O Lord, 50. How could they all turn red? Well, yesterday, when I was young, I randomly assigned colors and elements to seasons of The Muppet Show as parts of a book, and the more I started writing, the more connections I started to make between a show from the past & the show that is my life & this whole world of show. Writing the first two parts took a long time, and getting to the third, I felt more charms at work between my self and this reality we all call life. I felt synchronicity between myself and the television (god) when Roy Clark’s guest stars and a fire ignites in the theatre!
Catching fire with threes, this muppoem is a villanelle. A villanelle is a fixed form of six stanzas, five of which are tercets, consisting of three lines each. Originally, villanelles were about pastoral scenes. They were basically country songs, and that fits this episode where Kermit says they are all “going country.” The original villanelles did not have the set form they do now, but they did have a refrain. As time progressed, they were modernized into fixed set of rules and led themselves to be a good way of dealing with obsession. Without out a doubt, my mind is very obsessive, and so my villanelle meets somewhere in between its two ends of its history. I did not grow up in any of the interior red states of America, but I was raised in rural country, and I’d seen a red barn many times. In thinking on it, my imagination set it on fire humorously playing with the farmer's daughters trope to reveal a rocky underbelly to this country’s beautiful landscapes.
Just like when trouble erupts in the control panel of the Swinetrek and random things keeping popping up, so too do words, as the villanelle’s form allows for things to return with a refrain. The very fact that things come back is essentially the echo of America I am coming for with my poem.
