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On Form: The Villanelle

The Villanelle

BBC Radio 4 - On Form, The Villanelle

Andrew McMillan explores why poetic forms are fashionable again.

Andrew McMillan explores the recent resurgence in formal poetry. This week: the villanelle - its history and how to write a modern one. With poet and academic, Aviva Dautch.

In the third and  last of this series, Andrew McMillan meets a diverse group of contemporary British poets who are reframing traditional techniques to write about the modern world, exploring why form is fashionable again.

In today’s programme, poet and academic Aviva Dautch, traces the roots of the villanelle back to its musical origins and explores how it developed into a poetic form with fixed rules. To understand the interplay of the form’s complex refrains and rhymes we hear Juliet Stevenson reads classic twentieth century villanelles: ‘Do Not Go Gently’ by Dylan Thomas and ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop, exploring how these poets use the form to contain grief.
 
We meet bestselling poet, Wendy Cope, a former teacher whose comic villanelles play with the formal counterpoint between repetition and surprise. Irish poet Gail McConnell describes how her experimental villanelle helps her articulate what it means to be part of non-traditional family structures, and the transition from the one she grew up in to the queer one she has created with her partner. And finally, Marvin Thompson, winner of this year’s National Poetry Competition with a villanelle variation,  tells us about his passion for the form and reads his award-winning poem about his Jamaican-British identity.


The reader is Juliet Stevenson.

Photo of Andrew McMillan credited to Urszula Soltys

Producer: Mohini Patel

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