Tuesday Poem: Guest Editor on The Tuesday Poem Hub
Today I am the guest editor on the Tuesday Poem Hub, which is the beating, driving heart of the Tuesday Poem community!
For that reason, I am not posting a poem here today, but inviting you to visit the Hub, where I have selected Rhian Gallagher’s Butterfly, a contemporary villanelle, as this week’s guest poem. Butterfly is included in Rhian’s second collection, Shift, which is forthcoming from Auckland University Press.
But to find out more and read Butterfly, hie thee to the Tuesday Poem Hub!
And do leave a comment—I am sure it will mean a lot to Rhian, with the publication of Shift just around the corner.
To read another poem of Rhian Gallagher’s, go to my Tuesday Poem post of 29 June last year, here, where I featured Rhian’s poem Between, from her first collection, Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon.)
Nice 🙂 Now I have to educate myself about what a villanelle is (that’ll be fun)
Oh, a villanelle is traditionally nineteen lines: 5 tercets ending with a quatrain. The first and third lines of the first tercet (i.e. the ‘refrain’) then alternate to form the final (third) line of the subsequent four tercets, and the final couplet of the quatrain. it used to be that the refrain lines were repeated verbatim, but the contemporary trend is to vary them slightly.
Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” with the refrain lines “Do not go gentle into that good night//rage, rage against the dying of the light” is generally regarded as a very strong example of the villanelle form.
Oh yes, and a villanelle is worked on two end rhymes throughout—that’s important, too.