Metavillanelle

In college, I had a professor I didn't appreciate at the time. It's odd, because I have one of his books of poems, and I really like them, and he also did more to challenge us to become real poets (not just blank verse scribblers) than any other professor I had. Maybe it was his personality for which I had no love. I really don't remember. What I do remember now is that he made us write different kinds of poems to stretch our minds and force us to see poetry as something more than just a blob of words with no rules. I didn't get it at the time. I had written sonnets and heroic couplets and I had no fear of meter and rhyme, but I was still in that first-love with poetry that led me to spew youthful emotions into broken lines on a page and call that a poem. Anyway, thank you James Reiss, author of, among other works, I'm sure, Ten Thousand Good Mornings and sometime professor of English 320 at Miami University, for making me write syncopated verse and sonnets and pastorals and villanelles and whatever else you made us do that annoyed me at the time. This leads me to my own personal challenge of the last week or so, finally finished to my satisfaction:

I dreamt in verse that waking couldn’t quell.

For once I set my mind a task to write

a verse that lent itself to villanelle,

it labored through the day, and when night fell

my restless mind lay writing through the night

in dreams of verse that waking could not quell.

At dawn a daydream kept me under spell:

that poem’s lines were written out of light

in verses bending rays to villanelle.

If by the end of day I can’t compel

the verse to close with lines that fit it right,

I’ll dream in verse no waking dreams can quell.

In house, or yard, or bed asleep, I dwell

with wakeful lines that whisper through the night

in dreams of verse no waking thoughts can quell

when seeking lines to bend to villanelle.

You have heard this kind of poem before, whether you realize it or not. (Click the link. Do it. JUST DO IT!) It is, as it knows itself to be, a villanelle. I think the name came from the villain that came up with the format because it is a complete pain in the brain to write one. This is the second one I've written in my life. The first was somehow lost to computer data perdition, but I do remember that Prof Reiss kept telling me, no matter how much I worked at it, that my two tag lines didn't evolve enough over the course of the poem. I had no idea what he meant, and frankly, I still don't. Hey, J.R.-- how did I do this time?