Tony Curtis's villanelle workshop

Check out Guardian Unlimited Books for a succinct explanation of the villanelle form and how to write one. You start with a couplet and work it out from there. Dylan Thomas's "do not go gentle into that good night / rage, rage against the dying of the light" is perhaps the English lanugage's most famous villanelle. Sometimes working in closed forms like the sonnet, villanelle, or sestina helps to discipline content, shaping the chaos of emotion and experience into some connective, musical whole.