[David Landrum]

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.

[Rose Kelleher]

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 Anthony]

"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.)

[Jan D. Hodge]

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

or maybe "repetitious crap"?

[David Upson]

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).]

[Golias]

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.

[David Anthony]

Originally posted by David Upson:


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


[/b]

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

[David Upson]

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

[Rose Kelleher]

Those last two are lovely.

[Marion Shore]

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...