Paradelle
Quick answer: The paradelle is a hoax form invented by Billy Collins as a parody of the villanelle, now written in earnest. Learn its strict rules and strange history.
A paradelle is a four-stanza poem in which each of the first three stanzas repeats its opening two lines exactly, then rearranges every word of those four lines into two new lines, while the final stanza must reuse every word from the first lines of the previous three stanzas, all of them, and only them. It sounds like a medieval torture device for poets, and that was the joke: Billy Collins invented the paradelle in 1997 as a parody, publishing 'Paradelle for Susan' with a mock-scholarly note claiming it was a demanding fixed form from eleventh-century France.
The prank outgrew itself. Readers took the invented history at face value, poets began attempting the form sincerely, and in 2005 an entire anthology, The Paradelle, collected serious and comic examples. So the paradelle now leads a double life: a satire on form-worship, and a genuine constraint that, handled well, produces strange, incantatory poems. Few glossary terms come with a better story.
How It Works
Each of the first three stanzas has six lines. Lines one and two state a sentence; lines three and four repeat lines one and two word for word; lines five and six must be built from all the words of lines one and two, every single word, rearranged and none left over. The fourth stanza, also six lines, is the reckoning: it must use every word from the first pair of lines of stanzas one, two and three, with nothing added and nothing omitted.
An original sketch of the mechanism, showing just one stanza's move: 'The river keeps the keys to every door. / I lost my name somewhere along the bank. / The river keeps the keys to every door. / I lost my name somewhere along the bank. / Somewhere along the river I lost every door. / The bank keeps my name, the keys to.' That dangling 'to' is the form showing its teeth: perfect grammar is nearly impossible, and the resulting dream-grammar is either the flaw or the point, depending on your temperament.
Where You Will See It
Billy Collins's 'Paradelle for Susan' appeared in his 1998 collection Picnic, Lightning, deliberately ending in collapsed syntax as part of the gag. When some critics scolded him for writing the form badly, unaware it was his invention, the joke deepened. Theresa M. Welford's 2005 anthology The Paradelle gathered dozens of poets writing the form both straight and satirically, and it now appears in creative writing courses as a case study in constraint, parody and the strange authority of tradition: tell poets a form is ancient and difficult, and they will fight to master it.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose your opening lines like a chess player. Short function words, a, the, of, and, are your friends because they recombine gracefully; long specific nouns are anchors you must reuse whether you like it or not. Lines with balanced parts of speech, a couple of verbs, a couple of nouns, some connective tissue, give the rearrangements room to breathe.
Decide early whether you are playing it straight or for comedy. The form rewards both: obsessive repetition suits grief, insomnia and desire, while the enforced word-salad has a natural slapstick. Either way, read the final stanza aloud many times; it is the hardest eighteen-word jigsaw in contemporary poetry, and when it clicks, it feels like the poem solving itself. Judges scoring creativity tend to remember a well-landed paradelle, if only because so few arrive.
What poets can take from this
- Draft your six source lines first and count their words; you will live with every one of them.
- Favour short flexible words over long specific ones, since each word must be reused exactly.
- Allow dream-logic: the form's broken grammar can be an expressive feature, not a failure.
- Keep a physical word bank, each word on a slip of paper, when assembling the final stanza.
- Read Collins's original last, not first, so its parody does not set your tone for you.
Try it yourself
Write a paradelle in which each of the three opening couplets states one fact about a person you miss. Let the scrambled lines behave like memory misfiling itself, and let the final stanza reassemble all three facts into a farewell.
Questions
Is the paradelle a real form?
It is now. Billy Collins invented it in 1997 as a parody of the villanelle, complete with a fake medieval history, but poets adopted it sincerely and an anthology of paradelles appeared in 2005. A hoax that people keep writing becomes a form.
What are the rules of a paradelle?
Four six-line stanzas. In each of the first three, a couplet is stated, repeated exactly, then all its words are rearranged into two new lines. The final stanza must use every word from the three opening couplets, nothing more and nothing less.
How is a paradelle different from a villanelle?
A villanelle repeats two whole refrain lines in a fixed pattern across nineteen lines. The paradelle repeats couplets and then forces you to recombine their words, which is why Collins designed it as the villanelle's absurd cousin.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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