A Bushwick Villanelle
Hi all! A few weeks ago I decided to try my hand at a villanelle. I tried to capture the things that went on in my life in the almost-year since I moved to the city --the seasons are new to me, coming to the northern hemisphere from the tropics, heh. After reading it again today, I feel like it needs a lot of work as I think there has to be some salvageable core in there, and I realized that the best way to improve it is to get more eyes on it! Maybe this particular piece should live in a different form? Maybe I'm being too obvious with the names of seasons? Also, my sense of meter in English is still nascent, so I'm sure I made it awkward at times!
A clean sun shines over St. Nick’s and Harman street
welcoming a spring of transformation and glee
Mounds of snow a memory, forgotten the sleet.
Soon it’s sweltering, a summer we barely greet
yet it brings a new chapter—an existence free.
A clean sun shines over St. Nick’s and Harman street.
Occupation is soon found, not missing a beat
a routine as all leaves wither and leave the tree
Mounds of snow a memory, forgotten the sleet.
As autumn cools it’s despair anger and deceit
outside; yet we subsist on love and art and tea
a clean sun shines over St. Nick’s and Harman street.
Complacency broken by appalling defeat
we steel ourselves, patience and wisdom are the key.
Mounds of snow a memory, forgotten the sleet.
This winter of the soul and earth valiant we’ll meet
together we stand, for our own we cannot flee.
A clean sun shines over St. Nick’s and Harman street.
Mounds of snow a memory, forgotten the sleet.
The feedback:
Posted Mar 23, 2017, 7:26 PM UTC · edited
32
[deleted]
Oh whoa, it's Gummyfail! I've lurked in many of your poems, an honor to get feedback from you! Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it and that you gleaned all these details (e.g. the corner of my apartment building, as a home that I'm still settling on, is definitely a recurring thought!). Excited to read your villanelle!
Great catch about "results": I think I tried to clean up the meter a bit before submitting and that one line lost its original rhyme as a consequence! I'll think about a suitable replacement, had fun doing the rhyme but yeah, you're dead on: got myself in quite a pickle trying to rhyme and pull off a villanelle nervous laughter.
As for the punctuation, that's a pretty solid point: I think I'd actually like the phrase "on love and art and tea" to kinda pile on instead of pausing, now that you point it out. I could even lose the last semicolon and make it just a good ol' period there, huh? I think I like the caesura that the semicolon after "outside" creates, though it may be a bit premature so it'll probably see some revision when I do an "okay let's look at punctuation" general pass. You make a good point about the pausing: I think I need to say this one out loud a few times to see where I really want it to pause and where I'm just overindulging in squiggly glyphs.
[stealing some time at work to respond to this lest I forget, I'll do these revisions tonight, thanks for rekindling my dedication to this piece!]
updated with the missing rhyme and hella fewer punctuation: I'm letting line breaks do that job more, left some punctuation that still made sense when saying things out loud. Also, I noticed you submitted your villanelle not long after giving your feedback, hot damn that's quick! Read it and loved it, leaving you actual feedback on your post :D