A Garden's Labor

During my brief visit with my Dad, we went to the Boerner Botanical Gardens in Whitnall Park. It's been years since I've been to the gardens, which are one of the highlights of the Milwaukee county park system. Years ago, the park included a section with thousands and thousands of tulips, each year carefully planted according to various color schemes. Since it's well past tulip season, we didn't venture to that part of the park.

However, the roses were in their glory, as well as many of the perennials. Two specimens seared in my mind's eye were the alliums with their enormous flowering globes and the 'Sum and Substance' hosta with its massive leaves.

The garden's web site includes this bit of history:

Two federal programs having the greatest impact on Whitnall Park (and other parks as well) were the Civilian Conservation Corps, more commonly referred to as the CCC, and the Works Progress Administration, or the WPA.

And these days, much of the upkeep is at the hands of volunteers, so says Dad (who also reminds me the volunteer community is an essential vertebra in the backbone that is America's workforce). Thus I am reminded gardens and people go hand-in-hand; each shapes and cultivates the other.

Meditation on a Meditative Form--The Villanelle

I met with a couple of the lovely and talented writers of KaPow! yesterday to discuss two villanelles I had written recently. (Poets.org gives this explanation of the form.) As we were talking about the form, I was trying to articulate why the form sometimes works so well. Because eight of the 19 lines are repeated lines and the entire poem hinges on two rhymes, it seems to me that when a villanelle works:

• The repeated lines change or deepen in meaning as the poem progresses.
  
• The variable lines support and push on the repeated lines.
• Much energy comes from the union of the repeated and variable lines.
  
• Its subject matter is usually not narrative in nature but meditative.

For me, this last point is important. In much of my poetry, particularly free-verse, I am trying to get from point A to point B in a clear and linear manner (blame my training as a technical writer). However, this is probably impossible to do with the villanelle. Its nature is to double-back and wind around an idea. So the villanelle seems an especially apt form to work in when I have a subject that I need to meditate on, a subject that feels more like prayer or song than story.

In An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Artists Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (The University of Michigan Press), Maxine Kumin concludes about the contemporary villanelle:

It's my thesis that we don't need to ossify these ancient French forms by slavish imitation. We can enliven and enhance them with our own approximations. By resorting to the ingenuities of our own time and place, American poets in the last fifty years have turned a stultifying and restrictive form into an elastic, even gymnastic one. Perhaps in the twenty-first century others will remake the villanelle in ways as yet unthought of.

An excellent point of which I need to remind myself from time to time. When I work in form, my goal is to let the form be flexible, elastic, let the form serve the poem and not the other way around, but sometimes, particularly during the revision process, I lose this flexibility and find my allegiance has shifted from the poem to the form. I think there is a way (there must be!) to honor the spirit of the form while maintaining the integrity of the poem. Such is my quest.

Here are some of my favorite villanelles:

• One Art by Elizabeth Bishop
• Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas
• Little Miracle by Molly Peacock
• Villanelle for D.G.B. by Marilyn Hacker (scroll to end)
  

Poems Speak to Us...If We Listen

If you're lucky, you'll read a line in a poem and know it is speaking directly to you. That's how I felt when I read these lines at the end of Linda Pastan's poem "Women on the Shore":

If death is everywhere we look,
at least let's marry it to beauty.

This could be the manifesto of why I write poetry. Read the whole poem here.

My Fair Lady - See for Yourself

The end of "I could have danced all night" as well as the beginning of the Ascot scene.

My Fair Lady

Last week I caught the last half of My Fair Lady (1964 version) on television. I've already noted that I love musicals (though strangely not the new ones), and My Fair Lady ranks right at the top. While it doesn't have dancing, which is one of the elements I adore about musicals, it does have Audrey Hepburn, with whom I've been enamored for years. And though there are no elaborate dance scenes, it is one of the most stylistic and carefully choreographed musicals I can think of, from how the characters stand to how they move through a scene to how they interact with one another. The Ascot scene in particular stands out in my mind as a feast for the eyes.

One thing that has troubled me over the years is how I can love the movie when the story makes me a little uncomfortable. The musical is based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which in turn was inspired by Ovid's Metamorphosis. Wikipedia gives this plot summary for the movie:

Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), an arrogant, irascible professor of phonetics, boasts to a new acquaintance, Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), that he can teach any woman to speak so "properly" that he could pass her off as a duchess. The person whom he is shown thus teaching is one Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a young woman with a strong Cockney accent who is selling flowers on the street. Having overheard Higgins's boast, Eliza finds her way to the professor's house and offers to pay for speech lessons, so that she can work in a flower shop. Pickering is intrigued and wagers that Higgins cannot back up his claim; Higgins takes Eliza on free of charge as a challenge to his skills.

My feminist perspective makes me feel a little guilty for loving this movie. Take, for example, the song "A Hymn to Him," in which Henry Higgins sings to Colonel Pickering, "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" I have conflicting feelings about the ending as well, when Eliza returns to Henry (I make the assumption that she stays), though we know he'll never change. What heartens me is that Eliza is as hard-headed as Henry, so I feel she'll give right back what she takes. Also, I sort of like that it's not the ending in the play. In Pygmalion, Eliza marries Freddy, the young, eager man who falls in love with Eliza, though she doesn't feel the same way. While this is a more realistic ending, it has its own lamentable implications, specifically that Eliza marries out of necessity and lack of choice (and choice, in my opinion, is at the heart of feminism). As Eliza tells Henry, "I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me, I'm not fit to sell anything else." As much as the story brings up issues of women's equality, it also takes on class issues--how language and accent contribute to the distinction of classes.

Maybe that's why I love this musical so much...because it challenges me. At the same time it delights me with its sights and sounds. I could have danced all night.

Garden Revisited

The magnolia and catalpa of two weeks ago.

What Accent?

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
North Central
The West
Boston
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

This is extremely funny to me. My husband and I are convinced we speak standard English without an accent. But folks can often pin us to the Midwest, sometimes even to Wisconsin. My husband insists this is because standard English is what's spoken in southern Wisconsin. Still, we probably speak some "Wisconsinisms" that reveal our heritage. My favorite is bubbler, which sadly hasn't slipped out of my mouth in years. Now I tend to favor the more widely accepted water fountain.