The Villanelle

Looks like blogging is going to help me in my studies. I am researching poetry forms, looking at villanelles right now and would love your feedback. What does the poem say to you? Apologies for the MLA citing in the intro...I need to write a critical, formal essay and these are my notes:

The villanelle began as an Italian rustic field song, sung as a round, which most likely accompanied various stages of farm tasks. This poetic form might be classified as a work song, a form most identified with African-American heritage involving repetition with the rhythm of the task. The song-like origins of the form unconsciously allow us to enter the language of spirit. A liberated language, beyond words, beyond utterances, beyond non-verbal communication, the language of spirit is an integration of all three forms of communication in a story without syntax – a story that divorces itself from context in order to generate the new. The villanelle was revived by the French, via Jean Passerat who gave the form its current metrical and rhyme structure. Oscar Wilde unleashed the form into the 20th century with his villanelle written in 1891. The contemporary appeal for such a rigid form, according to Strand and Boland (8), is that it refuses a linear narrative, and instead cultivates a spiraling repetition that allows both the reader and the poet to experience a transformational déjà vu. Like the double helix at the core of our being, a spiral motion and shape allows us to witness where we have been without going back and glimpse at where we are going without charging forward before we are ready. “Its repeated lines, the circularity of its stanzas, become, as the reader listens, a repudiation of forward motion, of temporality and therefore, finally, of dissolution” (Strand 8). The villanelle is a form that remains in the present; an ideal form for holding in the thin places of our lives while still having the velcrox of the known with the possibility of re-configuration or resurrection into the new unknown. As Dorothee Soelle says in her book on mysticism and resistance, “We need a new language in order to plunge into the cloud of unknowing” (Soelle 59).

If a man falls in a forest

will he rise
from clay and solitude, by degrees,
through a blessed throat of communion cries

he lies
naked among russet leaves.
Will he rise?

Winter skies ~
dream haloes light frozen trees
and a blessed throat of communion cries.

He relies
on the night watch, crouching, clutching rib and knees
Will he rise?

What if the male of the species dies?
Released to a starry night crossing, he pleas
through a blessed throat of communion cries.

What if he lives, cornered, at sunrise,
strapped in gun-metal gray, old way, patriarchal seize
Will he lie or will he rise
through a blessed throat of communion cries?