Greg Bales

Villanelle for Wednesday

It is not Wednesday. In fact, it is nearly Friday, which makes this post almost two days late. Among other things, that means my promise to write daily isn’t going as well as I’d hoped. For that, I have little excuse. Nor have I an excuse for the even greater tardiness of the subject of this post. Way back in September I challenged Jeremy P—— to practice writing formal poetry. I said it would help him learn to write with the line rather than in spite of it. I said that I would write whatever he did, and then I laid it on the line: Write a villanelle," I said.

“Well, f— me!” he replied. “You might as well have asked me to f— an elephant.”

Then he added, “It’s not a real form, you know. It’s not ancient.”

Despite the vulgarity and the snobbery, he obliged, sending me a dramatic rendition of the fall of Barcelona during World War 2. He didn’t follow the assignment all that well; he played fast and loose with the idea that the first stanza’s first and third lines should in fact repeat. But it was a fair poem nonetheless. (He says he has revised it since, and that it is much better now.) Meanwhile, for several weeks I would write him, saying “I’m still working on it,” though I wasn’t, and eventually I didn’t say anything at all, hoping he might forget. And he may have: soon after my challenge, he published his first poem, then he published another, and then he was invited to write some occasional poetry for a Haiti benefit, and in less than a winter his poetic career had taken off no thanks to my lame and unnecessary “formal poems will help you write with the line” attempt at an intervention.

But even if Jeremy did forget, I didn’t. I kept his villanelle in my inbox, and every time I cleaned it of all the mail I had replied to, I felt a twinge of regret that I couldn’t archive it, too. Now, six months after he sent it, I have decided to do something about it.