Invented Forms: The Upside Down Paradelle

Extractions
By Grace Curtis

We remove the tougher of these
We remove the tougher of these
And get angry when we are wise
And get angry when we are wise
Remove these when of the angry.
Wise, we are, and we get tougher.

Have wisdom, a uselessness, wisely,
Have wisdom, a uselessness, wisely,
Teeth are with life we wisely extract
Teeth are with life we wisely extract
Wisely extract with a wisely wisdom
Teeth are a life, have uselessness

We have them, useless vestiges
We have them, useless vestiges
Teeth, yet not their teeth, get up
Teeth, yet not their teeth, get up
Vestiges get up, have useless teeth
Them, yet not have their teeth.

Wisdom teeth are the teeth we get
when we are wise. And yet, we wisely
remove them, these angry vestiges
of a tougher life.  We wisely extract
the useless teeth that have not
caught up with their uselessness.

Writes Curtis: I call this an upside down Paradelle because it is, by extension, a furthering of the spoof of the form Billy Collins invented as a retort to complex forms. A Paradelle—as defined by Collins—is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.

In the Paradelles that have been published, e.g., PARAVALEDELLENTINE: A PARADELLE by Annie Finch, and as intended by Billy Collins, the lines of the first three stanzas are ones that tend to follow normal syntax and sentence structure, i.e. a structure that generally makes sense as we read them, while the lines in the final stanza sounds a little crazy in syntax and structure because they contain only words from preceding stanzas and no others.

I created a variation of this, by bringing all the words together to make a normal sounding final stanza and the first three stanzas pull only unrepeated words from the final stanza and therefore, sound a little crazy. So rather than, an overarching form of normal sounding stanza (nss) , normal (nss), normal sounding stanza (nss), crazy sounding stanza (css), my form is css, css, css, nss. That’s why I consider it an upside-down Paradelle. Rather than have the poem fall apart in the last stanza, my version the poem comes together in the end.

Grace Curtis is the author of chapbook The Surly Bonds of Earth, selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2010 Lettre Sauvage Book Contest. You can see her work in Waccamaw Literary Journal, Chaffin Journal, Scythe Literary Journal, Red River Review, and others. She has an MFA from Ashland University. She is from Waynesville, Ohio.