I wrote something yesterday (3.17.23)

Recently, I stepped away from Wednesdays@One, leaving it in good hands and with a full complement of writers who still attend weekly to work on projects and to share poems and readings.  It took me a long time, two years, to decide to move on, and now that I have, I am feeling either an obligation to read and write more poetry and poetry criticism/history/theory, or renewed energy for doing these things, because I've written almost every day over the past month, either here, in my journal, or in my word processor.  

Several new poems have been born as a result, a couple of which I think are good to very good, and several continue to form in my mind and on my laptop, where I tinker and toy, try and tease out new lines, phrases, breaths, images, figures. Two I am having particular trouble advancing, for two related but probably different reasons. I'll discuss only one of them here, and very superficially at that.

It's a villanelle and it's tormenting me.  I began it yesterday and, in a single sitting, drafted a complete version: five stanzas of a-b-a rhyme with a closing quatrain of a-b-a-a.  As I often do with this form, I struggled for an hour to compose the first and third lines, that is, the alternating refrains, these being the engine that powers the poem. The opening line I had created early in the day during a long walk, which I had finished more or less by the time I returned home. The third, a-rhyme, line was partly conceived by then as well and needed only a half hour's work to fit together. The middle line of the tercet, the b-rhyme line, took a little more time and, as it often does, created an obstacle because of its quirky rhyme requirement: fertile.

I say obstacle, but only because in choosing it I declined any easier close or masculine rhyme. At the same time, the word "fertile" opened up possibilities for near, slant, off and rhythmic rhymes, which turned out so far to be:

fertile

riddle

fiddle

apple

fickle

paddle

Which is all to say, the whole thing has turned into an exercise in formalities. Yes, the poem has a theme (God's contribution to Original Sin), and yes, the argument is developed logically beginning to end. But that's just the problem with the poem, it's very Audenesque, so to speak. It strives for cogency overlaid with irony and a bit of tongue-in-cheek. It wants to be read seriously but it doesn't want to appear Poetic and Sober. It's a poor hash of modernist trope upon modernist trope.

So now I may be back to the real effort of writing, to cast a cold, critical eye on what I write . . . and to push on with the drafting, hoping that eventually I'll find a way to drop the posturing and write a real poem.

I say this poem is tormenting me. That's an exaggeration. I am not tormented by poems; annoyed sometimes, dissatisfied, but not tormented. And in this case, the best word for it is probably unbelieving. I haven't yet brought the poem to a state where I can believe in what I am doing, that what I am doing is of much value as craft or art or feeling. I don't know that I'll be able to get it there.