Or, are you a free spirit, living for the moment, acting spontaneously and laissez-faire?
A villanelle is an ordered, structured style of poem, with repeated lines and rhymes, which sticks to a rigid form.
One might think that such order, structure and repetition would be stifling and become boring, but in fact, the very structure can release the creativity and allow for subtle, surprising and skilful variations within.
Likewise, order, structure, discipline, focus and routine in your life, can bring freedom and time to be creative within that structure.
What sort of person are you and what do you think?
Below is a villanelle that I wrote and comments are welcome as to whether you think the structure helps the unfolding story, or stifles it?
Cry
My grandfather’s cry comes without heart
into the morning Liverpool air:
‘whose rags and bones are ready for the cart?’
Kids play football in the park. The mart
is open, but may the buyer beware.
My grandfather’s cry comes without heart
from The Stanley Arms. Drink tore apart
his family life, though he was unaware.
‘Whose rags and bones are ready…? For the cart
is idle. Beer-fuelled it will all restart.
Like a loner lost in solitaire,
my grandfather’s cry comes without heart
ripping the evening smog. It’s a grotesque art
to shout, to curse, to fight and then declare
whose rags and bones are ready for the cart!
His flesh and blood are ready to depart
into the night, without a prayer.
My grandfather’s cry comes. Without heart,
whose rags and bones are ready for the cart?
Thank you for reading, David Wilkinson.
2 comments:
A most thought-provoking blog. I'll sign up to being a free spirit bouncing around inside self-imposed structures and routines and occasionally breaking out :-)
I liked your poem the first time I heard you read it. When I read it again now, it's very moving.
As you intimated, the strict villanelle structure has prompted you to come up with some neat and pleasing syntactical devices (rigour being the mother of invention?); and the rolling, repetitive nature of the verse as it unfolds the story through time is starkly effective. It's a wonderful poem.
Very interesting. Your poem had me chasing up something of Yeats, The Circus Animals' Desertion, which concludes with the lines:
".... Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."
Thank you.
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