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Poems from the Hoot
Doing Time
Betsy Sholl is a Portland poet who was a featured
reader at the September 3rd Hoot.
She included a villanelle-a 16th c. French poetic form derived from Italian folk-song.
What a wonderful surprise. Here it is:
Doing Time
prison poetry workshop
They call me Babe and make a kissing noise
from inside their bars and
inside their rage.
Most of them are men, though they act like boys
who've played too hard and broken all their
toys.
Now they're trying to break their metal cage.
They yell out Babe, make that loud kissing noise
as if their catcalls mean they have a voice
routines and bells can't break. "It's just a phase,"
their parents must have said when they were boys.
Don't ask what they're in for; let them enjoy
their small audience, their short time on stage:
"Hey, Babe, how about…" then that kissing noise.
In class they want to rhyme, their way to
destroy
all evidence of anguish on the page.
They can't bear to remember being boys.
Some study law, some use another ploy,
daydreaming they'll do time, but never age.
"Hey, Babe," means "kiss off" to that cellblock noise,
to broken men, in here since they were boys.
-- by Betsy Sholl
We have here a poem of nineteen lines-five tercets and one quatrain.
Notice how the core of lines one and three keep returning, culminating in the last two
lines of the poem. And notice that tight rhyme scheme. Clearly, this is a complex
creation. But the magic here is in how she turns a 16th c. European form into a 21st c.
American poem. We see the inmates in their metal cage-we hear that kissing noise-we feel
the rage and grief of broken men on the inside. To pull off a villanelle that speaks to
our world is a rare feat-Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and Donald Justice have proven
it's possible.
Betsy's poem confirms it. - - JP
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Betsy Scholl teaches creative writing at the University of Southern Maine, and in
the MFA program at Vermont College. Her books include the award winning "Don't
Explain" from U. of Wisconsin Press, and a recent chapbook, Coastal Bop, from Oyster
River Press. "Doing Time" copyright 2003 by Betsy Sholl.
Note: To be considered for publication in this space, poems read at The Poetry Hoot should not exceed nineteen lines. Line length
should be limited to fifteen words.
This column originally appeared in Spotlight Magazine on September 25, 2003
'Poems from the Hoot' reprinted by permission from the Portsmouth Herald.
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