Poetry Thursday - a villanelle about snow in Arizona

Thanks to June and Jer for this poem and photo, a vivid evocation of their unexpected experience when they headed south from Portland, Oregon, for a change of scene and some winter sun. It's a reminder that Arizona has mountains, or rather a plateau - in other words, a poem with altitude.

(via)

Snowbound in Prescott

The woods have filled with snow.
The road has disappeared.
Our pickup will not go.

We traveled south, you know,
For weather to be cheered.
The woods have filled with snow.

We spent a lot of dough.
For sun, not something weird.
Our pickup will not go.

The storm put on a show.
Surpassing what we feared.
The woods have filled with snow.

We’ve shoveled to and fro.
We’ve dug and pushed and steered.
Our pickup will not go.

We’ll stay inside just so
Until the road is cleared.
The woods have filled with snow.
Our pickup will not go.

jer

The form is unusual - or is it? Villanelles  are 19-line poems with two rhymes. They originated in oral poetry with a pastoral subject, and were sung; the form became fixed early in the 17th century, in France - but most villanelles have been written in English - by William Empson, WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, and Elisabeth Bishop among others.

"The villanelle has been noted as a form that frequently treats the subject of obsessions," says Wikipedia, "and one which appeals to outsiders; its defining feature of repetition prevents it from having a conventional tone."

And on the relation between form and content:

 "T. S. Eliot [made the point that] "to use very strict form is a help, because you concentrate on the technical difficulties of mastering the form, and allow the content of the poem a more unconscious and freer release". In an introduction to his own take on the form, entitled "Missing Dates", William Empson suggests that while the villanelle is a "very rigid form", nonetheless W. H. Auden—in his long poem The Sea and the Mirror—had "made it sound absolutely natural like the innocent girl talking"."

Since the 1980s, contemporary poets have often varied the villanelle form in various ways.

You'll be glad to know that the pickup did eventually go, and they could leave the snow. Jer went on to write some cinquains about traffic in Tuscon, here.