The Process of Writing Poetry, Part the First

I have a massive headache.  This has nothing to do with writing poetry.  Writing poetry is one of those things least likely to give me a headache.  However, if nothing I say in this entry makes any sense whatsoever, we're going to blame it on my headache.  Got that?  Good.

Of course, the poetic process is different for every poet, blah blah blah de-freakin'-blah.  We're all special snowflakes working on our "craft" (if that is not the most pretentious word ever used to describe what writers do, I am Marie of Rumania.  Not even "art" is worse).

Anyway, let's get down to brass tacks.  (Have you ever even seen a tack made of brass?  Me neither.)  The poetry form I'm talking about today is the villanelle.  You can read all sorts of interesting stuff about it on Wikipedia, because I'm only giving a basic overview.

A villanelle is a 19-line poem that uses two main repeating lines in its construction.  Because villanelles repeat so much, it's imperative that the repeating lines are used in a way that doesn't make this poem completely boring or nonsensical.  The construction is thus:

A1
b
A2

a
b
A1

a
b
A2


a
b
A1

a
b
A2

a
b
A1
A2

Theoretically, this should be pretty simple to understand, but since assumptions make us all dumb, A1 and A2 are the repeating lines.  The lowercase a's are lines that rhyme with A1 and A2, and all the b's rhyme.  Now you are smarter than you were.

So, in this case, I set out to write a love poem, but decided that I couldn't, for whatever reason, write a love poem today that was anything but dreck.  But then I started to write this, and it turned into a KIND of love poem.  Sort of.

At any rate, the first thing I do when writing a villanelle is decide what lines I am going to use for repetition, and then start brainstorming other rhyming endings.  So I came up with a first stanza:


I say all the things I've said before
Some verbatim, some paraphased
This time, though, I mean them more.

Of interest only to me is the fact that "This time, though, I mean them more" didn't start out like that.  It started as "But this time I mean them more."  I changed it for a couple of reasons I'll discuss in a moment.  But it was a perfectly good first stanza, with non-difficult rhymes to work with.  Then I brainstormed everything I could think of that rhymed with "before/more," and everything that rhymed or even just sorta-rhymed with "paraphrased."  I made sure to write down the word "semaphore" because I love that word and really, it just isn't used enough.

Here is where a villanelle gets tricky (to me).  Each stanza in the middle contains one of the repeating lines.  It's pretty imperative when I write a villanelle to make sure the other lines in the stanza support that repeating line.  So I ended up with this second stanza:

It's not a game.  I don't keep score,
But still, considering earlier days
I say all the things I've said before. 

You see?  The first two lines support the overall idea of "saying things [I've] said before."

Then I came to the third stanza.  I really didn't like the overall flow of "But this time, I mean them more" with the lines I chose here.  So I changed the line up to make the stanza flow better, and this is what I got:

I can remember vows I swore
And I kept them.  I'm still amazed.
This time, though, I mean them more.

If I had kept the "but..." line instead...it just didn't sound as good to me.  Sometimes that's the only criteria you can work on.

Of course, one of the other main ideas in writing a villanelle that you keep hold of is the fact that your two repeating lines will end up side-by-side in the last stanza.  They need to flow together well, and make sense just as a couplet.  Which I think I actually accomplished (some of my early villanelles, written when I was around 19/20, are painful because I didn't follow this rule very well).

Here is the poem in its entirety.  What I was trying to say--and you can read it any way you want--is that when we fall in love, we tend to repeat the same things over and over.  Not that they don't have meaning; that's not what I'm suggesting.  Feeling something for one person, and then feeling it again later on for another, doesn't invalidate the feeling at all.  I just found it interesting that our language of love tends to be circumscribed.  It's certainly something I try to avoid.

I say all the things I said before
Some verbatim, some paraphased
This time, though, I mean them more.

It's not a game.  I don't keep score.
But still, considering earlier days
I say all the things I've said before.

I can remember vows I swore
And I kept them.  I'm still amazed.
This time, though, I mean them more.

All that seems surreal semaphore (I knew I could use it somewhere)
Word and gesture, a love-charade
I say all the things I've said before.

To those I previously adored
I gave these gifts too.  Merely a phase.
This time, though, I mean them more.


Yet it was true then, that face I wore.
But I've dispensed with that masquerade
I say all the things I've said before
This time, though--I mean them more.