Susan McLean, ‘What Goes: A Rondelet’

You were the one
who always told me what to do.
You were the one
who said I ought to buy a gun.
So when you said that we were through,
one of us had to go. I knew
you were the one.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “I have to credit Allison Joseph for introducing me to the rondelet, a French repeating-form poem that has not been in fashion for a very long time. She was teaching a workshop on repeating forms at the West Chester University Poetry Conference, and I was one of the students. The rondelet is a short form with such short lines and so many repetitions of the first line that it doesn’t give the writer much wiggle room for an interesting twist in the meaning of the repeated line. I settled on “you were the one” as my repeated line, because it is associated with the standard swoony romantic line, but it could easily change its meaning depending on the context. Once I chose “gun” as a possible rhyme for “one,” that word suggested to me a scenario in which the controlling partner in a relationship comes to regret influencing his partner to arm herself. The poem’s title is a pun. At first, it looks as though naming the form in the title is just an effort to identify an unfamiliar form, but if you say it aloud, it evokes the common phrase “what goes around comes around,” suggesting that the man’s comeuppance is partly his own fault. In French, “rondelet” means “a little circle.” This poem first appeared in New Trad Journal and was later published in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “#Siena #streetart #guns #woman” by Romana Correale is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.