A Novel Situation

Like all of us in these disorienting days, I reach out across the distance to family and friends — mostly by email, sometimes by phone — to ask how they are doing, to let them know I am thinking of them. Those who like to read or write tend to ask me what I am reading or how my writing’s going, and I return the questions, much the way people who diligently work out at the gym might ask each other how they are staying in shape during this period of confinement.

My friend Ken Victor, a poet, jots down impressions for a poem he might write when today’s still-unfolding emotions can be recollected in some measure of tranquility. For reasons he can’t explain, he writes villanelles. The intricate combination of two rhymes spread across recurring lines, along with an unthinking need to respond with humour to the strange tenor of the day, leads us to swap a few of our favourite funny poems.

Ken sends me Max Gutmann’s “The Villanelle’s Appeal,” with its wise and...