#trethewey

If you’ve read or listened to many poems, it’s possible that you have read or heard a villanelle - its a 19-line format in which the lines repeat in a pattern that could be mistaken for some form of abstract algebra ( A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2. ) except that, when done right, there is a pleasing methodical circularity to it - you might say a sense of closure. Good examples include One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, and Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, or I wake to sleep and take my waking slow by Theodore Rothke.

Today’s selection is not a villanelle, but I wanted to get you thinking about patterns and about closure. We’re going to talk about former U.S. Poet Laureate, and Pulitzer prize-winner  Natasha Trethewey, and her 18-line poem (1 short of a villanelle) titled Myth. 

This is a poem about loss, and the difficulty of dealing with it, and the tantalizing idea that, if you hold onto a waking dream tightly enough, it might become reality.

I was asleep while you were dying. It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow I make between my slumber and my waking,

So what is so unusual about the pattern or structure of this poem? It is a perfect inversion: eight lines, asterisk, the same eight lines in the reverse order. The same futile return to where she began, mirroring the thoughts and emotions carried by her words:    

So I try taking you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning, my eyes open, I find you do not follow. Again and again, this constant forsaking.

Sadly, the waking dream cannot be realized. What is lost stays lost. There are times when the words help transcend what the reality is, and times when they say, in this case on multiple levels, that they are what they are. 

Reality triumphs over myth.

This is the year of Dr Whooves searching for his own special telephone box!

This is photo number 200 of 365.

Here is Dr Whooves looking at a phone box at Trethewey, in Cornwall, England. This is not the box he is looking for.

“This is the great cultural force of poetry. In its intimacy, the individual voice of the poem can show us ourselves by showing us the interior life of someone else, can inspire in us great empathy—​a sacred gift—​and can bring us back from the depths of despair.”

“No longer closed to me, my mother could be resurrected in the sacred language of a poem, brought back for a moment of recollection—​a stay against the inevitable—​through the bittersweet pleasures of the elegy.” 

“In that simple invocation of the power of language, I find again what is not only comforting, but revolutionary about poetry—​its communal nature, how one can be absolutely alone with it, but at once part of something larger, ancient, and ongoing.” 

It’s easy to forget sometimes that Toronto, as we know it today, is made up of a number of former villages – Parkdale, Brockton, Leaside, Swansea, Mimico to name a few.   Some were absorbed by the city early on, while others were swept up in the amalgamation of 1998; the one that made a municipal Frankenstein’s monster of Toronto, East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough and just plain old…