POETREE

I'm taking a leaf out of ysabetwordsmith's book and splitting my post about the villanelle format into two. In this post, I'll give a brief historical overview of the format, offer a historical example, and provide links for further readings. In the next post, I'll use one of my own villanelles as the basis for discussing what I personally have found challenging, and occasionally satisfying, about writing in this format.

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The French are to blame for the villanelle. Or, more specifically, minor nineteenth French poet Wilhelm Ténint is responsible for accidentally turning a single obscure sixteenth century poem into an entire 'Renaissance form' that his contemporary Théodore de Banville then 'revived' and popularized. The form hopped the channel - and the language barrier - from French to English in 1877 with Edmund Gosse's "A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse", and has essentially never looked back since.

In English, the villanelle consists of five stanzas of three rhyming lines (i.e. five tercets) and a concluding four line stanza (i.e. a quatrain). So far, so similar to other interlocking forms like the terza rima. What distinguishes the villanelle is that, of a total of nineteen lines, a full six lines are alternating repeats of the first and third lines. This 'dual refrain' can be powerful, but it requires two brilliant lines that play off each other well.

( Breakdown of format with using first stanza of modern example )


Here's another example, one whose copyright is a bit more permissive:

( 'Do not go gentle into that good night' )

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( Questions for Discussion )

Further Reading:
Refrain Again: The Return of the Villanelle by Amanda French (text available for free online; I highly recommend it!)
( et al. )

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Format: Villanelle (Pt. 2 of 2)

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This is the first of two posts on the subject of Beowulf and my poem 'Mother-Tongue'; the second will be a meta post.

Last year I participated in the annual Yuletide Challenge. Yuletide, for those unfamiliar with it, is the fandom equivalent of a Secret Santa exchange where every participant is assigned another participant who has written prompts for three to four obscure/rarely written about fandoms. The canons, i.e. source material, range from mythology to TV commercials, books to antropomorphic websites. (I'm particularly fond of The Old Spice Guy commercial interpretation of Beowulf written by Castiron, the poem Gamol-léac.) Each participant writes a minimum of a thousand words responding to one of their assigned prompts and submits it late in December; on Christmas morning the archive goes live with all the authors listed as anonymous. On January 1st, the authors are revealed.

I chose to write a poem in response to the following prompt from desertport:

Beowulf
I've studied the poem a few times in lit classes and wrote a little about what the critics have to say about the monsters, a topic that was fascinating. (Haven't read James Gardner's Grendel yet.) One of the most interesting lines of discussion concerned Grendel's mother, her monstrousness, her namelessness, and how she herself lives by the Anglo-Saxon heroic warrior code. Another thing that intrigues me is the silent role of women in general. We have several women in a variety of circumstances whose lives and thoughts I wish I were privy to. Yet another thing that interests me is the poem itself. Who wrote it and when? What were the circumstances of it being written? Where did the story come from? Why was it transcribed and kept? Meta in the form of fic is always a good thing, if you wanted to go that route. Please, go crazy!

The result? A 1,097 word piece inspired by the Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf that weaves together the stories of Beowulf's mother and Grendel's mother. Other references include John Gardner's Grendel, as well as Alivin A. Lee's Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: Beowulf as Metaphor. Beta credit goes to moragmacpherson, who was a solid bastion of support despite her claimed 'tin ear' for poetry, and for peoppenheimer, who is a wonderful poet in his own right.

Mother-Tongue

So. The honor-women in days gone by
and the men who ruled them had grace and greatness.
We have heard of their sons’ heroic campaigns.

There was Hrethel’s daughter, cup-bearer to the Geats
soother of mead-halls, weaving peace between king and thanes.
The All-Father favored her with beauty.
She was not destined to be a queen in a foreign land;
her father kept her close to home.
Dressed in gold-finery, she served high and low alike
performing the courtesies, setting other women to shame
with her example. She was a right woman.

In time Hrethel gave this gem-woman to mighty Ecgtheow
as reward for his loyalty, sealing the bond between them.
The treasure-giver honored his thane with his only daughter.
She became mistress of her own household,
a balm in bed to the battle-hewn warrior
and a comfort to his people.

Lightly she stepped in the mead-hall, listening
always for words roused in anger or formal boast.
The torque-bearer bestowed her golden favor
with care, heart-sore with worry
for Geat-land was beset with monsters,
the great Hrethel hard-pressed to keep his borders strong.
The Lord of All Things was testing his thane
giving the shield of his people chance to show his courage
and prove his war-band’s might against unnatural foes.
( Read more... )

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In 1592, Christopher Marlowe wrote a delightfully insipid poem called 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love', featuring a horny shepherd attempting to win his love over with various gifts and promises. Four years later, Sir Walter Raleigh penned 'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd', in which the titular Nymph absolutely skewers the shepherd's every attempt at charm, incidentally subverting the pastoral mode in which both poems are written. Zoom forward some four hundred years, during which several other poets throw in their two cents, and you get another voice--me--taking up the banner of the humble lamb.

Given how important context is for getting all the jokes, I'm including 'The Passionate Shepherd' and 'The Nymph's Reply' in full here under cuts, and 'The Lamb's Plea To Them Both' at the end.

( The Passionate Shepherd to His Love )


( The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd )


The Lamb's Plea To Them Both
If all the world were soft and green
And not a lupine creature seen
If all that then I would approve;
Abandon me for wooing love!

We'd happ'ly stand, my folk and I,
Watching the Nymph and shepherd fly,
With crunch of grass, to which sweet song
The nightingale might sing along.

O Nymph! My shepherd's lost his head;
He mutters oaths, neglects his bed;
And what care I in winter's cold
For woolen dress and buckle gold?

A wise, aged ewe still fair like thee
Will only tease the ram he be;
Return his heart and let it roam
Else I be shorn and locked from home.

O Master, let me eat the belt
And nibble roses for my pelt,
For such a love is not to be;
There's no excuse for leaving me

Enjoy the sun and eat thy grass
And let this fit of passion pass;
If all my pleas thy heart may move,
Then live with me free from such love!


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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Consciously or not, I think most poetry is in conversation with other poetry. Do you enjoy such conversations, or find them intimidating? How much of an educational barrier is potentially there for one's audience when one draws on greater conversations and cultural references, and how might one lower the barrier without compromising on the richness gained by consciously including those contexts?

Hey all, I'm J.J., aka jjhunter, and I'll be acting as Poetry Host this week. I'm an amateur poet with a strong background in the Western classics and a love of science, mythology, Japanese art history, and people. I write everything from thousand plus word epic poems to haiku and haikai (more on that later this week), and enjoy being playful with language, especially in my use of sound, metaphor, and word combinations.

From the 'haikai for code' project:

welcome and well come
the word-water's fine; your space
awaits, you define

Due to how my schedule is working out this week, I'll be focusing primarily on sharing poems Monday-Friday, and then putting some thoughts down on paper (or should that be in binary?) about poetry in general and one poem in specific Saturday-Sunday. I look forward to talking with you in the comments! Please feel free to bring in anything you consider relevant to the conversation there--I'm always curious about what associations people have, and how the same words can mean very different things to different people. We each carry our own context around with us in our heads, and the richness of language means that one word in its time can play many parts.