Group: Julia Liu, Ann Rayburn, Wren McMillan
This week, we have opted to explore the The Life of St. Margaret through three different poetic styles. The first poem, “Untitled” by Julia Liu, utilizes a free verse structure. The next, another untitled piece by Ann Rayburn, is also in free verse, but is intensely inspired by the works of e.e. cummings and makes ample use of formatting elements. The third poem, “Margaret” by Wren McMillan explores the villanelle form with slight modifications in some refrains. Each poem has been attached to this post as a PDF in order to preserve any formatting (and, admittedly, for consistency’s sake).
This is so cool! The notion of blood as testimony is really fascinating. The formal breakage of “dra gon”–amidst a formal thunderstorm of a poem–is very clever. And the formal rigidity and rhyme-scheme of the ode to Margaret [Margaret] is a beautiful culminating move over three very different responses to her Life.