How the Villanelle Form Rooted My Trauma

This article appeared, in slightly different form and under another title, in Bill Walsh’s wonderful essay collection Why I Wrote This Poem: 62 Poets on Creating Their Works (McFarland, 2023)

It shares just one example of the healing power of the Villanelle. To learn more about this wonderful form, you can check out my upcoming class Dancing With Villanelles online through Poets House (June 23, 6:30-8:30 PM)!

A ROOT

What happened when he grabbed me at the root?

I stopped. It all stopped; spirals fought to win

My spiral life (from an unspiraled root —

From thick cigar stubbed in my young tongue’s root —

(Heart beating uncle lifetimes through my skin!)).

What happened, when he grabbed me — at the root

Where women learn to starve — our very root?

One broken body — one more! — broken in?

One spiral life from an unspiraled root-

Filled pomegranate? (in the basement; root-

Husked hell of seed as if seed could have been

What happened.) When he grabbed me at the root,

Did ancestors throw chains down through our root

To rot and winnow, with their pain and sin,

My spiral life? From an unspiraled root?

Oh sisters, keen our sisters / Till the root

Of loving! turns! (and not! from! twisted kin!)

WHAT happened (when) (he) (grabbed) me at the root?

Our spiral life! From an unspiraled root!

My belief that poems are gifts is probably a major reason that my plan, in the winter of 2006, to get up early on a regular schedule and write poems before anyone else woke up lasted only for three mornings. We were living in Maine. So tiny was my writing studio that there was literally room for nothing in it but a huge desk that had been my grandfather’s and my father’s. It had heavy wooden cubbyholes and a hidden ivory-colored buzzer for calling your assistant.

When the alarm rang, those three mornings, I’d turn it off instantly, slip out of bed not to wake my husband, and tiptoe naked and freezing(we turned the thermostat way down at night) to grab my wee-hours writing outfit off the hall floor: wool knitted hat, sheepskin-lined boots, and, during cold weeks like that one, a purple zip-up full-body goosedown ski suit from the thrift shop. By the light of my studio’s one teeny window barely gleaming in the dark dawn, I’d suit up, feeling strange. I was a mother of two with a full-time job, a huge roster of writing and editing projects, and a temperament that gets miserable if I don’t write poetry. I was desperate for time to write. Theoretically, it made sense that I would take time each dawn to create a new poem. But in practice, it felt strange and cynical to start writing with no idea what it would be about.

The Muse to me is a Goddess. I trust that if She wants me to write about something, ever, she will let me know. And she does! Sitting by a stream or a window; washing dishes or sweeping a floor; falling asleep or waking up; watching a candle or waves, a parade or stars, a play or a dance, a party or an argument; opening a book, lying in the dentist chair, receiving a massage, nursing a baby; kissing or fucking or making love, drinking wine or water or tea: even when I am not prepared for the Muse, I am open to Her pulsing voices, whispering or shouting lines, phrases, or entire poems into the darkness of my brain, throwing out the tips of their rhythmical tentacles like spider silk, forcing me to seek paper napkins at a party or coasters in a bar, to commandeer the flyleaves or inside covers of books, the blank spaces in advertisements in theater programs, or the margins and backs of student manuscripts, to scrounge scratch paper from waiters, clerks, and librarians, to stash tiny notebooks in the waistbands of skirts with no pockets, to hoard index cards in hidden spots in cars or in plastic bags in kayaks, and to harbor legal pads and flashlights under the bed for scribbling my lyric poems in the dark. And I have an outer Muse as well. She’s the one who prompts me to promise poems for Valentine’s Day, a baby naming, a library dedication, a crisis like 9-11, a feminist rally, or a witch-circle to the people I feel accountable to as a poet—and who incites me to create narrative poetry, like my epic on abortion, or dramatic poetry, like my plays. Poems written for both my inner and outer Muses feel necessary and useful, connected and alive. I never throw out a poem that the Muse has gifted to me. I honor them all, saving them to revisit and revise even when they seem to be leading nowhere, and then I coax and dance with them until the truth they carry the way a fruit carries a seed finally sprouts, then blooms with my help to reveal itself, just as I’d trusted in Her that it would.

