I think
 she'll pour
 my drink.

 I wink
 at more,
 I think,

 than minx
 who pours
 my drink.

 I sink
 to floor,
 and think

 she stinks!
 I roar,
 "My drink,

 you fink!"
 I snore,
 and think
 I drink.

What is a villanelle? “Seven-syllable lines using two rhymes, distributed in (normally) five tercets and a final quatrain with line repetitions”, saith the Britannica, which also calls it a “rigorous and somewhat monotonous form”. Rigorous it may be, but half the beauty of a villanelle lies in the poet’s efforts to conform without lapsing into monotony. Indeed, by its very nature the villanelle seems to cry out for some sort of wordplay or other - it is hard to write an entirely ‘serious’ poem under the constraints¹.

The most usual form of wordplay is simply the setting up of the repeated lines so that the word meanings shift and change. Schaeffer takes a slightly different approach here - rather than trying to write so ‘naturally’ as to distract attention from the rigid form, he embraces it for humorous effect. For instance, in ‘The Art of the Villanelle’ (see links) he explicitly comments on the repetition - “Attend this line, which you’ll have heard…/ until you’re sick of every word.”²

Today’s poem, on the other hand, uses a different technique - it strips the villanelle of its usual trappings, simultaneously poking fun at both the villanelle and at minimalist verse. (See also the last verse for an example of villanelle-induced wordplay).

Links

Just over half a minstrels ago, we ran Schaeffer’s mindbogglingly good ‘Juggler, Magician, Fool - A Pantoum’: poem #195

The canonical example of the English villanelle is surely Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’: poem #38

which includes, as a bonus, another of Schaeffer’s villanelles, ‘The Art of the Villanelle’

And for some lovely pieces of minimalist verse, see Pound’s ‘In a station of the Metro’: poem #319

and Corman’s untitled poem: poem #348

— Martin