The Market Share of Niceties
Last spring Peter Kline of the UVA MFA program read two triolets (a poetic form in iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme ABaAabAB that was new to me) at our graduate conference. The first two lines are also the last, but their meaning the second time has shifted slightly. The first line is repeated half-way through the poem, marking this shift; I used this rule in my triolet to indicate the cyclical nature of these behavior patterns.
I’ve spent the afternoon reading Edna St. Vincent Millay, regretting we do not spend more time with female authors and poets in the advanced Modernism survey I’m teaching this semester; how fresh Millay’s work reads—she always begins her poems in the middle of situations. This week in class we are discussing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a pleasant respite from the Joyce/Yeats/ Eliot trajectory of recent weeks. Rereading Dalloway I’m reminded of the significance of her details; Woolf builds elegant unsaids into her neatly crafted exchanges and we forget that as readers we are privy to the free indirect discourse unavailable to the characters. I thought about Clarissa’s joy at the beautiful London morning, her embrace of ceremony, her unfailing politeness, and I wrote my triolet.
“A Pretty Hewn Town” is posted in the portfolio section.
Leave a Reply
Posted Tuesday, September 26th, 2006, 4:02 pm | Filed in Books, Pedagogy. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
