You know what’re great? Villanelles. Also, sushi. If I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, it would be sushi. But I’m vegan until Lent is over. Ugh. And my favorite lunch cart – which has the most perfect vegan spring rolls EVER – is closed until late March tomorrow!

#whitewhine #firstworldproblems

Back to the villanelles, then. This is my new favorite poetic form. I’m all about rhythm and rhyme, and the repetition of this structure lends itself so well to a topic that really needs transmutation from abstract emotional cancer to cold hard text: Obsession.

Yes: Manic, panting, crying, hair-pulling, soul-crushing, unrequited desire. We’ve all tasted it a few times. If you haven’t yet, honey, you haven’t lived.

While pining like this can be highly disruptive and annoying to everyone involved, it’s not as special and isolating as it feels. As with any wild, monstrous emotion, naming the demon gives you power over it. Call it out in a poem; bind it with line after line of carefully chosen words and confine it to language. Fix it in your mind’s eye as something solid; a black and white stack of verses or stanzas. The villanelle is the best mold I’ve so far seen to press your thrashing woes into. Witness Sylvia Plath’s masterful example below:

Mad Girl’s Love Song

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I do love the scope of this. Words are not so much bindings for this demon as lenses on a drifting telescope, bringing the nebulous into focus. Though Plath confined her heartache to precision text, the emotions still burst a muted longing across a cold, empty universe that stretches out to the end of time. True lovelorn madness, right? That stuff really comes across in the refrains. Obsession is repetition; getting stuck in an infinite loop and having your logic frequently interrupted by lust for that one thing you can’t have.

Trying to explain the form itself is tricky:

“The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains… Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.” – poets.org

Once I tried drafting it with a couplet I’d written a while ago, I was able to get it. I really like couplets – the flash fiction of poetry. I have a few of them floating around and I think they make great starters if you want to try a villanelle. Heck, once you have a couplet, eight of the nineteen lines are already written.

For this experiment, I’ll use, “The heart wants what it wants, / But the hungry beast is always wrong.” Woody Allen is famously recorded as the first person to express line 1, but since Emily Dickinson also said it 130 years prior, I’m considering it an idiom.

The heart wants what it wants (A1)
Crippling the minds caught in its wake (b)
But the hungry beast is always wrong. (A2)

Familiar lines in all these songs, (a)
All the different words to say (b)
The heart wants what it wants. (A1)

Yet your efforts meet with loss. (a)
When you reach out, she’s gone away. (b)
The hungry beast is always wrong (A2)

Yet you let her drag you on. (a)
Excusing confusion, pretending it’s okay: (b)
“The heart wants what it wants.” (A1)

Obsessive desire and repetitive thought (a)
Centered on a food cart named Yatai… (b)
The hungry beast is always wrong (A2)

Because it’s winter, kid, the cart is gone. (a)
Your food lust has to wait. (b)
I know the heart wants what it wants (A1)
But the hungry beast is always wrong. (A2)

FOR REAL, ALL I WANT IS SOME GODDAMN SUSHI.