made for me during this very inspiring panel was a remark by Richard Hoffman that the origin of the villanelle lay in a popular folk dance. I love this! The sonnet, of course, originated in a folk song form (the word means “little song.”) I have always liked the idea of poetic form as dance—in fact, I used the metaphor recently when interviewed for an article about poems based on the Fibonacci series.
But, except for the carol form, based on an ancient dance and accompanying song (which I used for the poem “A Carol for Carolyn,” dedicated to Carolyn Kizer, in Calendars), I had not known of a form based specifically in dance. To learn that the villanelle (a form I have had to grow into with such patience over the last twenty years, and which has rewarded me so deeply for my pains), is based on a dance gave me great pleasure.
I was also intrigued by a comment made by Florence Grende, a creative nonfiction student in the audience. Florence knows the villanelle form well, since along with other of Richard's creative nonfiction students, she has written, under his direction, an essay in the shape of a villanelle. I had just brought up the Paul Oppenheimer’s idea that the development of the sonnet form not only coincided with, but helped to bring about, the emergence of the modern sense of self, with its complex interiority and capacity for self-contradiction. What model of the self could the growth of the villanelle form in our own time could be reflecting or encouraging? The villanelle is about memory and return to the past, Florence observed: returning to the past again and again and perhaps at last making peace.
This idea is beautiful to me, and it confirms my sense that the villanelle's time may at last be at hand. How appropriate for our time: a poetic form that encourages us to dance and cycle back through the past. How else than by returning to the past with open eyes can we begin to heal our planet from the terrible wounds brought about by greed and progress? Soon after the residency, a colleague sent me this vision story of “Spiritual Advice from Grandmothers.” Surely poetry has a role to play in the kind of cleansing of the past that the Grandmothers describe.
Waging peace until next time,
Annie