Spring Villanelle

Thanks to the Kellogg-Hubbard Library and Montpelier Alive for hosting my Modern Villanelle Writing Workshop today as part of PoemCity 2014. We had four participants: poet and poetry therapist Mary Rose Dougherty, Indiana transplant & writer John Fox, film instructor and Sestina master Rick Winston, and Veteran and Vermonter George Druin.

We had a lively discussion of the form, its history, and its contents, while also reading a few great poems by Sherman Alexie, Dylan Thomas, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name a few.

Books about Villanells I recommended and used as a reference are Villanelles edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); and The Teachers & writers handbook of poetic forms, edited by Ron Padgett (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2000).

Thanks to our poets who participated today, five new Villanelles have been birthed into the world (I wrote one, too).

Here I'll share with you my own villanelle I wrote this morning, and also here is the form to give you a sense of how to write your own:

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Spring Villanelle 
        by Samantha Kolber


It's been too long since we've seen the sun.
We stumble blind
as if out of the dark cave we've come.

Ready for laughing and fun,
warmth on our skin.
It's been too long since we've seen the sun.

Ready for fingers in dirt, planting a garden.
The ground not harsh, but kind
as if out of the dark cave seeds come

up, released from Hades. Not a son
but a daughter reunites.
It's been too long since she's seen the sun.

And as for mothers and fathers you only get one.
If your childhood's been unkind
it's out of the darkness you've come.

Winter breeds darkness, and spring the growing season.
Mom, dad, I'm really trying
to see the sun.
Out of your dark cave is where I've come from.

Modern Villanelle Writing Workshop with Samantha Kolber: a PoemCity Event

It's that time of year again: National Poetry Month! To celebrate, I have joined the PoemCity 2014 movement in Montpelier, Vermont.

Not only do I have a poem displayed in the window of Julio's restaurant on State Street...

....but I am also teaching a free Modern Villanelle Writing Workshop on Saturday, April 12. Here is the program description:

Come learn about villanelles, and write your own!

“The villanelle is one of the most fascinating and paradoxical of poetic forms, quirky and edgy…prone to moods of obsession and delight; structured through the marriage of repetition and surprise… No wonder it is currently enjoying such a powerful, post-modernist blossoming,” from Villanelles: Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. 

We’ll read aloud examples by poets such as Sherman Alexie and Sylvia Plath to get inspired; then we’ll get busy creating our own villanelles. All levels and ages of writers are welcome.

Hayes Room, Kellogg-Hubbard Library, 135 Main Street | 10 AM

Hope to see you there!