Spirits

Visual Poetry by Individualist

Author’s Notes:
I have done some research and learned about a form of poetry which while new to me has been around for some 300 years called the Villanelle. The following website does a far better job than I can of describing it so I will post a link here: Poetic Forms: The Villanelle by Conrad Geller .

Essentially the Villanelle works around two base lines of Poetry in six stanzas. The first five stanzas have three lines each and the last has four. The first stanza has the first baseline as the first line and the second base line as the third and last. In the next five stanzas the first lines always rhyme with the base line stanzas which also rhyme. The last line is a baseline stanza line each one repeated after the other. The last stanza of the poem is always the two baselines. The second line of each stanza always has the same rhyme.

For this poem I have chosen to follow the rules of iambic pentameter (see the author’s notes of the poem Freedom for a discussion of what this is). I have used a more complicated form by making the first line of my baseline the masculine form with 10 syllables. The second line is the 11 syllable feminine form. This is created by adding an unstressed syllable to the end of the 10 syllable masculine form
(da Dum da Dum da Dum da Dum da Dum da). In the remaining stanzas the first line will always be the opposite of the baseline used in the third line of the poem (alternating masculine feminine then feminine masculine as the base lines themselves alternate).

For the Visual piece of the poetry I have created a picture frame that is a horizontal line roughly one fourth of the vertical length of the picture. It includes a picture dedicated to that line of the base poem and is repeated in the order top or bottom as the line of the poem itself. I will call this the baseline frame. The remainder of the picture is the stanza frame which is dedicated to the remaining lines of the poem. Thus my Visual Villanelle will have six pictures one for each stanza. The fist and last stanzas will have three frames and the four middle ones will have two frames.

This was fun as it gave me an opportunity to play with the visual portion of the poetry and try and develop rules of structure to follow the way the lines of the poem itself follows structure.