Villanelle Victories

I've struggled with writing poetry for as long as I can remember.  It's never been my thing.  Give me prose and I'm fine, but poetry?  Nope.  I've been known to say that I hate it on multiple occasions (as my former English teacher Ms. Hays can attest to).  To me, poems have always been constricting.  Never fun.  I didn't like poems because I found the form poems to be so difficult, and oftentimes, confusing.  I could never find the story to latch onto in a poem like I could a book or a short story. 

And my own poems definitely suffered from my dislike of reading and writing poetry.  The following is an example of my many high school level poetic atrocities:

Running Creek

Water

runs 

through the bed

across smooth

rocks and shells. 

The deer stops

in its tracks

to 

take a drink

from the icy stream. 

And in the 

high trees

animals

call out to me. 

I mean, seriously?  What even is that?  A dumpster fire of a poem, obviously.  Clearly, I was not meant to write poetry.  And I was completely okay with that. 

But, because of my Creative Writing emphasis at Northern Illinois University, there were certain poetry classes that I had to take, and I hadn't exactly been excited for them.  Luckily, I had a change in attitude about poetry when I started taking poetry classes from Dr. Amy Newman.  Over my two years at NIU, I ended up taking 3 or 4 classes from her - some were reading poetry, others were writing it.  In one of those classes, we read "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath, and that was where I discovered that, hey, poetry could tell a story too and not suck in the process.

Now, previously, I had hated form poetry because I'd always felt like it constricted me as a story-teller too much.  You had to focus on the rhyme scheme and syllable count too much and couldn't really tell a story in those measured lines.  Then that Sylvia Plath poem came into play.  This particular poem is a villanelle, which means it's made up of 19 lines, broken into five tercets and one quatrain.  It also has two refrains that are alternately repeated, plus some rhyming and syllable count.  If you haven't read much poetry before, that explanation probably means nothing to you like it did to me when I first read the poem.  So, here's kind of a skeletal format of a villanelle (plus you can always google some great examples too!).

There are probably some good skeletons on Google too if you can't read my handwriting.

Well, in the Writing Poetry I class with Dr. Newman, one of our assignments was to write our own villanelle.  I still wasn't enthusiastic about writing one, but I figured if I tried to make a story out of it, maybe my poem wouldn't be laughed at in the sharing portion of the class.  I'd also been watching a ton of Supernatural at that time, so I ended up writing a villanelle inspired by both the T.V. show and Sylvia Plath's poem.  Here's the finished product:

Deal with the Devil by Amy Kirschenmann

My demons follow me down the road so far, 
relentlessly haunting the shadow I leave. 
My black stained heart carries the scar.

The organ sits rotting in a dirty glass jar, 
collecting more dust and filth than it can receive. 
My demons follow me down the road so far:

observing, calculating, lurking.  They hope I stray far 
from the two-lane concrete path I perceive. 
My black stained heart carries the scar

Satan tore open again, bleeding hot tar. 
Angels battle. Wings clash.  They cannot believe 
my demons follow me down the road so far.

My faith shrouded in tears, my soul in the stars, 
I wonder how much hope there is to retrieve 
my black stained heart that carries the scar.

The clock strikes midnight, Lucifer becomes czar. 
Now an entity for dark, there is nothing I grieve. 
My demons follow me down the road so far, 
my black stained heart carries the scar.

After writing it, I realized that the rhyme scheme and the repetition wasn't constricting, but more like a puzzle for me to solve.  And, throughout it, I could be telling an interesting story.  So, I started writing more.  I looked through the stories and novels I had written, searching for lines that could be used as those refrains.  I ended up writing a few more for that class, and when I took the second Writing Poetry class, I wrote a whole bunch more.  I wrote one inspired by Klaus from The Originals, and several in the voices of some of the characters I've been writing for almost a decade now.  I actually have a lot of fun writing these types of poems now, which is something I didn't think was possible.   

So, if you've ever felt like poetry isn't for you because of forms or rhyme schemes, just keep experimenting.  I never thought I'd find myself enjoying writing anything other than prose, but here I am nonfiction blogging and writing poetry.  The point being, keep trying.  You never know what you might discover!

Write on! 
Amy

P.S. Below are links to both Sylvia Plath's poem as well as the Amazon page for the excellent Dr. Amy Newman!

https://allpoetry.com/Mad-Girl's-Love-Song
https://www.amazon.com/Amy-Newman/e/B001K831Y8/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1