
Michael Quin Heavener	Search:

POETRY 133

The foxy lady's looking fine.
She'd like to say she taught us right
But mostly she just blows my mind.

She doesn't like to waste the time
We spend in class but when we're tight
The foxy lady's looking fine.

I hassle all the morn to rhyme
A verse that just won't fit quite right
But mostly she just blows my mind.

She gives us feet; she gives us lines.
I wonder what she does at night?
The foxy lady's looking fine.

I sit in class and seek a sign
To understand, to see the light,
But mostly she just blows my mind.

In dreams I have, old poets rhyme,
Pentameters and dactyls fight,
The foxy lady's looking fine;
But mostly she just blows my mind.

There's a history to this poem. My junior college poetry teacher was drop-dead gorgeous (at least that's how I remember her) but a stickler for rhythm and metre. She introduced us to a number of poetic forms and alternatives, including this—the villanelle. The distinctive form comes from:

Uses fixed A-B-A, A-B-A, A-B-A, A-B-A, A-B-A, A-B-A-A rhyming pattern.
Uses iambic quatrameter scansion (symbolizes as /_/_/_/_ or duhDA duhDA duhDA duhDA).
Six verses, each has three lines, except the last has four.
Very first line becomes the last line of every other verse.
The last line of the first verse becomes the last line of the alternate verses.
The two lines repeat together at the end of the modified final verse.

As the quarter wore on, it seemed the instructor liked this form best of all—she gave it an awful lot of lecture time and we wrote more than one each. I asked a friend in the teaching office to look at her final exam (note that I did NOT ask for any information to be revealed). I requested that if the final poem to be deconstructed had a similar pattern, that she substitute this in its place. She did.

The look on our teacher's foxy face was priceless as she tried to figure out how the hack was accomplished and what she should do about it—AND realized a compliment had been paid. Ultimately, she let us take the test with my poem (yes, I did have to deconstruct it). I got an A, naturally, but also a lecture from the Dean of Students about cheating.

Michael Quin Heavener

POETRY 133