example of villanelle

Virginia Heffernan: Making a Hashtag of It

If you’ve been watching media debaters flip the pro-con coin about the Internet lately, you know by now that Twitter is either a noble catalyst of the Arab Spring or an atomizer of noxious moronism whose users might as well be huffing computer duster.

But another meaning of Twitter has been hiding in the plainest of plain sights: at the summit of the hot-topic list on Twitter itself.

Fire up those blockbuster “trending topics” — daily conversation-starters like “It’s hard when” and “I wanna slap” — and it’s clear that Twitter’s signature use these days is neither as news operation nor as neurotoxin. Twitter 2011 is in fact a wiki-wit machine that specializes in black one-liners in the spirit of Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Wanda Sykes.

A recent Twitter hashtag, #moodkiller, inspired gags about the logistics of lingerie. Corey tweeted: “What a #moodkiller wen u tryna take off a girl bra n she got double d’s n that last latch is holdin on 4 dear life!!” Pretty Yonaa used the same hashtag for a riff about dashed expectations: “Looking Forward To A Cup Of Cherry Kool-Aide *Sips* .. Its Watermelon #moodkiller.”

Don’t find this stuff the height of humor? I kinda do. Especially when you see it all together. I always appreciate a guy’s-eye perspective on the idiosyncrasies of bras, and there’s a funny compression to stage directions in asterisks like Pretty Yonaa’s “sips.” Not to mention the invocation of regular Kool-Aid instead of that brainwash Kool-Aid. Finally, there’s just something inspiring in the spectacle of an enormous crowd of writers working off a single idea, in a form as rigid as a villanelle, to crack jokes and convey koans.

Last fall, Kanye West, a zealous user of Twitter, coined the phrase “hashtag rap” to describe analogies in rap lyrics that use a comic pause where the words “like” or “as” might be expected. West explained that this style conveys the rhythm of the pound-sign in online hashtags. Consider lines from the rapper Drake like, “Two thumbs up [PAUSE] Ebert and Roeper” and “I could teach you how to speak my language [PAUSE] Rosetta Stone.” Hashtags have become a big part of the rhythm of online communication — on the social networks, but even in e-mail and texts. Leave it to West and Drake to formalize them as prosody.

The Villanelle and Conceptual Synthesis: a poem with commentary ...

I would not want it thought that this poem was written purely for analysis, or simply as a vehicle for a generalised commentary. It can, however, serve as an example for the purposes of demonstrating the way that a certain kind of poetic thought operates, and, in particular, how the form of the villanelle has a specific dialectical propensity. Nonetheless, it is true to say that the writing of this poem was kindled by a spark of recognition that there is a way of having a conversation with oneself through poetry, in order to ignite a thought ‘in a single flame’.

I do not know if this is the kind of thinking that encourages writers of villanelles to turn to the form, but even in arguably the most famous example – Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ – the refrains appear to approach a kind of synthesis. The first refrain is an acknowledgement of the circumstances, while the second is an appeal, however hopeless, to attempt their obviation. Even in the earliest example of the villanelle, in the form we have come to know it, the refrains are similarly opposed: ‘I have lost my turtledove / [...] I will go and find my love’. This is the poem by Jean Passerat (1534-1602) that did not, historically, establish a tradition such as that of the sonnet – or even of terza rima -century phenomenon that looked to Passerat’s false paradigm. Theodore de Banville (1823-1891) is responsible for this in a significant way, as discussed by Amanda French and others. It is not of little consequence that aspects of the form connect with the flowering of German idealism around 1800 (Kant, Hegel and Schelling). Hegelian dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) is reflected in the trajectory of the villanelle, even though the structure admittedly appeared rather earlier in the late 16 Century.

The proximity of the two refrains at the end of a villanelle is always a drawing together, a formal embrace – but always, too, an abortive resolution. Poetry would have to end if it succeeded, after all.