A villanelle—at least a traditional one—is an elaborately structured French poetic form that dates back to the 16th century. Typically, the villanelle has 19 lines: five tercets (3-line stanzas) and a quatrain (a 4-line stanza). There is intricate rhyming and a lot of repetition.
This poem is a result of my wondering what a California version of a villanelle might look like. I doubt it would rhyme, but it probably would repeat itself in more conversational ways. And I figured a real California villanelle would be like, Screw that last quatrain…
I was also thinking about the promise and the reality of California right now. Its past. Its future. What we take. What we give. What we represent to the rest of America. Like America, California is a land of great contradictions. I can’t always tell whether I should be pessimistic or optimistic about my home state. I just know I love it.
Or, maybe this is a poem about the Killing Eve villain slashing her way through the Golden State looking for love…•
This poem appears in Issue 26 of Alta Journal.
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It is time to look where we have not looked,
time to see what we will not see. It is
time even though we can’t to know what it
is we need to learn about the past, yes,
but also about history, which is
not the same but is itself a mode of
time, something to be looked at not through, like
a map of a land you have never seen,
never heard of, much less visited or
even imagined. Perhaps it is time
to imagine a twilight, a moon of
pure fire, the entire universe
a country lit by its own darkness, the
spaces between its emptiness so full
it has already begun to explode.
Dean Rader has authored or coedited 12 books, including Self-Portrait As Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days, which won the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly appeared in 2023. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
