Glass Slipper Triolets and other poems

A.E. Stallings, Oblique Strategies, NaPoWriMo, The Bat Poet, and repetitive forms

Der Krieg (War) by Hans Baluschek, 1915— via Wikimedia

Repetition is a Form of Change: An Oblique Strategy in Poetry

Last night I was watching an A. E. Stallings lecture on repetition in poetry. (More about that at the end—I highly recommend her Oxford lecture series.)

Anyway, Stallings discusses various forms that have repeating lines and one she mentions is the triolet. And that reminded me that I wrote some triolets once, so I went to look for them.

These are the first and second triolets I ever wrote:

For the Stepsisters

These shoes were not made for your feet—
Brilliant slippers, perfect cut glass.
You might as well admit defeat.
These shoes were not made for your feet—
Remove heel or toe, you can't cheat.
Shove as you may, you'll never pass.
These shoes were not made for your feet—
Brilliant slippers, perfect cut, glass.

For Cinderella

This shoe was made to fit your foot
By magic no handcraft can match.
Born to shine, not to sit in soot,
This shoe was made to fit your foot.
The jealous say you're but a slut
because his eye they could not catch.
This shoe was made to fit your foot
By magic no handcraft can match.

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An Oblique Strategy

It was April 2023 and I was trying to write a poem for NaPoWriMo and I guess the prompts I was using suggested writing a triolet. (I’ve lost the prompts, but the page says NaNoWriMo, so I’m trying to reconstruct what was happening there.)

I knew what the form was supposed to look like: ABaAabAB—and yet I had no idea how to go about writing a triolet. So I did what I do when I’m stuck but it’s time to write: I just started writing out a grumble about the problem of being stuck.

So this is just a free form flow of me trying to find concrete images to fit the feeling of wanting to write and frustration at not knowing how to write within the particular formal constraints, mostly because I didn’t know what to write about:

strict meter, form shuts out images
ideas want to flow like water and yet are imprisoned
the fence keeps things in and out
at the same time
two people separated by a fence
two halves of a whole
A chain link fence without a gate
I can't get into the space
where I would spread my blanket
for a picnic feast
shut out 
imprisoning form
water carved into stone 
trying to become real flowing water
trapped motionless that which wants
to create the sense of ripple bubble shimmer
and gurgle 
a stained glass window shattered
the image lost, gone
irretrievable
the hand is chained to the wall
it reaches for a pencil but cannot reach
cannot draw
cannot write
fog obscuring a landscape
painter thwarted
the mississippi cannot be contained by the concrete levys
the flooding waters seek their own level
they want to spread to reach out to new lands
thirsty to swallow everything 
they burst out spreading 
like the woman on the subway 
who spreads across two seats
her bags taking up two more
packages overflowing from arms that cannot contain
her overambitious shopping

Some forms are too tight
Cinderella's stepsisters trying to squeeze their too large feet
into the glass slipper
cutting off their toes and heels
marring perfectly fine feet
to try to make them fit
into a shoe that wasn't made for them
confinement 
a perfectly scupted shoe of hardest diamond
glistering and perfect on a velvet cushion
the dancing candlelight delights to shine in their facets
who wouldn't want to wear such a trinket
to feel it slip over your foot 
like it was made for you
to dance all the night never tiring
as long as the music lasts as long as the night stays dark
the dancer will prolong the dance

You’ll notice that Cinderella’s slipper comes in there. And that’s when inspiration struck and I decided to write a triolet about the glass slipper itself, make the poem about the form that doesn’t quite fit the too-large foot.

And then my delight at actually writing a triolet spilled over into writing another one, but this time from Cinderella’s point of view, about the shoe fitting!

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Stained Glass, Shattered

And then, bonus, I decided to use the stained glass imagery that came up in my free write:

The stained glass window is shattered.
The image now forever lost.
All night cannons boomed and battered.
The stained glass window is shattered.
Faith bereft of all that mattered.
The church has given up its ghost.
The stained glass window is shattered.
The image now forever lost.

I think this poem is also ekphrastic, because in my mind it’s haunted by the ghost of Hans Baluschek’s painting of a stained glass window, the only part of a church left standing, surrounded by dead bodies.

