The title is deliberately provocative, but it is nonetheless true that there are some forms where the threshold of kick-assery has to be pretty high to get over my baseline loathing. The triolet is one of these, but the one that really sticks in my craw is the villanelle.
There have been good villanelles written. Mostly in Provencal, I suspect, though there is "Do Not Go Gently Into This Good Night"--hey, one villanelle I can think of that didn't bug the hell out of me in the last 100 years!
Why my loathing for this form that appears all over the goddamn place in various formalista journals? Well, the sound, to begin with. The repeated lines seem to almost compel poets to clomp their way through ten syllables and five stresses before coming to a rest on the clang of the rhyme.
Second, the content. The formal demands of the villanelle tend to lead one to decide a villanelle is successful if its language remains more or less colloquial and it follows a roughly logical progression. Competency becomes excellence.
And so much repetition over so short a space is usually too damn much. "Oh fuck, here comes that line about the poet's father again"--without, in the overwhelming majority of cases, enough in between the repetends to give the line a new twist.
So all you villanelle writers out there--PLEASE STOP!!!
Quincy
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