Format: Villanelle (Pt. 2 of 2)

[jjhunter]

Pt. 1 can be found here.
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As previously mentioned, the most successful villanelles have two strong, flexible refrain lines. It is thus well worth spending a fair amount of time on your first stanza, since not only will you be repeating the first and third lines throughout the piece and deriving your ultimate 'oomph!' from finally placing them one after the other at the end of the poem, but you will have to rhyme the ends of other lines with the final word of your second line no less than five times.

Here are three sample first stanzas from my own work, in order of oldest to latest. (The final one was my submission to stillnotbored's February First Line Contest, which closes tomorrow - I highly recommend checking it out.)
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the poet's tree:

a pebble from a pool of poetry
falls from the page to break my surface calm
I come to rest beneath the poet's tree

Mornings:

Mornings recall her to her lie
dreams washed away in the shower
and the birds sing hello, goodbye

Proper Shape:

Her bones remembered the proper shape
though time leached their strength and weighed her eyes
she had only her sweet flesh to drape

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( Further discussion and full text of 'Proper Shape' behind the cut )

Finally, if villanelles are so difficult to write in comparison to, say, a haiku or a free form poem, why would anyone choose to write them? I personally like doing them because they require so much focus and skill. The format is such that I have to completely close out the world around me for an hour or two and just give myself permission to play with words and sounds and concepts. The product may not always be devastatingly brilliant, but I surface feeling cleansed, much like having gone on a long run or having solved a difficult sudoku or having finished translating a passage from Ovid. I have put some small subset of the world in order, and it rhymed to boot.
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Monthly Retrospective: February

[jjhunter]

February was almost an embarrassment of riches here at POETREE. Our weekly Poetry Hosts goneahead, lnhammer, and dave_bonta guided us through realms of international poetry, translation, and research respectively; please join me in thanking them for each doing a superlative job. In the final week just past, ysabetwordsmith, bookblather, and I contributed posts on the theme of unusual poetry formats for this month's multi-Hosted week.

Poetry Host: goneahead (International Poetry) (weekly roundup)
Poetry Host: Dave Bonta (weekly roundup)
Poetry Host: L.N. Hammer (weekly roundup forthcoming)
Multi-Hosted Week: Unusual Poetry Formats (weekly roundup forthcoming)

We also welcomed alee_grrl (Manda) as the new co-mod for the community. Throughout the past month Manda has worked tirelessly to catch us up on the weekly roundups and other community miscellanea, and has significantly eased my own workload at a time when I was less able to be present and involved with the community. Thank you, alee_grrl!

As we move forward into March, we have some exciting potential changes bubbling beneath the surface. The Anonymous Feedback Poll #2 will be open until this Friday; if you are not one of the five people who has already filled it out, please take a moment or two to do so. Based on that feedback Manda & I will be announcing some tweaks to comm policy and format this upcoming weekend, so now's your chance to make your voice heard in time to influence those decisions. (And if that isn't motivation enough, consider the fact that due to technical difficulties I ended up creating that poll manually three separate times. Yes, that was an epic amount of copy-and-pasting.)

Our regularly scheduled program will return soon. Until then, Manda & I look forward to hearing from you.

-J.J.