Pat and I did pretty well with today's NYT Spelling Bee. We came up with 61 of 63 words, well past Genius level. Not surprisingly, the word "valentine" was a pangram, although not the only one.
I looked up the last two words, one of which was "villanelle". We both griped that we don't even know what the word means, and what are they doing putting that kind of thing in the puzzle, and then I looked up the word. In Wikipedia, a "villanelle... is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately at the end of each subsequent stanza until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines."
At which point that 19-line thing rang a bell, and I looked up the 2017 New Yorker article on Elizabeth Bishop that I had read recently. Sure enough:
[She wrote] seventeen quickly successive drafts of an exactingly structured villanelle, a form with origins in the French Baroque... a fixed form of nineteen lines: five tercets, a concluding quatrain, and a rhyme scheme tight enough to keep any feeling from spilling over the borders.
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