Here's a great villanelle by Wendy Cope. I think it is the form that gives the content so much impact. It is a mixture of humor and sadness:

Lonely Hearts

Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Male biker seeks female for touring fun.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Gay vegetarian whose friends are few,
I'm into music, Shakespeare and the sun,
Can someone make my simple wish come true?

Executive in search of something new—
Perhaps bisexual woman, arty, young.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Successful, straight, and solvent? I am too—
Attractive Jewish lady with a son.
Can someone make my simple wish come true?

I'm Libran, inexperienced and blue—
Need slim non-smoker under twenty-one.
Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Please write (with photo) to Box 152.
Who knows where it may lead once we've begun?
Can someone make my simple wish come true?
Do you live in North London? Is it you?
----Wendy Cope

By the way, everyone be sure to read my villanelle, "At Rocky's Bar," which will be in the next issue of The Barefoot Muse. I was astonished to see it made it in when so many other were rejected.

Wow - I'd forgotten about that Wounded Knee villanelle.

Damn. The language is so deceptively simple.

I really have nothing useful to add, I just feel a need to say wow.

"David, you said "using the fat white woman to personify her own failings as she saw them."

1. He could only guess at "her failings as she saw them." I agree with Gregory that the point of view is smugly condescending & all the more so because it's totally a shot in the dark from a whizzing train.

2. The phrase "personify her own failings as she saw them": what on earth does that mean, David? Can anyone personify their own failings as they see them? How is that done? Perhaps that is, after all, what John Lennon meant by posing for the camera sloshed with a kotex on his head. Or what Mark Chapman meant by shooting Lennon?

Terese"

--Terese,
I meant that Cornford was identifying herself with the woman in the fields. I'm sorry my meaning was not clear to you.
(Cornford was a woman, not a man, by the way.)

"Our Quincy doesn’t love the villanelle.
He thinks it tends towards repetitive crap ..."
...............................--John Beaton

or maybe "repetitious crap"?

For me, forms are containers. In my humble opinion, a generalized statement about whether villanelles are any good or not is like stating that one hates martini glasses or that one likes martini glasses. Personally, I love sipping icy-cold gin from a martini glass; others may not. The real problem I have is when the host decides they like martini glasses and tries to serve me beer in one. But, I don’t rail against the glass; it’s the host that gets my scorn. And there are many other containers, some of which are more versatile and can be used for a multitude of beverages, including my icy gin. That’s my take on it anyway.

By the way, I’m familiar with some of Cornford’s other work and I always assumed that she was using transference; she was really expressing feelings about herself rather than some unknown woman in a field. She caught hell for it though, and I’m sure it had nothing to do with her being Charles Darwin’s granddaughter. To my knowledge, she never defended her poem with my explanation.

David


[This message has been edited by David Upson (edited November 20, 2006).]

Frances Cornford (1886-1960) grandaughter of Charles Darwin and great niece of William Wordsworth, began writing poetry in her early teens. She married Francis Cornford, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University, and made their home a gathering place for writers and artists. Rupert Brooke was one of her closest friends. She began to publish her poems in 1910. The Collected Poems were published in 1954 by The Cresset Press, Ltd. of London. Her writing style has been described as Georgian, and she was uninfluenced by the likes of Pound and Eliot. Many of her poems describe scenes in and around Cambridge. Here's a fourteener she wrote when quite a young girl.

Autumn Morning at Cambridge

I ran out in the morning when the air was clean and new,
And all the grass was glittering, grey with autumn dew,
I ran out to the apple trees and pulled an apple down,
And all the bells were ringing in the old grey town.
Down in the town, off the bridges and the grass,
They are sweeping up the leaves to let the people pass,
Sweeping up the old leaves, golden-reds and browns,
While the men go to lecture with the wind in their gowns.

And another early piece:

The Watch

I wakened on my hot, hard bed,
Upon the pillow lay my head;
Beneath the pillow I could hear
My little watch was ticking clear.
I thought the throbbing of it went
Like my continual discontent;
I thought it said in every tick:
I am so sick, so sick, so sick;
O Death, come quick, come quick, come quick,
Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.

Indeed, David. Such seeming arrogance is hard to find in her other poems.
Furthermore, she is cocooned, not in gloves, but in a train, so is all the more segregated from nature. Surely her intention must have been ironic?

Best regards,
David

I’m not a huge fan of Cornford, but if we’re posting her earlier work, it’s probably only fair to post a couple of her more mature and better received pieces:

All Soul’s Night

My love came back to me
Under the November tree
Shelterless and dim.
He put his hand upon my shoulder,
He did not think me strange or older,
Nor I him.