While earning my MA in creative writing at the University of Houston in the mid-1980’s, though, I learned about a completely different approach to writing poems: “getting a poem out of it,” to use the words of one of my teachers there, Cynthia MacDonald. This way involves sitting down to write a poem about anything or nothing, not because of the call of the Muse or your tribe or community, but simply because you have decided it’s time to write a poem and you figure you’ll hit on some stimulating topic. “That was an awful thing that happened,” I’d hear Cynthia say, “but at least you can get a poem out of it.” The phrase made me wince, as if the fount of Helicon were natural gas being fracked for profit regardless of the destruction of ecosystems. Of course, sometimes it may be necessary to force a lyric poem, if there’s a deadline or assignment to meet and the Muse remains silent. But to my mind those moments are exceptions that prove the rule. To accept “getting a poem out of it” as an ars poetica felt dangerous, as if it could cause muddiness in the creative waters and lead to confusing true inspiration with ego. It felt disrespectful, like spending precious poetic energy on a whim or an exercise—or worse, a lie. It felt depressing—calculating, cynical, lonely, and no fun.

So, after only three days and three poems that Maine winter, I returned to warmer, lazier mornings and my normal writing process of scribbling on napkins at the Muse’s beck and call. But a new deed had been done, during my three-day flirtation with ego as Muse. Yes, two of the poems were just as I’d feared, distracting and forced—empty, useless exercises. It still drains my poetic energy to recall them. But the poem I’d written on the second day was alive. It was called “A,” which was maybe a nod to The Scarlet Letter, and it was about a subject I’d written about cryptically and indirectly for thirty-eight years but had not addressed directly before, barely even in my diary. And yes, there may be a reason for this: I had recently started Rolfing, a process of very deep bodywork. The second session had suddenly and dramatically awakened the memory of being molested by my uncle at age twelve, and I had ended up sobbing in fetal position on the floor of the Rolfer’s studio . . .

“A” told that story of that early wounding, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Though it was only six lines of iambic pentameter, it felt like a poem—not just a piece of a poem.

A

A wedge of posture driven in to death.

A weight of shoulders forced in like old stairs.

A heartbeat thick as rain that finds no root;

A wealth of burning rawness dropped like fruit.

A skin seared into mine. A foreign skin.

A silence where there could have been a bird.

It also felt unrelenting and hollow. Inscrutable. Closed. When I tried to revise it, it sat there unbudging, like the little shiny trick boxes that sometimes used to appear in my childhood Christmas stocking. The trick boxes were impossible to open unless you knew how to slide back a hidden panel and reveal the spring that would pop up the lid. Was there a hidden spring that would let me open the poem, let more air in, invite in breath and contrast, energy and movement, discovery and change?

I put “A” into a book manuscript. In my poetic world, this is not necessarily a mark of completion. You’d think that gathering together forty-five or fifty finished poems, many of which have already appeared in magazines, would yield a finished book. But instead, as I’ve leafed through the manuscript pages of each of my poetry collections, preparing to send it to a publisher and imagining it all in print, I notice poem after supposedly finished poem starting to thrash around in vulnerable and embarrassing ways, screaming with new assurance, now that they are gathered close to their siblings, the truth that they’re nowhere close to finished after all (interestingly, the only collection of mine for which this didn’t happen was Spells: New and Selected Poems, whose poems remained calm and finished while being collected. I take this as a sign that the revision process before publication in their original volumes had been completed).

