Each of the eleven Yokel Song collections on this blog contains approximately twenty poems, and each is a selection from a corresponding longer Yokel Song book. Drafts of most of the poems were originally posted on this blog, and all the date-stamps are included in the longer collections. In the selections listed below the date-stamps are omitted, but the chronology by date of composition is maintained. Click the hot titles to go to the collections.
Doomed Yokel - Blood Red
Fate, politics, COVID, self-preservation (the Phoenix in Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle). The bird symbol is the Cardinal. Root.
Black – Woke Yokel
George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter fist.
Orange – Bardic Yokel
Ambivalence about poetry (Screech Owl in The Phoenix and the Turtle). Sacrum.
Yellow or Dove Gray – Vulnerable Yokel
Individuation, exploitation, victimhood (Turtle Dove in The Phoenix and the Turtle). The bird symbol is the Dove. Solar Plexus.
Motley Green – Pretty Yokel
Autoeroticism, gender-ambivalence. The bird symbol is the Green Heron or the Motley Starling.
Grass Green – Trans Yokel
Paganism, femininity, dance, gender transformation (Swan in The Phoenix and the Turtle). Heart.
Sky Blue – Yokel Comedian
Philosophy, comedy. The bird symbol is the Chickadee.
Deep Blue – Devout Yokel
Spirituality, altruism, voice (Eagle in The Phoenix and the Turtle). Throat.
Indigo – Elegiac Yokel
Death, loss, voices from the past (Crow in The Phoenix and the Turtle). Third Eye.
Purple – Splendid Yokel
Spirit: Self as other, other as self. The Bird symbol is the Phoebe. Crown.
Rose Red – Loving Yokel
The Phoenix and the Turtle in the present moment. Root.
______________
Starting in 2017, I have been making Yokel songs as a kind of preposterous diary.
Their period of composition has included much of the first Trump administration, the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath.
Until January 2021 and the events accompanying the inauguration of the 2020 American presidential winner, most of the songs were posted in this Google blog, from which they received date stamps that are preserved in each complete collection. Songs written later were not posted and date-stamped but were appended chronologically in a long final section called End Times.
By September 2023 when I stopped writing them, there were more than seven hundred songs, collected chronologically and dated.
I needed a way to sort the songs without changing their chronology, and Google’s extended ROYGBIV color palette gave me a way to mark song titles by theme - blood red for politics and COVID, sacral orange for poetry, grass green for gender transformation, indigo blue for elegy, rose red for love, and so on.
More recently, my therapist helped me realize that the colors-themes correspond closely to the chakras of the Hindu Yoga tradition, similarly based on the spectrum.
The obvious next step was to make a separate collection for each of the colors-themes, preserving the chronology within each.
___________
The renaissance villanelle was a poem containing repeated words and lines, usually on a rural love theme. The late-nineteenth-century notion of the villanelle (Edmund Gosse 1877) may largely have been based on a single renaissance villanelle, I Have Lost My Turtle Dove by Jean Passerat, a translation of which is provided in Loving Yokel. Villein, or villano, means something like farm worker, so villanelles might well be called Yokel songs.
The villanelle is aleatoric: its rhyme and word-repetition requirements lead the writer to say things they wouldn’t have thought of saying otherwise. Something prompts a rhythmic line, and another follows by sonic suggestion. It is both a relief and a challenge when the repeated line/word arrives at the end of each stanza and must be recuperated into the context that the rhymes have created. The meter tends toward accentual regularity. The diction is slangy—yokelish.
____________
Pronouns are a preoccupation. There are always questions of voice and address (use of the I and you pronouns), and of gender naming. She/her and he/him pronouns are avoided. The Yokel is always they/them. The goddess Venus is she, but most of the he/him characters are trolls—i.e., male poets.
