Punching Up the Villanelle with Images

At today's Jump Start workshop, we worked again with Joe Millar's image lists: take a piece of paper and write across the top Taste, Sound, Touch, Sight, Smell. Fill each sense's column with as many concrete images as you can in, say, 15 minutes. Put down images that please you as well as a few that are not so pleasing. My list has things like "moss between bricks," "fresh laundry," "greasy old coins," and "the Mozart Requiem."

Then, using these images as your poem's vocabulary, write. Today we worked on the villanelle: five 3-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the 1st and 3rd lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. There two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain. Here's a schematic that might
help you visualize this--capital letters represent lines, numbers represent rhymes.

A 1
B 2
C 1

D 1
E 2
A 1

F 1
G 2
C 1

H 1
I 2
A 1

J 1
K 2
C 1

L 1
M 2
A 1
C 1

There is no shortage of great examples. Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. Elizabeth Bishop's The Art of Losing isn't Hard to Master. And this one, new to me: Mad Girl's Love Song, by Sylvia Plath. You will also find two excellent villanelles in Thomas Aslin's new book, Salvage, 2016 from Lost Horse Press. http://www.losthorsepress.org/catalog/salvage/