April 2, 2013
Tuesday

Meaning lies in meaning’s absence. The mist
Is always just about to lift.
— J. Allyn Rosser, b. 1952
American poet
from “Sugar Dada”

According to Wikipedia, that handy online source for quick and simple explanations, the villanelle is “a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines. The villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form.” Had I ever developed as a poet beyond the “modern sonnet” stage — 14 lines (or so) of iambic pentameter (or not), in any rhyme scheme you like, or none — it would have become my holy quest to write one. As a reader, I find the form endlessly satisfying to study.

I first knew of the form when I was a sophomore in college. My very influential teacher, Leon Feldman, a poet himself, had become annoyed when no one in his freshman composition class could tell him what a villanelle was, despite a mention of it, and an example of one, in the day’s assignment. He ordered the students to write one. I was not a member of that class, but I heard many of my friends complaining about the endeavor. So I looked it up. The results of my friends’ efforts were rudimentary, flawed, in some cases comical and in others actually passably good. I wonder, however, how many of them, these 47 years later, still remember and appreciate the form.

“Sugar Dada,” a villanelle by J(ill) Allyn Rosser, appears in the February 2001 issue of Poetry. I have no idea why I stuck a flag at that page. The allusion to Dadaism, the movement in art and writing that deals in incongruities and absurdities, might have attracted me. (One of my favorite classroom jokes: Q: How many Dada artists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Mayonnaise. Students look perplexed, say they don’t get it. I say they have just demonstrated that they do.) It’s a poem about the difficulty of finding meaning in life, about the persistence of the futility of existence. Just what I’d be drawn to in a season when I sighed over those things, and wrote only two posts here in two months.

I was very productive yesterday. Not so much today. I didn’t leave the house, although I did wash my face and change my clothes this morning rather than loll about all day in my nightgown. When I changed again a little while ago to take a shower, I discovered that I’d had my turtleneck on backwards all day. Not an inappropriate note on a day that began with a reading of a Dada-esque poem!