by Chuck Radda

Created on: February 06, 2009

When I was teaching my contemporary poetry course, Theodore Roethke's "The Waking" was always part of the syllabus. It wasn't that I liked the poem that much; it was more that I wanted the students to know that someone other than Dylan Thomas had composed a villanelle. One year we debated the merits of that particular poetic form, not simply compared with a sonnet, but compared with all traditional forms. One of my students said something to the effect that the villanelle deserves respect because it must be impossible to write, and, of course, that became their assignment: write one.

This class was not an AP or honors level group; they were simply good kids who actually enjoyed poetry and couldn't have cared less about its significance or necessity in the 21st century. To them an assignment was an assignment, and they all wrote villanelles. So did I. Most of theirs stunk. So did mine. But one of them (with a little tweaking) wound up being read at the graduation exercise, a venue that, I agree, seems just a bit askew. The other graduates seemed to like it well enough though: it was filled with most of the platitudes that constitute graduation addresses. And the young poet (a lovely young lady whose diffidence frequently kept her from the rigors of classroom debates) enjoyed a few moments of celebrity to boot. But maybe because of the venue, and maybe because of the topic, the poem was doomed to be flat, and it was.

The point, if I could just get there, is that even my young and inexperienced poets seemed less able to tap any emotional depth in the villanelle, though their other poetry, most specially their sonnets, frequently came closer. The very form of the villanelle, it seemed, overwhelmed or maybe simply distracted them from the craft of writing, resulting in a process more akin to filling in a crossword puzzle than creating a finished piece. And while those "clues across" and "clues down" were being filled in, there was little time to consider the strong emotions that poetry conveys so well.

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