Writing Poetry: The Villanelle
Taught by Regan Good
Regan Good is a poet living in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her book The Atlantic House was published in 2011 by Harry Tankoos Press. She thinks Marianne Moore’s lines “Ecstasy affords/the occasion and expediency determines the form” are as wise a thing ever written about the act of writing a poem.
You may have snatches of villanelles in your head already: Dylan Thomas’s magisterial “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, Theodore Roethke’s “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow”, or Elizabeth Bishop’s “The art of losing isn’t hard to master”.
It’s a beautiful form of poetry, capable of transmitting haunting human sentiments. In this class, we will write a villanelle each (true) and emerge with bona fide drafts of this sometimes obsessive form. Exquisite torture or constrained ecstasy? You decide.
Some experience writing poetry would be helpful but not necessary. We will create your refrains (and rhymes) through an in-class writing exercise. To quote from Roethke’s beautiful villanelle: “We think by feeling. What is there to know?”
