“How to Kill a Poem Dead” - a protest villanelle
To kick off National Poetry Month, here is one of the two poems I’ve ever written. It’s also a poetry quiz: it contains 19 allusions to classic poems. How many can you spot?
I wrote an introductory essay when this was published in the British magazine The Oldie to explain the villanelle form, TPCASST, and why on earth I would write this. Here, I will put it after the villanelle since it gives away two of the answers and contains a clue to a third.
“How to Kill a Poem Dead”: A Protest Villanelle
Inspired by my son's 11th-grade homework, in which he was asked to analyze a poem using the TPCASTT method
To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable
Jargon, jargon everywhere, nor any tiger burning
A poem etherized upon a table
A pleasure-dome, a demi-paradise of fable
Slithy toves and dappled things resist discerning
To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable
This naming of parts, to mince and quince a label
Connotation, Attitude and Shift, the rags of learning
A poem etherized upon a table
Time’s winged chariot rusts unburnished in the stable
The body electric fritzed by credit-earning
To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable
Bent double, knock-kneed, my mind unstable
Nevermore! Rage, rage against the churning
A poem etherized upon a table
Ignorant armies will the bee-loud glade disable
Leaden-eyed despair is fast returning
To use this TPCASTT method I’m unable
A poem etherized upon a table.
Click on to the next post for the answers. If you’re curious about how this poem came about, read on.
My son, Rafael Guevara, created this AI image -
“Mom, you’ve got a First in English from Oxford,” said my extremely frustrated eleventh-grade son one night. “Can you do this?”
He handed me a sheet of paper detailing the TPCASTT method for analyzing a poem. Title. Paraphrase. Connotation. Attitude. Shift. Title (again). Theme. It made my head spin just to look at it. A wave of exhaustion crashed through me.
No, I couldn’t do this.
I took it to my next-door neighbor, who has an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. His eyes glazed over. He sighed. He turned the paper over and looked at the back. He may even have turned it upside down.
He couldn’t do it either.
Does any poet write a poem thinking, I hope someone analyzes this! I’m gonna floor them with my Attitude and Shift. I’m gonna connotate this puppy so tight kids will go mad trying to paraphrase it.
No hands up in the room? Amazing.
What is the point of this? To train children that everything has to be reduced to a brain-numbing formula, so they’ll become good little employees? To make Language Arts respectably academic by dissecting a poem the way biology class dissects a frog? It certainly doesn’t teach kids to appreciate poetry. It teaches them to hate it for being recalcitrant and maliciously opaque, like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces deliberately don’t quite fit.
So there I was, fuming about that poor froggy poem, and a phrase popped into my mind: “a poem etherized upon a table.” (An echo of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”) That offered an outlet for my angry energy—write a protest poem!
Writing a poem is not my usual reaction to feeling annoyed. I did challenge myself once, when I was 17, to write a sonnet, because I was stuck in a nowhere town in Yugoslavia with not much to do in the evenings. This, nearly 40 years later, would be my second poetic attempt.
The only way I could do it, I felt, was to have a tight formula. So I decided to try a villanelle: six stanzas, three lines each (except the last), two lines repeated in a set rhythm, iambic pentameter, and only two rhymes for the entire poem. Super demanding: but at least the form would tell me what to do.
Immediately I got another phrase: “the rags of learning,” an echo of Donne’s “The Sun Rising” (“Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time”), one of my favorite poems. Great, my two rhymes for the entire villanelle are “table” and “learning.” Not making it easy on myself, am I? But by that point it was too late.
I sat up till almost 2 a.m. that night, and completed a draft villanelle with eleven poems quoted in it. My son thought it was hilarious—and still does. A completely unintended side effect of his mother’s obsessional villanelle was to give him an appreciation for, at least, the appreciation of poetry.
Over the next week or so, mostly when I was driving, I’d think of other poems to work into the villanelle. Everything had to scan and had to make sense. When I got to seventeen poems quoted, I thought I’d maxed it out. But a year later, dissatisfaction started to nibble at my fingers. There were a few slack places where I could shoehorn in another poem. Plus, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” was missing. That, along with “Rage, rage,” took me up to nineteen—the same number of lines as a villanelle.