The Paradelle [Paperback]

THERESA WELFORD (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1597090239 | ISBN-13: 978-1597090230 | Publication Date: January 1, 2006

A few years ago, I wrote a poem that I titled Paradelle for Susan. It was the only paradelle ever to have been written because I invented the form in order to write the poem. What I set out to do was write an intentionally bad formal poem. Auden said there was nothing funnier than bad poetry, and I thought a horribly mangled attempt at a formal poem might have humorous results. I considered using an already existing form, but I figured enough bad sonnets and bad sestinas are already being written these days without me adding to the pile. . . . The paradelle invites you in with its offer of nursery-rhyme repetition, then suddenly confronts you with an extreme verbal challenge. It lurches from the comfort of repetition to the crossword-puzzle anxiety of fitting a specific vocabulary into a tightly bounded space. While the level of difficulty in most verse forms remains fairly consistent throughout, the paradelle accelerates from kindergarten to college and back to kindergarten several times and ends in a think-tank called the Institute for Advanced Word Play. Thus the jumpy double nature of the paradelle, so unsteady, so schizo, so right for our times. . . . Billy Collins, from the Introduction

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Theresa Malphrus Welford, an Assistant Professor of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University, recently completed a PhD at the University of Essex (in Colchester, England). Her dissertation examines connections between the Movement poets of 1950s England and the New Formalists of the United States. Theresa has published poems in journals including Karamu, Thalia, Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, Dickinson Review, Rhino, and New Mexico Humanities Review, along with an article in Paideuma: A Journal of Pound Studies, an article in Florida English Journal, and a chapter in Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents. Her edited collection, The Paradelle, which features A Brief History of the Paradelle, written by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins, was published by Red Hen Press in 2005. Theresa is in the early stages of editing a collection of poems in the cento form, and she is also working on a collection of her own poems, most of which will be dramatic monologues.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Red Hen Press (January 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1597090239
• ISBN-13: 978-1597090230
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,518,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)