Paradelle

"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

Theresa Welford grew up just outside Savannah, Georgia, in a small working-class town called Port Wentworth. She has degrees in English from Armstrong State College (BA), the University of Georgia (MA), and the University of Essex (PhD). She has taught at Georgia Southern University since 1987. She and her husband Mark live in a small house out in the boonies, off a dirt lane, behind a cotton field, in the woods, with their five cats and four dogs, plus (currently) a foster cat and a foster dog. A long-time vegetarian for ethical reasons, Theresa volunteers with two local animal rescue groups, she also writes a weekly blog, focusing almost entirely on animal-related subjects, for the Statesboro Herald Community website. Welford has published poems in journals including Karamu, Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor, Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, Dickinson Review, Rhino, and New Mexico Humanities Review. She has also published several articles. One article discussing the possible connections between a poem by Ezra Pound and one by Thomas Wyatt appears in Paideuma: A Journal of Pound Studies; another article, about "re-animating" students' interest in poetry, appears in Florida English Journal; and another one, which combines memoir with ideas about being a working-class person in an academic world, appears in Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents. Her most recent article, "Code-Meshing and Creative Assignments: How Students Can Stop Worrying and Learn to Write Like Da Bomb," will appear in Code Meshing as World English: Policy, Pedagogy, Performance, edited by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Martinez.