So I entered a new revision phase, moving through the manuscript and spiraling through layers on layers of interlocking edits, uploading the changes to all the poems and to the manuscript’s order and organization and printing it out over and over. If there are many months between successive drafts of a manuscript, I welcome the time because it allows me to reenter the poetic labyrinth with a fresh eye. I’m so attuned to this method by now that the instant I turn the title page and begin to read the title, the dedication, and the Table of Contents, I can feel my heartbeat slow. By the time I begin reading the first poem, my consciousness has become so still that each syllable moves like the circling ripples caused by a slight wind on the surface of water. It’s a combination of listening and feeling, as much as it is reading or seeing. My attention to the universe of the manuscript is so entire that it blocks out any noise around me. But if anyone addresses me directly, the spell is broken. Crashingly. It takes up to an hour for my body to calm down and recover. Then I need to start from the beginning again, regathering the momentum in which the deepest trajectory of the manuscript will reveal itself.

These manuscript-absorption sessions are physical more than intellectual experiences. Turning the pages, poem by poem, I hear the words, or feel them, resounding through my body so fully that anything that’s off scratches me physically, painfully. It’s not a matter of thinking. At the height of the process I become a spider spinning all the threads of the manuscript out of my belly anew, all of me disappeared except the part—at once will, mind, body, heart, and spirit— that is listening any unfinished poems deeper still, combining and intercutting poems, reworking and rearranging poems, reordering and resectioning and retitling poems, so they can be better heard and felt. The process continues until each poem has “clicked shut like a box” (as Yeats described it), or else has revealed itself as what I would call “dead” to the current revision process and been removed.

“A” was different. The most recalcitrant poem I had ever birthed, it stayed in the manuscript year after year, not clicking shut and not dying either, just sitting there un-revisable, refusing to open the tiniest door into the deeper poem-layers where growth and change can happen. Its secret panel would not reveal itself; its secret lock would not budge. On the pages around it, other poems changed, arrived, changed again, left the manuscript. But no matter what part of the manuscript I put “A” in, it just stayed there— locked, shut, stubborn, impervious, impossible to kick out because it simply would not die.

I did more bodywork. Found more memories resurfacing. Wrote a little prose essay called “Traces.”. Got stronger in my public life. Completed a twenty-year dream of co-editing an anthology of villanelles. Went deeper into therapy. Journeyed with a Norse shaman. Got an agent who guided me to spend a year writing a lengthy proposal for a memoir. Co-created a powerful women’s circle. And kept trying to work on the poem. In 2011, the year I got the agent, I renamed it. Now called “Silence,” it was still the same stubborn poem:

SILENCE

A wedge of posture driven in to death.

A weight of shoulders forced in like old stairs.

A heartbeat thick as rain that finds no root;

A wealth of burning rawness dropped like fruit.

A skin seared into mine. A foreign skin.

A silence where there could have been a bird.

The next year, I took two steps: renaming it “Assault” and breaking it into couplets:

ASSAULT

A wedge of posture driven in to death.

A weight of shoulders forced in like old stairs.

A heartbeat thick as rain that finds no root;

A wealth of burning rawness dropped like fruit.

A skin seared into mine. A foreign skin.

A silence where there could have been a bird.

Now “Assault” was the poem that sat there, tight in its coiled sourness. Still no invitation, no crack of light, no frayed edge. Like the impermeable tightness of the muscles that held my repressed pain, the poem seemed solid, self-contained, as if it needed nothing. There wasn’t anything else I could do but let it be, holding its spot in my manuscript. At least it deserved that much.

And then came one rainy summer night when I found myself alone with the manuscript in a small old cabin. A full moon loomed outside, a hard wind rattled loose panes that needed caulking. and I sat crisscross wearing three layers of sweaters. Piles of papers rested on my knees and around me on the green futon couch as, working by the light of three kerosene lamps and five candles, I moved through the familiar but ever-changing array of pages cutting out some poems, revising others . . . And then, in this deep space of peacefulness, something frayed. Something happened. A hint of green amid heavy clods of clay. A circle of light below the surface of an eggshell. A footstep in a passage on the other side of an impervious-looking wall. Suddenly I noticed differently the rhyme in lines 3-4, which I had read a few hundred times: “fruit” and “root.” In a flash, “A heartbeat thick as rain that finds no root” became the repetend in a villanelle, and “A skin seared into mine. A foreign skin” the center of a villanelle stanza. I had found the poem’s hidden spring, hiding in plain sight; it showed me that the insistent grip of the traumatic moment on my memory was a perfect theme for the relentless, circling, healing dance of my new favorite poetic form.

