A Preamble to Villanelle.
Hi there! I’m Athena, the “American” half of Villanelle.
This whole project started with 2 kids sitting in the back of journalism class awkwardly bonding over rolled cigarettes in August of 2019. Eventually we realized our career-related aspirations were alike and would make semi-serious jokes about working together. However a few months ago, our jokes became more of a reality when I enlisted Nathan to help edit a cookbook I am ghostwriting. And now comes Villanelle.
When Nate and I were still nervously joking about the prospect of creating some kind of a creative-platform-publishing-editing-doodah, we spoke about how it could be fun to mix our last names, Villard and Luckhurst, together.
He then offered the word Villanelle — (Vill & L) — and here we are. The villanelle is a type of poem with a fixed format with 5 sets of tercets (3-line stanza) and one quatrain (4-line stanza) to close it out as well as a particular rhyme scheme and repeated lines throughout. This kind of format is often employed to depict a sort of obsession, however I find that the addition of a quatrain at the end allows for the narrator’s cycling obsession to either be diminished or amplified.
I found a whimsical villanelle by Theodore Roethke:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
The line that struck me most in this piece is “And, lovely, learn by going where to go.” Variations of this line are echoed throughout the villanelle, mainly in response to the narrator’s own feats of worry, of trying to know before doing.
This line rings enormously true at this time in my life — having graduated college in the midst of a pandemic and feeling the ground beneath me melt away like I’ve lost any semblance of control. Much like for everyone else in the Class of 2020, I’d be forced to experience all the future potentialities I built comfort around very quickly be thwarted. I soon found myself in Cleveland, Ohio for the duration of quarantine, a place I’d never dreamed of landing in.
With the many surprises — good and bad — that came with 2020, I’ve slowly learned that dwelling on what might be or might have been is pointless if I am not doing anything. Akin to The Waking’s narrator, it’s as if for all of lockdown I had been asleep, obsessively pondering the world and my life rather than remaining an active player in it.
The obsessive quality of the villanelle poem parallels my own (mostly-)prior obsessions with what might be and, much like The Waking’s final quatrain does, this year/this post/this blog shall represent a journey of self-liberation that began a few months ago in which I allow myself to finally wake and “learn by going where I have to go.”
Thus concludes my preamble to Villanelle.
