[Julie Steiner]

From the sequence My Sister's Shadow:


My sister gives the clothing she’s outgrown
to me, two years her junior. I accept
her charity resignedly. I own
her boots (still caked with shit in which she stepped),
white blouses for 4-H (with pepper-stains
from sheep who sneezed on her at point-blank range),
her high school gym clothes (bearing the remains
of silkscreened mascots laundered into mange).

My sister’s threadbare hand-me-downs include
her schools (which teem with people she’s impressed).
Although the straitlaced sonnet was eschewed
as “too constricting,” scorned as “overdressed,”
and mothballed as “antique” ere I was born,
at least it’s something Tammy’s never worn.


The whole sequence is self-congratulation for what a brave and noble and unique thing I thought I was doing by becoming a sonnet-writing nerd, instead of another math-and-science nerd like Tammy, as everyone expected. Imagine my disappointment when I found out formalism wasn't quite as dead as my high school teachers had led me to believe.

[Ann Drysdale]

Shit happens. Everybody gets their share;
the sorry stuff doesn’t discriminate –
it hits the fan and then it’s everywhere.
Nobody ducks until it’s far too late.
A canny lass can never have too many
plans for confronting an emergency.
A sonnet is as good a way as any.
It did for Shagsberg; it’ll do for me.
So sock it to me, Sunshine. I can take it.
I’ll dredge the sludge for something new to say.
I’ll squeeze the mental Plasticine and make it
sing itself. Waste not, want not. That’s the way
Creative Writers learn to deal with it.
This is the way a poet handles shit.

[Gail White]

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.

[Roger Slater]

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.

[Alexandra Baez]

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.

[Christine P'legion]

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!

[Alexandra Baez]

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.