Linda Sue Park - Villanelle: Why I Love Libraries

Villanelle: Why I Love Libraries
by
Linda Sue Park

I lose myself within the book-walled maze,
with no end to the promises in sight,
through passages to many worlds and ways.

The aisles meander pleasantly. A craze
of unread pages beckons, tempts, invites;
I lose myself. Within the book-walled maze

a googolplex of lexical arrays
for exploration flanks me left and right.
True passages to many; worlds and ways

that lead to corners sharp with turns of phrase,
and tales both commonplace and recondite
to lose myself within. The book-walled maze

reveals its pleasures slowly, but repays
the debt of time in thousandfold delight—
through passages to many worlds, in ways

mapped out by words. A sudden blink of light:
It's checkout time—they’re closing for the night.
I'd lost myself within the book-walled maze,
through passages to many worlds and ways.

©2009 Linda Sue Park. All rights reserved.

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Linda Sue Park writes poems, picture books and novels, and won the Newbery Medal in 2002 for A Single Shard. She's also written wonderful stuff on her blog, and I've referred countless people there just to read her thoughts on "voice." And she doesn't know this, but it was a big day for me a couple years back when she visited GottaBook and let me know that she liked and was writing Fibs! Yes, I'm writer star-struck (and it's been a big month for that, lemme tell you!), and that was indeed a good day.

To me, her villanelle above simply falls in the category of "holy smokes!" Like Joyce Sidman's pantoum and Marilyn Singer's triolet and Avis Harley's acrostic, this is an example of taking a form and using it rather than being constrained by it. My official poetry tester here at home read this poem and said simply, "that's amazing." I concur, and I'm exceedingly happy to have it here as part of 30 Poets/30 Days.

Yesterday, we celebrated SPRING with Lee Bennett Hopkins. Tomorrow, Children's Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman's I Dreamt I Saw a Dinosaur!