Tuesday, August 30, 2011

News at Eleven: Regardless of the content, a villanelle

is about entropy. The slow disordering of love.

I've always been hesitant to say something like that--to claim that a formal construction has an ontological character. But villanelles strike the way that songs written in a minor key do; the actual lyrics can't fundamentally alter the meaning of the thing. The formal narrative is so intense, and so beautiful, that you can stop listening to the words as semantic signifiers and hear them as pure musical characters marching towards their fate.

from National Post: A literary form designed to break your heart

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