50. Just Another Fucking Villanelle

...being a back handed homage to yet another poetic forme fixe

As someone who emails out my poetry on a weekly basis to a subscription list, I feel a responsibility to tread gingerly from time to time. It may not be the most widely read source of poetry on the internet, but there are a small group of people who seem to enjoy it, and It has tiny bud of reputation that I am keen to nurture, and cultivate, just like a gardener is keen to nurture and cultivate the growth of lawns and borders. 

But this week I also felt the need to post something that features a swearword really prominently in the title. This could be regarded as allowing a thick tangle of bramble to obscure the entrance to the garden, an act of self sabotage, that could undo the success of what I have carefully tended.  

I thought long and hard about whether to change that title. I could easily have called it simply “Villanelle”. Or perhaps I could have gone with the option of replacing one or more of the letters of the word in question with asterisks. In the end I decided against either of those options. Publish and be damned!

There were two main reasons for my hesitancy. The first being the practical one that people’s spam filters might object, and any email promoting the page may lay unnoticed in junk mailboxes until automatically deleted. The second being, that it could outrage the gentler minded reader to the point that they might even unsubscribe, turning their back to my crassness like I recently turned my back to the Crassness of Elon Musk and his awful vanity project¹. Watching subscription numbers gradually increase over the past fifty weeks has been a great source of pleasure to me. Why would I want to risk its development with a hasty F bomb?

Then the voice of Polonious, to thine own self be true came to state the case for the defence. The purpose of creativity is not to pander to what you imagine might please your audience. Once you start doing that, then you might as well work for an advertising agency. The purpose of creativity is to express yourself. To use your own voice. To say things as you see them. If you can bring an audience along with you, then all the better. So the swearword stays at the top of the page, because that particular mix of Anglo Saxon language and high art pleases me no end.

I have always been happy to use swearing in my creative work, although much of it comes from a sort of inverted snobbery. I have always felt the need to display my working class credentials, to underline the fact that I am a regular comprehensive school educated bloke who grew up in a terraced two up two down in the back streets of Hull. What I am more shy about, and only recently coming to terms with, is that I am also a bit of a “culture vulture” or, as the voice of that kid from Hull would say a “pretentious twat.” To be honest, I probably felt more angst about quoting from Hamlet above, and name dropping WH Auden below than using the word “fucking” in the title of this piece.

Its not as if I have never used that sort of language here before. My first ever post had shit in the title, another one featured an illustration of a lump of shit on a page of poetry, and the one about Tupac Shakur - well it relishes his use of expressive language, and the essay that I accompanied it with contained many of my thoughts on the joys of swearing.

So, dear reader, if you have got this far - thank you! I imagine that you are probably thinking that it is about time I turned my attention to that fucking villanelle. So I shall.

The villanelle is yet another fixed form of poetry that has its origins in 17th century France, although it became really popular a couple of hundred years later in the British Isles. Quite a few well known poets have tried their hand at creating one, including Sylvia Plath, WH Auden and Wendy Cope, who has done several, although I couldn’t find a link for “Reading Scheme” arguably her best known one, from Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.

Compared to a sestina, or a rondo doublé, villanelles are easy. As long as you can find a set of eight rhyming words and accompany it with a set of six rhyming words, you can construct something pretty quickly. You get to repeat one of your lines four times and another one three times, and as there are only nineteen lines altogether, it means that you don’t have to write an awful lot. Just 14 unique lines - the same as a sonnet, but less trouble. Rather than waste time explaining the mechanics of how one is written, I advise those who fancy having a go at one to look at what is perhaps the most famous villanelle of all - Do not Go Gentle into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas and try to copy its structure, rhymes and repetitions. You can hardly go wrong!

And thats where I feel the problem lies. Because it is easy to write one, it is easy to write a really terrible one. I feel the same way about Haikus to be honest. In fact they are even worse. One can spend a whole morning churning out haikus by the hundredweight, and have them all sent off to Amazon and published by the afternoon, maybe someone would actually buy them. (Go on… I dare you!).

Don’t get me wrong, I know some fantastic practitioners of the art of the Villanelle. My good friend Mick Jenkinson is particularly adept at expressing himself in that form one of his, entitled Enduring Marks can be found on his Sixty Odd Poets page, and his piece about the death of his father is perhaps my favourite villanelle of all (but I am always a sucker for a dead dad poem) A fine Villanelle is a wonder to behold, but sometimes it seems that the world of poetry throws out far too many that are not particularly good, and the intolerant, critical, egotistical voice within me just cant help but groan “Not another fucking villanelle” as soon as it becomes obvious what it is (usually by line nine in my case - I’m not all that quick on the uptake)

So, yet again, the wellspring of creativity deep in my soul, (or was it the character fault, that cries out Poetry is Shit far too often) prompted me to write a poem. Is it a shit one? In my opinion, shit, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You can get it out with Optrex - or by merely clicking the unsubscribe button and causing a tiny, shallow part of me to be filled with regret.

Just Another Fucking Villanelle

As poems go it ticks the boxes well
There’s structure, rhyme and metre, the full set
But there nothing much else in it, truth to tell

No real content, all it is is words that gel
Verbose arrangements of the alphabet
Its just another fucking villanelle

It sounds profound, it rings true as a bell
As satisfying as a cigarette
But there’s nothing much else in it, truth to tell

Like drinking cheap and nasty zinfandel
The aftermath is nothing but regret
Its just another fucking villanelle

Its empty words come tumbling, pell-mell
Assaulting our minds with empty threat
But there’s nothing much else in it, truth to tell 

Welcome to the poetry of Hell
Where what you see’s exactly what you get
Its just another fucking villanelle
And there’s nothing much else in it, truth to tell

1. Yes, I have walked away from Twitter, and like many others, have discovered BlueSky, which provides a twitter like fix, but is filled with more love than hate. If you want to say hello, pop over, there is a burgeoning poetry community to explore. The only downside for me is that English football below Premiership level is not yet represented very much at all. Then again, I don’t really want to read much about Hull City at the moment.