The Guitarist Tunes Up

With what attentive courtesy he bent
Over his instrument;
Not as a lordly conqueror who could
Command both wire and wood,
But as a man with a loved woman might,
Inquiring with delight
What slight essential things she had to say
Before they started, he and she, to play.

David

Those last two are lovely.

What David Upson said so eloquently about the glasses!

This very thread is a refutation of its original premise, in that so many fine examples of these forms have been presented here. It's certainly a difficult form, and not to everyone's taste. On the other hand, isn't this a subjective matter? I think there is much to admire about successfully using their insistent repetition in a way that inextricably blends with the mood and content of the piece.

Seems to me summarily ordering poets to stop using these forms is reminiscent of the prejudice of the mainstream poetry community that proscribes writing any formal poetry whatsoever.

De gustibus...

The question I rarely see put to one of these villanelles that has been judged "successful"(and, ironically, I think it's the most important one) is, "Would it have been even better as a real poem?"

Is a good villanelle like the bumblebee of poetry - it flies despite its flawed design, but not as well as it could?

Thus spake the Neo-Formalist establishment, Marion. I never denied that a good villanelle could be written, any more than a good sestina. Nor would I say that no one should write them. I would say that there are too goddamn many of them, that the villanelles I see published have a far greater chance of sucking ass than most other types of metrical poems and tend to suck ass worse, that the form is, I suspect, frequently used by the technically proficient to just keep cranking the fuckers out, that the problem isn't that the form is hard per se but that it is of relatively narrow utility.

Quincy

Editing in--the pithy comment directed at Marion--which was not intended to offend--has been excised.

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited November 20, 2006).]

[Edited out inflammatory parts, as promised]

[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited November 20, 2006).]

It's a shame that "De gustibus..." so often could be translated as, "Read it my way, or the highway..."

Wow. As a guitarist, I love this poem. Thanks for posting it. It's definitely going in my archives!

David (L)

Rose--

Perhaps. Sorry if I offended.

Quincy

I didn't see Quincy's deleted comment, but I never took his urging (in the first post in this thread) to be perfectly serious. And I do think it's an excellent idea for writers to reconsider whether villanelles and triolets actually need to be poems in those forms or not.

I will admit to often having been bored senseless by the staleness of exultation in longing by any poet. Speaking of lust and love in a poem is not as workable as many writers seem to think. More often than not it comes off puerile unless it's somehow very fresh and unusual.

Quincy has been a great boon to this board, and his so-called "vulgarity" makes me laugh more often than not. I don't believe in the existence of vulgar words any more than I believe human functions are vulgar. So we piss and shit, so what? I mean for heaven's sake, a bunch of you are in the Shit Creek Rvw and exult in it! If any wordsmiths can actually see a moral reason not to use certain words, I'd like to know what that is.

Quincy's insight can be both revealing and pithy at times: "The problem isn't that the form is hard per se but that it is of relatively narrow utility."

I certainly have never seen that stated before, and it's quite obviously true. In some ways writing a villanelle is too damn simple (that is, writing a mediocre one, as most are).

[My able counter-pwn of Rose is likewise excised]

All is well, folks!

Quincy

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited November 20, 2006).]

[Edited out inflammatory parts, as promised]

[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited November 20, 2006).]

Let's confine our sniping to the crap forms, please, and refrain from the ad hom, overt or suggested. It would be a shame to have to lock an otherwise productive thread.

Alicia
Vice President of the Neo-Formalist Establishment

Rose--

I don't want this to get nasty and personal--as your reposting your off-topic attack on me after deleting it earlier makes this. But I'll limit myself to saying the following:

1. Deal with my arguments, please. The quality of my recent posts is neither here nor there.

2. It's not my m.o. to hound people to show what a rebel I am. At least I hope it isn't.

3. I deleted the comment because I thought, to an extent, you had a point.

4. I do think metrical poetry in the U.S. frequently suffers from stunted ambition, or the wrong kind of ambition. And it's my prerogative to think that. All I meant with my first line of the response to Marion that got you so bent out of shape was that she was defending the status quo.

Quincy

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited November 20, 2006).]

And with that, Alicia, I'm done with this point. So back to why I'm generally not wild about villanelles...

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited November 20, 2006).]

Rose,

I wonder if we should all refrain from making sweeping statements about one another's creative work here on the Gen Talk board. Probably.

Did Marion win the Nemerov a couple of times? I didn't know that; thought it was once, but you're right: She is not the queen of some oppressive nation. [There's a nice parody in there somewhere, Rose.] In fact I wish I had met Marion when I was up in Newburyport, as she has a reputation for being extremely kind, likeable, and intelligent.