That full-moon night I scrawled my exuberance across the backs of multiple pages of the manuscript, in green ink I’m pretty sure. First spurted out gigantic words--VILLANELLE!!!!!!!!!! BINGO!!!! THAT’S IT!!!!!! AT LAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THANK YOU GODDESS!!!!!!! — and then flowed the poem’s first version in villanelle form. “A” would not be finished for a while. But for the first time in its six-year life it was accessible, open to revision. For the following five years or so I revised it as a villanelle, switching and rearranging stanzas and refrains as well as words and lines. Here’s a 2015 version that still does not yet follow the villanelle form exactly, including the unrhymed words “death” and “bird,” and longer than a classic villanelle by two stanzas:

TWELVE

A wedge of posture driven in to death.

A weight of shoulders forced in like old stairs.

A childhood stricken like a blasted root.

A family story coming back to root.

A sad strange love with no new way to spill

A wealth of burning rawness dropped like fruit.

A pomegranate in a basement. Fruit

As red and angry as it could have been.

A childhood stricken like a blasted root,

A heartbeat thick as rain that finds no root,

A kiss so hard that love was twisted in,

A wealth of burning rawness dropped like fruit.

A family tree with anger at the root.

A skin. Seared into mine. A foreign skin,

A childhood, stricken like a blasted root.

A taste—cigars—deep in my sweet tongue’s root.

A huge hand— harsh—against my smoothest skin.

A wealth of burning rawness dropped like fruit,

A mother-loss, an orphan come to root,

A body broken, one more, broken in,

A childhood stricken like a blasted root,

A root of terror, root of fright, oh root

Of tortured body, decades deep as sin,

Oh heartbeat, thick as rain, oh find no root—

Oh, silence— where there could have been a bird.

Over the next three years of revision, the poem grew tighter and more complex as I entered it more deeply and began to claim the right fully to express my experience of the molestation and its aftermath: the rage and agony, the generational nature of the trauma, my fierce insistence on transformative healing not only for myself but for all who have suffered in this way. Parentheses were added (a poetic strategy I inherited from my mother Maggie Finch and used many times in my book Calendars). A slash was added in homage to the style of my beloved teacher and mentor Ntozake Shange, who holds such powerful literary space for rage and healing. Also, as I revised the book further (under names including Coven, Amulet, Amulets for Brave Women, Invocations, Invocations to the Five Directions, Spiral, and again Amulet), I associated a punctuation mark with each of its five sections, and “Root” incorporated semicolons—the punctuation mark associated in my system with iambic meter, awareness, and the mind. As I developed my symbolic cosmology, the imagery of spirals surfaced in the spiraling villanelle form. And along the way, the form’s two repetends evolved to end with the same word, a pattern I’d never done or seen before, but which seemed to have arisen from the unrelenting nature of the trauma that fueled the poem.

By the time I finished “A Root,” it had been nearly twelve years since I had reexperienced through Rolfing the wounding that, in just a few minutes of January 1969, had shocked me apart from the first twelve years of my life. By the time it appeared in Poetry in March 2019, I was living in Washington DC and only a few lines remained from the original version I’d written on a freezing morning in Maine. I didn’t mean for the poem to take twelve years to complete, but the fact that it did seems inevitable now: a year of revising to a year of healing. A year of childhood, a year of post-menopause. Twelve years of perfecting a poem, twelve years of reclaiming a self.