Yes, Virginia, you must read the assignment (also known as part 2)
So, I turned in that little prose poem at just about midnight, right before bed. I wake up this morning and check my email before leaving for work. The instructor had replied to my email mentioning the one snippet of the directions that “the McCarthy poem is exempt” from the assignment. Oops. So, I very quickly grab the packet and go to work, an hour to go before it has to be turned in. I pick a line, “And silent answers crept across the stars.” from “At Melville’s Tomb,” by Hart Crane. Immediately (and this is odd for me) I catch that is is iambic pentameter and decide, the clock ticking ever closer to the deadline, to write a villanelle. …. For those of you who’ve even glanced at my work, I write in free verse, without rhyme. It just seemed apropos, I guess. I field calls while googling “rhyming dictionary” and writing my first villanelle. It was an interesting experience, form, rhythm, rhyme, language, voice, all at great odds with my normal writing. It’s good to shake things up every so often.
A Villanelle at Melville’s Tomb
after Crane
Our lives a question about death and scar;
Vain chance to win or fail. Gods watch us play;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Some acid tears will fall, some puckered mar
Upon cheap skin that punctuate and lay
Our lives a question about death and scar.
Wracked! Torn! Kissed, then thrown across the bar
Of indeterminate near spaces. Pray!
And silent answers crept across the stars.
We patch our minds with pitch and tar
As ash leaves, rank and cold, a grim assay:
Our lives a question about death and scar.
Yes, love has light, that dim glow from afar
‘Cross shale and crack untrod, and holds no delay
While silent answers crept across the stars.
No answers found, nor these ideas we are
To know, they then present without allay
Our lives a question about death and scar.
And silent answers crept across the stars.