But I doubt that Quincy sees himself as a daring iconoclast. One or two people on the board have tried to make him out to be one, but it's more in the eye of the beholder (and how much is actually beheld on a two-dimensional screen?) than anything else.

Terese

PS. One more reply to your belated addition above re vulgarity; with all due respect, when someone writes "So you sometimes use a little vulgarity, big deal"—yes, that does sound like railing against vulgarity in a way. Even to call "fuck" vulgarity is railing to some folks. It's a good Anglo-Saxon word for which there is nothing quite the same.



[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited November 20, 2006).]

Quincy and I have already established we agree that certain forms are overused.

And yes, a lot of metrical/formal poetry sucks, and while the easy answer is that a lot of free verse also sucks, I agree with Quincy that certain specific kinds of suckage are more common in metrical/formal poetry.

[Edited out inflammatory parts, as promised]

[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited November 20, 2006).]

It seems people have said what the want to say regarding the forms, and that the rest can be taken to PM

Rose--

You don't have to be polite, but the attack on my work (based on what's on the board right now--always a cheap shot, incidentally) really kind of hurt. You are quite welcome to think me mean-spirited, a poseur, or whatever. Well, I wouldn't say "welcome"--I've generally gotten along with you pretty well and would like to keep it that way.

Quincy

Thank you to whoever unlocked this thread.

I find all of the discussion fascinating and naturally because people feel strongly things will occasionallly get dangerous.

If form and content fit then any form is terrific. It's often much more telling when something strong is made with minimal materials. That, for me, is where villanelles are at their best.

Most of us have occasionally had to cook a decent meal with only a few ill chosen ingredients. Great dishes have been invented that way.
Janet

Janet--

But one isn't obligated to write a poem. If I have half a jar of spaghetti sauce in the fridge and that's it. I'll make do, because I'll die if I don't eat.

Poems are different.

Quincy

Put a match to gasoline, Quincy, and you'll get burned every time. I agree with you about overuse of certain forms -- I would include the sonnet, even though I write a lot of them. But consider what the free verse establishment has done to formlessness! Like the product of every other human endeavor, poetry is mostly mediocre, and genius is rare. It doesn't take a genius to notice that. But so what?

Alan

Inappropriately chosen ingredients may have been a more apt comparison. Quincy, you will never find a jar of spaghetti sauce in my pantry;) Dry spaghetti in packets, all of the time. And the greatest spaghetti dish of them all is aglio, olio, peperoncino.

With spaghetti, garlic, olive oil, and chili pepper and a hint of parsley you can make a dish that has never been bettered. And it costs less than the jar of spaghetti sauce.

Why am I saying this? Because I must ;)

Well I guess there is nothing new about the ingredients (like traditional poetic form). It's all in the cooking.

Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 20, 2006).]

Janet--

I see your point. It is, indeed, in the cooking. But one doesn't attempt to bake a cake with--I dunno--shitake mushrooms and cheddar cheese. Ingredients should line up with recipes, and the same goes for form and content.

Quincy

Janet Kenny "And the greatest spaghetti dish of them all is aglio, olio, peperoncino.

With spaghetti, garlic, olive oil, and chili pepper and a hint of parsley you can make a dish that has never been bettered".

Tell me more Janet. I want to know.

With decent basic ingredients and a bit of taste and talent you can't go wrong, but with great - or at least very good - ingredients, the difference can be spectacular. Good, virgin Italian oil; fresh semolina pasta (sorry, Janet - I'll admit that I rarely use it myself, and you have to watch it carefully or it cooks so quickly you just have a glutenous mass - but it does make a difference); young garlic or, even better, a head that you've brushed with butter and roasted; fresh parsley from the garden; coarsely ground salt and pepper. And a few chopped up anchovies - loose, from a tub in the Italian grocery, not tweezed out of a tin - won't do any harm. (Throw in some capers at that stage, and you've got a simple putanesca.)

(If we've already had some sniping and snarling about something as dweebish as the villanelle, just think of the passions that can be aroused by a genuine food fight!)



[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited November 20, 2006).]

Indeed, fresh pasta and fresh ingredients for the sauce does make a great deal of difference--as does having the time to prepare it properly.

Quincy

Did anyone see this by X. J. Kennedy in Evansville Review:

A Statement of Preference

I'd hear Bach slaughtered on a concertina
Before I'd read the average sestina.

All respect to X.J., but the scansion on the first line is abominable.

