Superfluous Words

The world does not need one more villanelle,
yet teachers still assign the exercise.
Sooner or later someone does it well.

More verses than the damned can read in hell
are written daily, so it's no surprise
the world does not need one more villanelle,

but does it need the countless things we sell
in stores, the million things we advertise?
Sooner or later something is done well.

The lovers meet, the monk prays in his cell,
the married have their kids whose scratchy cries
the world does not need. One more villanelle

or less, what does it matter? Truth to tell,
we all make things for others to despise.
Sooner or later someone does it well.

What if we fail in trying to excel?
We'll all fill coffins of a standard size.
The world does not need one more villanelle,
but still, from time to time, one does it well.

The first poem I ever published was a villanelle, when I was a freshman in college. It would be many years before I learned what an iamb is, as I was about to be overwhelmed by instructors who thought meter had been outlawed a century ago, but I think it scans:



THE LOVE OF MY LIFE ASKS ME FOR A VILLANELLE

You ask me for a villanelle: How’s this?
It’s not too good, but still, it fits the form.
It’s like, if I were missing lips, I’d kiss

Somehow, someway. How could a man resist?
If I could barely rain, I’d play the storm.
You ask me for a villanelle: How’s this?

I’m running out of rhymes. I’m growing pissed.
I wrack my brain but I’m not even warm.
Still, even if I lacked the lips, I’d kiss.

My God, this writing poems is hard business.
So very few real good at it are born.
You ask me for a villanelle: How’s this?

I’ll try real hard, my love, if you insist,
But I can’t help but write the same old corn.
It’s like, if I were missing lips, I’d kiss.

It’s somewhat foggy, but, you catch the gist?
I try for you. You are my guiding norm.
You asked me for a villanelle: How’s this?
It’s like I’m missing lips and still I kiss.

Roger, this is a blast and fits so well with the monster I awoke! Thanks for sharing--I now have a much clearer frame of reference in which to operate.

A deep spelunking of my archives found these efforts from my late teens or early twenties, I think.

LOVE AT THE POETRY SLAM

Love is the only subject for poetry, she proclaimed!
Love is what we write on!

If love is the only subject it certainly explains
the reason poets fight on.

So we sit in a room and write about love,
wracking our brains to do it:

Is love a flower, a song, or a dove—
or gum, after we chew it?

Love is the only subject for us!
Our pens are true and bold!

Love can be written without too much fuss,
for true love can never get old.

--------

UNFOCUSED SONNET

The passing moments take me by surprise:
Each second comes and suddenly is gone,
Then comes and goes the next, and time flows on,
And every minute flees before my eyes.

Here in this passing we are too soon spent.
Each passing hour touches eternity,
And never will return again—but we
Become subsumed in how to pay the rent.

The sonnet form is harder than you think!
When halfway through without a conclusion
The poet's thoughts all turn to confusion
(Though she may take some solace in pink ink).

The last couplet is the grand finale:
In theory, it's a hot tamale!

Okay, wow, when I came here yesterday I must have clicked directly on the most recent post, Roger's latest, and been shot straight to his last post. I'd missed the immense wealth of entertaining and talent-bursting stuff that had accrued since Michael C. was sport enough to start this thread on Michael T's nudge (on my recent thread). (You should have told me, Michael C., or someone! Some of us [maybe just me?] are too busy on the weekdays to even stay properly fed, much less go meandering around the far reaches of the Sphere! And btw, my name is Alexandra, not Angelica. You can call me Lexa, if that helps. ;))

There's way too much here for me now to comment properly on any of it. Let me just say that I find all of these, each in its own way, clever, interesting, and rib-tickling, even the ones that don't touch into other areas or seek for broader meaning. What's amazing to me is how many of these poems overlap each other in their approaches and/or the specifics that they address. "Ideas are universally, not individually, rooted," it's been said, and I believe it. In light of my own villanelle-on-villanelle thread, I especially appreciate the examples of self-referential villanelles, which I'd been told were legion--it was news to me.

Striking a very different note than the above examples, here's this from my "romantic period":


On Writing Poetry Late at Night


Time, did you suppose you might sedate
my passion into hush, now that the hour
has stretched its way from early into late?
Your hands are light—too light to wield such power!

My dreaming joy is like a tropic flower
that neither day nor night can subjugate;
it scorns to close in eveningtime or cower
when wildbeasts howl and rainstorms saturate
the shrouded ground with floods of streaming gray.

I seek my fill in day and nighttime’s deep;
light-fed, I find in darkness, too, a ray
to slake me: something rustled from its sleep—
sucked up from sun, and strong enough to stay.

This was - obviously - written a very long time ago, in my pre wise-ass year.

The Process

The way I write is
I get a long and graceful table
and an old fashioned pen

or a slender Japanese brush
and hack and hack and chop
with the dull wood sword

that disgraced ronins use for seppuku
until my guts spill on the table
then dip in the pen

and get something down on paper.

Sometimes these wounds
stay fresh for years.


This one is more about living a poem than writing it.

Slow Rondeau

A slow rondeau is an erotic way
for dancers to portray the interplay
of couples who, with lover’s vertigo,
surround each other in the ebb and flow
of dreams that intersect a white bouquet.

In time, he winces when he hears her bray,
and she’s convinced she’s wed a popinjay –
the metaphor’s no longer apropos:
a slow rondeau

becomes a tight and vicious rondelet
of iterating phrases that betray
the dancers and the dream – but even so,
though lovers seem to stumble they still know
when urge remains to honor and obey
a slow rondeau.


This one goes bad - like the eggs it describes - by line four or sooner. But it does qualify as a PAP.

King of the Sestina

Awake all night with a sick sestina
I know by dawn there is nothing meaner
than six bad lines entwined in unrhymed scrawl.
A half a dozen eggs flung at a wall
to form an omelet makes as much sense
as incubating this perversely dense
monstrosity, which, within an hour,
must blossom as a six-leaf flower.

I’ll persevere, because I play the game
to win - this poet’s in it for the fame -
and to assure acclaim I’ll delegate
a clever envoy, meant to orchestrate
my reign as King of the Sestina and cheer
the end game. Bishop topples King! Oh dear!

And, as for Muses:

Don’t Need Her Help

After Michael Drayton, Idea 61

You hate my art! You tear it all apart.
Go away, we’re through, just let me be.
You’ve always been a challenge to my heart,
a sneaky and snide nemesis for me.
Buzz off and stay away, sing to crows.
Do ignore me if we meet again.
And please! No sorry reconciling pose,
for I would never bother to explain
how your fecklessness has soured the breath
I use to form in verse what might reprise
the love conceits you say are “done-to-death,”
countering your reckless and specious lies.
Carnal Cupid knows we’re finally over
and helps this Muse-free sonneteer recover.

DOPEY

I'm just a dopey little poem.
Who thought me up, and why?
I do not have a truth to tell.
I do not have a lie.
I am the wind that bends no tree.
I am the passer-by.
I live when I am said out loud,
and when I'm not, I die.

I'm just a mouth with careless lips
that hum a jaunty tune.
The snoring ghost of midnight,
the squinting ghost of noon.
I am the shadow of the clock
beneath a shining moon.
I'm just a dopey little poem.
You found me out too soon.

A quatrain by Barbara Loots:

ON LEAFING THROUGH A POETRY ANTHOLOGY

For immortality,
one poem will do.
Which one it is
will not be up to you.