As I mention in my review of his work, Randall Mann’s poetry collection Complaint in the Garden focuses a lot on the use of form and pushing boundaries. Because of this, I chose to write in similar way—pushing the content boundaries of my poem while maintaining a fairly rigid structure.
When deciding on which form to use, I knew right away that I wanted to do a villanelle. Although Mann uses pantoum, sonnet, and a couple other forms, I’ve always been intrigued by the villanelle’s repetition of whole lines—something I find to be particularly challenging. And a challenge it was. I approached this poem by trying to write a line that I felt would be strong enough to show up in the poem multiple times. I began with phrases such as “Daughter like father,” “Cut the strands,” and “I’d never helped bury someone before.” The first I thought was too plain and common. I thought the other two would be intriguing, but when I began to actually write the poem, I just couldn’t think of a way to make the lines relevant to the rest of the stanzas.
After a couple hours of trying to come up with a strong line, I switched tactics. Instead of trying to organize the poem around one line, I decided to outline my poem around its rhymes—a technique that made writing a sestina amazing easy! I thought of words like still, chill, bell, gather, father, and other really simple words. While this was more effective in planning the poem, the rhymes I kept thinking of were too rudimentary. After all, one thing I was taught about rhyme is that if I’m going to do it, make it complex, interesting—nothing that’s already been done. Eventually, my focus on the rhymes locked me into a Dr. Seuss spiral in which the only words I could come up with were of the fish-dish, cat-hat variety.
Once again I switched techniques, this time focusing on the theme of my poem— which “difficult” topic could I explore? Mann’s work concentrates on homosexuality, drag, and pornography, so I figured I could try searching outside of those topics. Unlike writing a strong line to repeat or finding a sophisticated set of rhymes, thinking of a theme for this poem had its own difficulties. What topic was outside my comfort zone, but that I was still able to write about? My default topic was disease, either in relation to myself or to family members. I nixed this idea, though, because, after all, I was trying to challenge boundaries not only enforced by society, but that I had put on myself as well.
Lately, I had begun exploring the themes of broken love, such as is the case in divorce, so I focused on pushing boundaries associated with relationships, namely the idea of an independent woman succumbing to an abusive partner. I felt that this would be an interesting scenario to explore due to the woman’s independence prior to the relationship.
In order to explore this topic, one of my main lines was “You leave me at least once a week,” which introduced the question of why stay with someone who keeps leaving you. The fact that this line was one of the repeated lines also emphasized that idea of repeatedly being abandoned by the one partner. In contrast to this abandonment, I wrote the line “your handprints blossoming on my physique.” This gave an imagery to accompany the abuse left by the abuser—even though he was gone, he still affected the speaker. To further emphasize this idea of abuse and manipulation, I wanted to use the phrase “tongue in cheek” without simply being a turn of phrase. To add depth to this phrase and use it to add complexity to the poem, I wrote “your [his] tongue in my cheek,” which helped to further demonstrate the relationship between the two characters.
It was at this point, halfway through the already-short poem, that I began to lose some momentum. I wasn’t sure how to expand on the relationship while keeping it fresh—enter my earlier idea in regards to the speaker’s independence prior to the relationship. To show some of this independence, I used phrases like “resistant [to him]” and “my interest piqued,” which gave the speaker some agency in terms of pursuing the relationship—she was the one who chose to “accept the flowers,” who “[stole] peeks,” and who “opened love’s door.”
By making the speaker the character that actively chose to start the relationship, rather than falling into it, I hoped to show how the abuser would have taken advantage of her openness to the experience and how this could happen to not just “victim-type” people. The active language in relation to the victim of the poem suggests an active role in choosing to be with her partner, at least at first; however, the fact that the abuser is the one to leave the shows the reversal of power in their relationship.
This form’s repetition helped to emphasize this idea, because, while the speaker’s agency shows up in the changing middle lines, the abusive partner is always consistently showing up as the control in the poem—his active role of leaving her is unceasing, even while her control in the relationship starts strong and wanes by the end of the relationship and the poem.
