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Just on form and the premeditation or not, as per Matthew Francis' posting, I wrote a number of villanelles as exercises when I was teaching Poetry as a first year unit at a local uni. (I like to write the assignments I set students so they see some credibility.) Anyway, a few years after that year my mother died, and a villanelle appeared as elegy. It came as naturally as my organic or cadenced verse does 'normally' (awful word, but indicative). Some lines in it were awkward, and needed lots of drafts to come right: that's where the craft came in. I could hear the problem with the lines, and could work my way toward fixing them up, and had the form as a discipline. It was a lesson to me because I started writing poetry in rebellion against the formal poetry we were taught at school - my first influences were Down Beat magazine articles by people like Leroi Jones, Nat Hentoff and Ira Gitler (for those that remember him), mixed with Time magazine's reports of a San Francisco poetry rennaisance and its scant quotes within. I was into 'free verse' with a jazz beat. So to come to formal poetry and have it work for me was just another step along the way to being a freer poet: all form is useful when the content is expressed by it (and sometimes within it). I now read that villanelle in tandem with a tight 'free verse' poem to my father as an intro to my poetry whenever such is needed, and I am always surprised I wrote both, and that they both sound like me. BTW, OZ Poet's 'theme' for March is formal poetry, or poems in forms, so don't forget to submit something. I'd love to get a sestina to work for me! They just always end up sounding like exercises in my hands. Damn. Andrew ---------------------------------------- Andrew Burke Copywriting [log in to unmask] Creative Writing http://www.bam.com.au/andrew/ Editing ---------------------------------------- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%