Above: A still from Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad. The screenplay was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

I’ve talked about pantoums before, but we get the form (and word) from Malaysia, where it is an ancient type of verse, though it was not introduced to English until 1812. In a pantoum, the second and fourth lines of the first stanza are repeated as the first and third lines of the following stanza until the final stanza, when two new lines are introduced but not repeated. So writing one is not so much a challenge of rhythm or rhyme but of sequence. The poem has only half as many original lines as it appears to have, but, when these lines reflect or repeat, they can become like a hall of mirrors.

One of my favorite pantoums is Elaine Equi’s masterful “A Date with Robbe-Grillet.”

A Date with Robbe-Grillet

What I remember didn’t happen.
Birds stuttering.
Torches huddled together.
The café empty, with no place to sit.

Birds stuttering.
On our ride in the country
the café empty, with no place to sit.
Your hair was like a doll’s.

On our ride in the country
it was winter.
Your hair was like a doll’s
and when we met it was as children.

It was winter
when it rained
and when we met it was as children.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.

When it rained
the sky turned the color of Pernod.
You, for example, made a lovely girl.
Birds strutted.

The sky turned the color of Pernod.
Within the forest
birds strutted
and we came upon a second forest

within the forest
identical to the first.
And we came upon a second forest
where I was alone

identical to the first
only smaller and without music
where I was alone
where I alone could tell the story.

— Elaine Equi

Alain Robbe-Grillet is, of course, the perfect subject to portray with the pantoum’s looping form: the plots of his novels, and, most famously, his screenplay for Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad, all cycle and refract in the most surreal and dreamlike of ways.

Equi’s poem willfully acknowledges the repetition at the core of its own construction. She writes, “and we came upon a second forest / identical to the first.” Each of the lines in this pantoum is a short but mobile declarative statement whose meaning shifts according to whatever statements may adjoin or accompany it. The phrases “It was winter,” “When it rained,” “within the forest,” contain only the simplest bits if information, but in context they begin to have a hypnotizing effect, as the weight of an image shifts from one line to the next. They frame and reframe, nesting one action recursively into another.

These phrases’ dependency, however, is put in conflict by the poem’s conclusion: “… I alone could tell the story.” A dream is a rearrangement of fragments from reality, but it lives inside a single locked subconscious. What is the story here? What is the meaning of this dream? It’s wedded firmly to the structure of Equi’s pantoum itself.