Well, Quincy, you did start this off by asking--although I think your tongue was in your cheek--that we not write these things.

Permit me another of my hypotheses: Poems in these forms keep getting written because each form dredges up stuff out of the unconscious that the other forms don't.

Quite often, yes, it ends up being dreck. But if you believe that the way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas, you can't sit around and wait for the gods to descend. You have to keep fiddling, and a form is a way to fiddle.

Maryann

What I found interesting about this whole thread is that it never really turned into a discussion but degenerated into a donnybrook between two or three people who were not even interested in disucssing the topic or making it a real discussion. I posted a couple of comments which were blithely ignored. The main posters were so engaged in an argument that they really did not want to do anything else but that. I thought it was going to be a real, if spirited, discussion of the subject matter. But it turns into a sort of argument resembling an IM exchange and why waste your time trying to contribute if you're outside the little circle of quarrelers.

This is the thing I find frustrating about Eratosphere. I would really like to discuss poetry but just can't seem to break into the magic circle--either for discussion or even for fights. I think I'm not the only one on the list for feels this way.

Actually, fresh pasta and dried pasta are both excellent. The dry stuff is not simply a convenience for those who can't get fresh pasta, but an alternative to fresh pasta that offers a different eating experience. Some might argue it is superior, in fact, since the texture of fresh pasta, even perfectly cooked, is softer and not as satisfyingly al dente.

My favorite way of making aglio olio comes from Lidia, who has a show on the Food Network. Slice the garlic into thin chips -- don't mince it -- and cook it in oil at medium heat until it is lightly golden, but not too dark. Add some pepper flakes to the oil, if you like (I like). When the garlic reaches the perfect color, add a few tablespoons of chicken stock to the pan for flavor, volume, and to stop the garlic from burning. When the pasta is ready, move it with tongs directly from the pot into the pan, letting excess water drip off but not worrying too much if it's still somewhat wet, and then toss it in the pan over low heat along with chopped parsely (added at around the same time, not too early so it doesn't wilt).

But if you're in a big hurry and don't want to dirty a pan, just chop up the garlic real fine and put it in a small cup or bowl with the olive oil. Put it in the microwave and zap it for about a minute, just enough to make it all sizzle and to flavor the oil with the garlic. Then toss it with the cooked pasta, and parsely if you have it. The parsely makes a big difference. (If you don't like strong garlic flavor, you can scoop some of it out of the oil and discard it before you toss it all together).

Yes, Italian forms are much tastier than French forms.

Michael,
One of the great sauces. But dry pasta (and I do make my own fresh pasta--have done for years) is not inferior. There are different recipes for fresh pasta. Italians revere dry pasta and are very picky about which from where for what. These dishes are for dry pasta.

Spaghetti, aglio, olio,--is basic--then add if wanted peperoncino and finally a smidgin merely of freshly chopped parsley. (You can dissolve a couple of anchovy fillets in the oil with the garlic and chili if wished. Many dishes are built upon it, especially seafood pasta sauces. NEVER cheese with this sauce.

Here's a recipe for spaghetti alla puttanesca (as made by a prostitute) by the great, late Italian chef Luigi Carnacina who ruled Italian food publishing for several decades.
(4 people)
400 grams spaghetti
150 grams pf black olives (stoned and chopped)
50 grams butter (he was corrupted in France-I never use butter)
4 anchovy fillets
2 cloves garlic
1 tablespoon capers (rinsed under tap and wrung dry and chopped)
1 tablespoon of chopped parsley
200 grams of tomato pulp (NOT concentrate)
olive oil, salt
Lightly colour the sliced garlic and chopped anchovy in the olive oil over low heat. Add the stoned chopped olives, chopped capers, tomato pulp (choppped if fresh) and simmer for about 15 minutes.

Cook and drain the spaghetti and dress it with the sauce. Opla.

Jim, I'll send you the recipe. I use a wok because that way a modern neurotic (all of us) can minimise the oil to maxim effect. A fresh green salad afterwards and crusty bread and some good red and you're in business.

I actually put a book together once but life got in the way and I never tried to publish it. I think the market's changed since then but I've chomped my way though a goodish bit of Italy with Italians who knew their stuff. Too good to waste.
My favourite pasta book is by Vincenzo Buonassissi : Piccolo Codice della pasta
Janet

Perhaps another thread. I could rave on for hours and so could Michael. And Roger ;)

Sorry David--poets care about the details of life. That's why they're poets. Hell I WROTE a villanelle for the discussion so you are not Robinson Crusoe. We will take this to another thread.




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited November 20, 2006).]