When deciding on which form to use, I knew right away that I wanted to do a villanelle. Although Mann uses pantoum, sonnet, and a couple other forms, I’ve always been intrigued by the villanelle’s repetition of whole lines—something I find to be particularly challenging. And a challenge it was. I approached this poem by trying to write a line that I felt would be strong enough to show up in the poem multiple times. I began with phrases such as “Daughter like father,” “Cut the strands,” and “I’d never helped bury someone before.” The first I thought was too plain and common. I thought the other two would be intriguing, but when I began to actually write the poem, I just couldn’t think of a way to make the lines relevant to the rest of the stanzas.
After a couple hours of trying to come up with a strong line, I switched tactics. Instead of trying to organize the poem around one line, I decided to outline my poem around its rhymes—a technique that made writing a sestina amazing easy! I thought of words like still, chill, bell, gather, father, and other really simple words. While this was more effective in planning the poem, the rhymes I kept thinking of were too rudimentary. After all, one thing I was taught about rhyme is that if I’m going to do it, make it complex, interesting—nothing that’s already been done. Eventually, my focus on the rhymes locked me into a Dr. Seuss spiral in which the only words I could come up with were of the fish-dish, cat-hat variety.
Once again I switched techniques, this time focusing on the theme of my poem— which “difficult” topic could I explore? Mann’s work concentrates on homosexuality, drag, and pornography, so I figured I could try searching outside of those topics. Unlike writing a strong line to repeat or finding a sophisticated set of rhymes, thinking of a theme for this poem had its own difficulties. What topic was outside my comfort zone, but that I was still able to write about? My default topic was disease, either in relation to myself or to family members. I nixed this idea, though, because, after all, I was trying to challenge boundaries not only enforced by society, but that I had put on myself as well.
Lately, I had begun exploring the themes of broken love, such as is the case in divorce, so I focused on pushing boundaries associated with relationships, namely the idea of an independent woman succumbing to an abusive partner. I felt that this would be an interesting scenario to explore due to the woman’s independence prior to the relationship.
In order to explore this topic, one of my main lines was “You leave me at least once a week,” which introduced the question of why stay with someone who keeps leaving you. The fact that this line was one of the repeated lines also emphasized that idea of repeatedly being abandoned by the one partner. In contrast to this abandonment, I wrote the line “your handprints blossoming on my physique.” This gave an imagery to accompany the abuse left by the abuser—even though he was gone, he still affected the speaker. To further emphasize this idea of abuse and manipulation, I wanted to use the phrase “tongue in cheek” without simply being a turn of phrase. To add depth to this phrase and use it to add complexity to the poem, I wrote “your [his] tongue in my cheek,” which helped to further demonstrate the relationship between the two characters.
It was at this point, halfway through the already-short poem, that I began to lose some momentum. I wasn’t sure how to expand on the relationship while keeping it fresh—enter my earlier idea in regards to the speaker’s independence prior to the relationship. To show some of this independence, I used phrases like “resistant [to him]” and “my interest piqued,” which gave the speaker some agency in terms of pursuing the relationship—she was the one who chose to “accept the flowers,” who “[stole] peeks,” and who “opened love’s door.”
By making the speaker the character that actively chose to start the relationship, rather than falling into it, I hoped to show how the abuser would have taken advantage of her openness to the experience and how this could happen to not just “victim-type” people. The active language in relation to the victim of the poem suggests an active role in choosing to be with her partner, at least at first; however, the fact that the abuser is the one to leave the shows the reversal of power in their relationship.
This form’s repetition helped to emphasize this idea, because, while the speaker’s agency shows up in the changing middle lines, the abusive partner is always consistently showing up as the control in the poem—his active role of leaving her is unceasing, even while her control in the relationship starts strong and wanes by the end of the relationship and the poem.