POETRY INVITATIONAL
VILLANELLE CHALLENGE
Two Week Submission Period: February 25—March 11
HELLO WRITERS!
If you're anything like us, sometimes the hardest part of being who we are—creative, driven, moderately-to-highly tortured and angsty—is making time in your life for the work. Not the job, the work. It's tough to sit down and be the writer, to take words and intent and make something out of them that isn't a client email or status update.
There's people scuttling about the planet doing all kinds of good and bad and here WE are—so how do we manage? What do we do next? How do we begin again, every single day, even if there may have been some...delays in our creative work?
TRY THIS: WRITE A VILLANELLE
Structure can save us, sometimes. It gives us purpose and something concrete, something comfortable, something to make us feel slightly less adrift in the universe for a few brief moments. And a villanelle is a tough but surmountable challenge that is now in front of you—it's so close you can see the whites of its eyeballs! The villanelle goes right for the gut, and maybe that's what you need right now. We sure do!
Think of it like writing a song. Villanelles are 19 lines, but you really only need to write 13, because your first and third line keep repeating. The meter is up to you, as long as it’s consistent.
We’ll let our homies at poets.org explain it in detail:
“The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. 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.”
SOUND COMPLICATED?
It’s really not, we swear. Check out the examples below and just follow the form. If you need more help, here’s a great description of how to write one.
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
HERE'S SOME MORE
The Waking by Theodore Roethke
A Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
1. Write that VILLANELLE!
We are here for you as POETRY COACHES so email us your villanelle (or villanelle questions) and we will workshop!
2. SUBMIT
Submission Period: February 25—March 11
Submit RIGHT HERE or via email at [email protected] and attach an original picture or artwork or an image along with your poem, if you want.
3. READ ALL THE VILLANELLES FROM YOUR PALS!
Check out poetryinvitational.tumblr.com for villanelles from humans you know and humans you don't, here on planet Earth.
4. SHARE
Share your poem once it's posted AND share the challenge with more writer friends! The Poetry Invitational community (and poetic awesomeness) keeps growing because of the poems YOU are sending forth into the universe. So sharpen those pencils/typing fingers. Let's see what you've got!
LET'S DO IT, WRITERS!
This is a tough challenge, but think of how good it will feel when you are done. It'll make you feel better than putting kale AND flax seed in your morning smoothie. Give it a shot, you badass poet!
Happy writing and rhyming,
Beth and Marcella