On Writing Villanelles

Though, Elisa, the heroine of UNDERCOVER is an aspiring writer, she still has a whole lot to figure out. There's an entire universe of words that she still hasn't explored, or made her own. There are voices that she's been hiding behind. And then there are all the ways that poems can get crafted—forms she's still struggling to master.

One day Dr. Charmin, Elisa's English teacher, asks the class to create a villanelle, which is in fact a French construction—a type of poem that takes its power from the repetition of refains. The first line of the first tercet (a three-line stanza) becomes the last line in the second and fourth tercets, while the third line in the first tercet appears as the final lines of tercets three and five. And then there's a crescendo of four lines—a quatrain—in which the two refrains appear one last time, to close the poem. Villanelles take their readers on circuitous journeys--in and out of a mood, around an idea, toward something true but elusive. You could chant an infant to sleep with a villanelle. You could ride the endless crest of a heartbreak.

I find the villanelle to be a terrific challenge. I've loved gathering young writers together and hearing them read famous villanelles out loud—Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," for example, or "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas (these and other villanelles can be found in the wonderful Norton anthology THE MAKING OF A POEM). I love watching them ease into the rhythms as they pass bits of the poem off to one another. But what is even more exciting is watching young writers fashion villanelles themselves. With the sound of masterful villanelles in their ear, with the patterns and the beat pressed upon them, they seem to transition effortlessly into the making of their own poems, the discovery of their own essential repetitions.

Villanelles require the opening of one's thoughts to song. They require a poet's faith that meaning itself can be found within sound.