This is how to write a Villanelle.
Or maybe not! I don’t know.
Prologue
The first reference I found for villanelle was in Plath’s The Bell Jar, where she mentions writing ‘Pages after pages of Villanelles and Sonnets’ in her chemistry class.
The only kind of thinking available to myself is, obsessive. I cannot not get completely obsessed with an idea, a word. I need to get engulfed whole, in the new idea/word/thing I read and extract as much meaning out of it as possible that it is wrung dry and has nothing to offer me anymore.
I thought to myself, what if I were to write not just a villanelle but a poem of every kind there is and then a couple of my own inventions!
I was fully consumed with the idea for a brief while. But I conveniently pushed it aside for other not so excruciating tasks. Yes, excruciating, because writing is both liberating and a major pain in the ass. Fitzgerald has said, ‘All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath’.
So, I thrust myself into consciously thinking about the writing assignment, just enough times in a day so as not to forget about it altogether, but not enough to take up my clickity-clack on my laptop keys.
It had been three days since, and there were no signs of productivity. I was cold and pale, consumed by a very mild fever, that made me its slave and tied me to my bed. Lying down on my couch, piling up dirty tissues after another, I tuned out and in, into a new show I had heard raving reviews about. It’s called ‘Killing Eve’. Now, if you’ve watched the show, you would have knowledge that the protagonist is named Villanelle.
This, I believed, was a nudge from my higher consciousness or whatever bullshit it is that you would call this.
The Villanelle is called ‘Dalliance.’
Dalliance
I am caught up in a Dalliance,
And it keeps me up at night,
Cradling in the wake of disobedience.
My heart at a tender age of adolescence,
Upright and Uptight,
I am caught up in a Dalliance.
Marred by its transience,
Flickers, although it burns bright,
cradling in the wake of disobedience,
its termination is pre-science.
The flame now growing faint,
I am caught up in a Dalliance,
Love or distraction in guise?
Not black, nor white, not wrong, nor right,
Cradling in the wake of disobedience
My heart- in a chemical imbalance,
keeps me up at night.
I am caught up in a dalliance,
Cradling in the wake of disobedience.
