The first thing you're likely to notice while reading Miriam Kotzin's The Body's Bride is the virtuosity. And it's the genuine article. Not technical display for its own sake, but a necessary demonstration of how the synergy of matter and form works. Nowhere is this more evident than in a villanelle called "Musing It Over."
I am fond of the villanelle. It sets up so many possibilities. The first and last lines of the first stanza alternate as the last lines of the subsequent stanzas. The two lines rhyme and unite at the end as a couplet. All of the second lines rhyme with each other.
"Musing It Over" lays out the equation of the experience it deals with in such a way that the solution to the equation is its laying out — the poem itself. The form itself, in other words, is the metaphor of the relationship being recounted, as the refrains make plain from the start: "Can you guess why at last I want to write … To see the lines wrap round to hold him tight." The second line turns out to be the answer to the question posed in the first, but you have to read to read the poem to see how exactly that is so.
Along the way, we learn that there is "no brooding muse nearby who frets / To see the lines wrap round …" And that is how the speaker wants it. It is a condition of the poem.
We learn as well that the object of the speaker's attention sometimes "forgets / To see the lines wrap round to hold him tight," though at times he "teases young coquettes / To see the lines wrap round to hold him tight."
And that is all I think I should say. Find the poem and read it. Then read it some more.
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