While his painting depicts an unbroken window and my poem depicts a shattered window, still somehow they are both looking at the same reality. After all, all the other windows have been destroyed. And who knows whether this one will last the night. The poem is also perhaps haunted by the ghost of the burning of Notre Dame in 2019.

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Only Standing by His Power

And then the stained glass poem and also the image from the painting of the window miraculously standing after the bombing, led to this triolet about grace:

I would be lost without God's grace.
I'm only standing by his power.
Blindly I grope to see his face,
Completely lost without his grace.
Too crippled to complete the race,
I call on Jesus in this hour.
I would be lost without God's grace—
I'm only standing through his power.

Discerning lovers of Madeleine L’Engle might hear an echo of the poem from A Swiftly Tilting Planet, L’Engle’s variation of St Patrick’s Lorica:

At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness!

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Confining the River of Inspiration to the Form

And one last triolet from that same free write, I no longer recall exactly where this image of water carved into stone came from, though clearly I’d seen something— a statue?— that inspired it:

The carved river never can run—
Summer sun won't melt stone water.
Frozen from morn till day is done,
The carved river never has run.
Of bubbles, ripples it has none
nor drink for my thirsty daughter.
The carved river never can run—
Summer sun won't melt stone water.

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January Serenade

I’ve only written one other triolet, this one was from this past January and was a reworking of a shorter poem.

Blue, bluer, black— 
Sinking down night.

Alas, alas, and alack,
Blue bluer black

On branches bare and black
Starlings alight.

Blue, bluer, black— 
Sinking down night.

And here’s the original, which I think I like better:

Blue, bluer, black— 
sinking down night
starlings alight
on bare branches.

That was the day I dropped my two oldest daughters off at the airport for their first solo flight to visit my family in Texas. I was sad at their flying away and the image of the starlings fitted my mood.

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The Stallings Oxford Lectures

And now, as I promised, back to A.E. Stallings. Stallings has long been one of my favorite poets. She’s a brilliant formal poet with a sharp wit and writes beautifully on classical themes (her field is Classics and she is also a fine translator of Greek and Latin poetry) and also on family life and motherhood.

Stallings was chosen as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2023. One of the things the Oxford professor of poetry is expected to do is to give regular lectures on poetry. These lectures are brilliant, the have something of a scholarly bent, but they’re also incredibly accessible.

My friend

Zina Gomez-Liss

’s mention of Stallings’ most recent lecture, Repetition is a Form of Change: An Oblique Strategy in Poetry, reminded me that I had been remiss in keeping up with them, so last night I treated myself to this delightful lecture on repetition in poetry. (I still need to go back and listen to a couple of the others.)

Stallings opens by talking about a deck of cards, the “Oblique Strategies” of the title. Invented by the painter Peter Schmidt and recording artist and musician Brian Eno, this deck of cards is aimed at recording artists and musicians and is a way to try to get around the writer’s block that is the plague of any artist. (Here I pause to be amused about my own oblique strategy of free writing my frustration about an unfamiliar form and how that turned into a poem.)

Now my triolets aren’t nearly as sophisticated as any of the poems Stallings investigates and they don’t fully take advantage of the way repetition is a form of change. I think my poems are fairly static and don’t really use the formal element of repetition to best advantage. But her lecture invites me to keep working in that vein, to keep using repetition to invite the reader on a journey and to create change.

I highly recommend watching Stallings’ lecture on the Oxford website because she projects the text of the poems she reads and discusses and there are several poems she only shows and does not read. Her lecture is a delight and covers forms from villanelles and sestinas, triolets, pantoums, ghazals, to ballades and rondeaus and blues poems.

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To Set the Darkness Echoing

While I’m on the topic, Stallings first lecture in the series, The Bat Poet: Poetry as Echolocation, focuses on The Bat Poet by Randall Jarrell, a book I previously mentioned in my post about birdsong and springtime, and which I highly recommend.

Stallings’ own bat poem, Explaining an Affinity for Bats, can be read here and is one of my favorites of hers.

Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

Stallings poem about bats also in my mind chimes with the final stanza of Seamus Heaney’s Personal Helicon:

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Heaney’s lines were echoing in Stallings’ mind as well. This is what poets do: we echolocate, we bounce sounds off of objects and ideas and even other poems, delighting in the echoes in the darkness, relying on them to help us find the way forward.

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