Edited and Introduced by Wesley McNair, Maine Poet Laureate
An important challenge for poets in each generation is to renew verse forms inherited from the past. Here Portland’s Betsy Sholl, departing from her characteristic free verse, updates the villanelle with an entirely new subject matter.
Doing Time
by Betsy ShollThey call me Babe and make a kissing noise
from inside their bars and inside their rage.
Most of them are men, though they act like boyswho’ve played too hard and broken all their toys.
Now they’re trying to break their metal cage.
They yell out Babe, make that loud kissing noiseas if their catcalls mean they have a voice
routines and bells can’t break. “It’s just a phase,”
their parents must have said when they were boys.Don’t ask what they’re in for; let them enjoy
their small audience, their short time on stage:
“Hey, Babe, how about”–then that kissing noise.In class they want to rhyme, their way to destroy
all evidence of anguish on the page.
They can’t bear to remember being boys.Some study law, some use another ploy,
daydreaming they’ll do time, but never age.
“Hey, Babe,” means “kiss off” to that cellblock noise,
to broken men, in here since they were boys.
Betsy Sholl is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Otherwise Unseeable, (University of Wisconsin, 2014). She teaches at USM and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.
Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2009 Betsy Sholl. Reprinted from Rough Cradle, Alice James Books, 2009, by permission of Betsy Sholl.
Questions about submitting to Take Heart may be directed to Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Special Consultant to the Maine Poet Laureate, at mainepoetlaureate@gmail.com or 207-228-8263. Take Heart: Poems from Maine, an anthology collecting the first two years of this column, is now available from Down East Books.
