The Villanelle is Swell!

It’s pretty easy to write an article about villanelles. I’ve got that covered. Writing a villanelle, on the other hand, is something totally different. I hadn’t tried villanelles in over a year, so this was good practice. And I got to remember why I like form so much.

When writing this, I knew I wanted to break the form a bit. So, my refrains are a bit malleable. I wanted to retain some of the main words, but have them echo throughout the poem, rather than repeat word for word. Also, I pushed the form a bit with my rhymes. Some of them are slant/off. The rule I was most stringent about was the iambic pentameter, until I got to the final stanza.

A good warm up for writing this was the fact that I taught both “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and “One Art” in my Literature class on Tuesday. It helped me get the feeling of the form that day, for when I wrote this.

Model, Captured for Hours, Whispers

Contort your body. Careful to comply,
I twist my torso, hollow out my chest,
then gaze at my reflection, in reply.

I cannot see my surface, how it shines
so bright that you can see yourself expressed
in my contorted back, but I comply.

I feel as if I’m made of smoke and light,
strategically placed mirrors; nothing’s left
just gazed upon reflections, mute replies.

But in the scrim of images, stretched tight
across my skin, I see ourselves, a mess:
distorted limbs, regrets. We all comply

to orders easily. We push, deny
ourselves of everything. This is our test.
We reproduce reflections, in reply.

We are stripped bare, compressed down to a size
where there is nothing wasted, nothing left.
Contort your body, silently comply
to the refracted image – wait for the reply.