Experimental Literature Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

In 1999 I began a sabbatical year research project in which I interviewed musicians from India and from America to explore the theory, practice and experiences of improvisation. As I studied and talked about improvisation, I wanted to observe the creative processes of improvising from within. Therefore, I began to compose villanelles, one or more a day, to experience the dynamics of extemporaneous composition. For the next few years I continued to compose villanelles on a wide variety of topics, writing on whatever topic or phrase or word pattern of mood seemed attractive at the time in the flow of everyday life.

In the villanelle structure the first and third lines are most important, because they open the poem, and are repeated in the course of its cycles, and they conclude the poem, too. The villanelle structure, with its nineteen lines and two rhyming sounds chiming back and forth, provides a focus so that the writer stays with, and riffs on, the original point; it compels a thematic focus and ensures a repeated return to say related things on the initial point, which can be a fecund process when things are working right. In fact, when things are going right such a form can provide access to the domain of imagination and the collective unconscious, showing the ways images and language have minds of their own. The structural process itself can provide a creative momentum, because it cycles and has a designated end point toward which the composition builds.

I jotted down observations about the structure and the experience of creating works in it, and notes about what happens after working in the form for such a long time that it becomes second nature, and the unconscious begins to generate patterns like puzzle solutions in intuitive images and wordplay. Just as there are many possible permutations of a Rubik’s cube, there are many possibilities in villanelle variations.

Villanelles are like spirals, curling back around again and again, so the structure, with self-similar patterns, can be used to explore fractal ideas. Villanelles are like crystals, with repeated facets, like ragas in Indian music. Like origami folded paper designs, it is a form with specific limits. There is a sense of inevitability in the mind at the outset and throughout, yet there is uncertainty and a necessary inventiveness too, and the structure lends a sureness to the chaotic process of finding the exact words. Each villanelle has a wholeness that is discernable and attainable. Villanelles begin like mushroom spores or a yogurt culture—they start with a seed idea or phrase which bespeaks a startling connection. The beginning gives a whole idea potential with excitement, a level to live up to, a challenge to make parts which are self-similar with the other parts, and a promise to reach fulfillment in completion. Villanelles are meditative, giving the mind a form to return to, a container for mulling over issues, a vessel in which to cook ingredients. The repetition evokes an incantatory aura, even when speaking of matters of fact and natural observations.

Once you get a flow of villanelles going, you flow with them in that mode; that is, even before you finish one, you might note the ideas for the first lines of the next one. You forget that note, then go back to it, to rediscover the idea potential in the beginning, and finish it; it’s as if the next one is already begun and working on itself.

As I have indicated, these thousand villanelles are the result of my 1999-2003 experiment in improvising. I wrote many of them in Indiana, but also wrote some in India, Italy, England, New England, Michigan, Illinois and California. Almost no holds are barred in this experiment—I let ideas take me where they lead. Nothing was off limits as topic or idea to use in giving life to the form. Politics, sex, religion, history, news, dreams, science, folklore, myths, celebrities, love, nature, language, and art, quotes and fantasies, all were fair game. As with the collages I’ve made for many years, I enjoyed great artistic freedom. Because a thousand villanelles comprise a lengthy text, one way readers can access verses of specific thematic interest is by using the “find” option on their computers, searching key words in the document.

I wrote my first villanelle in Vermont, while taking a class with poet Richard Eberhart in 1974. (I include that poem as the first in this series.) Before I wrote my first villanelle I read Eberhart’s villanelle written during World War Two, entitled “Christ is Walking in Your Blood Today,” and was attracted to the rhythm. Of course, Dylan Thomas’s well-known villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night” made a strong impression on me too, among others. I also find Jared Carter’s villanelles, especially the one entitled “Improvisation,” to be fine examples of this verse form.

Writing villanelles was an improvisational exercise I explored after experiencing other poetic practices over the years: I had memorized some iambic pentameter by Shakespeare and heard that verse form often in the years when I was an actor at the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Connecticut, and elsewhere; I had written dozens of seventeen syllable haiku in New York City, India and Vermont; in India I had translated a few hundred kritis and kirtanas from Telugu; and, inspired by Bab Dylan’s songs, I’d tried my hand at writing song-lyric-like poems with refrains. I suppose the repetition of mantras and bhajans can also be considered as background for work with the villanelle, which depends on repeated returns.

Information about the history and art of the villanelle is found at these websites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villanelle
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5796
http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/formsofverse/reports2000/page8.html
For a remembrance of Richard Eberhart by someone who was in his Dartmouth poetry classes around the same time I was, see David Graham’s “A Student’s Memories of Richard Eberhart” at http://poetry.about.com/od/20thcenturypoets/a/grahameberhart.htm