Writing With the Net Up

I got your iambic pentameter right here, Bob.

Photo by Mrika Selimi on Unsplash

“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” - Robert Frost

Free-verse writer, from long back — happily scouting the border between poetry and lyrical prose, crafting cadence into unmetered lines and finding ways for unrhymed words to sing with each other. And if Mr. Frost wants the net put up? I can play. Have a sonnet and a villanelle — both woeful in content (sorry about that, I wrote them in my thirties while I was Working Through Some Stuff) and both classically true to form if I say so myself.

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Tears

Walk upright, slowly. Not a drop is spilled
that laps the vessel's lip; still you contain
this hoarded stormfall, this salt sea of pain
here in one cup years-deep confined, distilled.
Others may raise rinsed faces to the rain,
fling careless limbs free, laughing, dance handfast
on sweet-soaked earth; anxious, apart, you cast
no glance away to gladness, only strain
for balance, balance. Stumble now, this vast
and thirsty ocean spills, and what shall drown?
The empty vessel cracks and spirals down,
tide-wracked and foundered, purposeless at last.
Walk upright, slowly. Balance pain and pride;
anguished, intact, you still contain the tide.

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Villanelle for Valentine's Day

Indifferent now, I cut my heart to lace:
a raveled tissue of recalled desire,
stained crimson by the thought of your white face.

With unpretending shears I snip and chase,
and toss away the scraps to feed the fire;
indifferent now, I cut my heart to lace,

add here a ribbon, there a spot of paste,
a woman's picture -- me when younger, shyer,
stained crimson by the thought of your white face,

flushed as the victor in a thrilling race,
first at your feet, to give my heart entire.
Indifferent now, I cut my heart to lace

to frame this token of a foolish grace
I would have had us share, in shared desire.
Stained crimson by the thought of your white face,

I leave the token, love, to take my place;
since all my heart is more than you require,
indifferent now, I cut my heart to lace,
stained crimson by the thought of your white face.

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My, oh my.

The sonnet was written at a time when I’d just begun to dip into a particular well of memory and emotions that I had avoided visiting for years. I had so much going on inside that my circuits were jammed: speaking a single sentence aloud, or letting a single tear fall, was a monumental effort. A friend who listened to me talking about the tears that were so hard to shed (I could talk about that) speculated that I must be full to the brim of tears inside, and what care it must take to move through the world without spilling them. And I knew she wasn’t wrong, and bingo — I had a poem to write. A sonnet, though? Why a sonnet?

The villanelle … well, it’s pretty clear what happened to prompt the villanelle, isn’t it? A man with whom I’d had a long, complicated, selectively intimate relationship decided it was time to back away. I was sad and hurt and pissed off, and I was in a store looking at a packet of those heart-shaped paper doilies that people use on fancy plates and in February crafts, and bingo — I had a poem to write. Which turned out to be … a villanelle? Huh.

I’ll say this for the classic poetic forms: they make really effective containers for powerful emotions. Engaging with meter and rhyme to shape vocabulary and expression — it creates a layer of thought and craft between the poet and the raw feeling, it gives you a schematic that lets you build this thing out of the assorted bits of whatever mess you’re surrounded by. And if you stay honest with both the schematic and your material, you end up saying stuff that’s true. The ironic dignity that runs through the sonnet (contain the tide? Oh, sweetie…), the ruthless graceful slash-and-bleed of the villanelle — those were worth capturing, and the poetic forms helped me capture them. These poems, like the situations that inspired them, are decades old now; I wish I could remember why, in either case, I decided to skip free verse and put the net up. I don’t remember, but I’m glad it happened.

So tell me, please: what’s it like to read poems like these, compared to free verse? Does the form make them easier or harder to enter into? Do they sound like my voice, or as if I’m speaking with an accent? I’d be interested to know.