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“The Bride Stripped Bare, the buck stops here, The Carpenters, the coast is clear, The Cockateer, the cold shoulder, the comfy chair, the crack of beers, the crack of rears, The Deer Hunter, the diluters, the dirt master, the girl next door, The Godfather, the gondola, the great ickster, the horned screamer, the last supper, the letter “r,” the life after, The Mad Hatter, The Marx Brothers, The Mouse that Roared, The New Yorker, The Pound Era, the reader hears, the room is awed, the same letter, the scent of her, the “seeded” draw, the skinwalkers, the slim reaper, the third gender, the unseen seer, the voice quaqua, The Watchtower, the…whatever, the who don’t care, the Wonder Years, the working poor, the Yakuza”
from No. 111 2.7.93—10.20.96
by Kenneth Goldsmith
The Figures, 1997
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No. 111 is a volume-length poem that itemizes a lexicon of phrases encountered by the author Kenneth Goldsmith during his reading over the course of three years, from February 7, 1993 to October 20, 1996. Goldsmith responds to the tradition of conceptual art by compiling a sublime, but useless, compendium that arranges in alphabetical order all phrases rhyming with the letter R, sorting these entries by number of syllables, starting with entries of one syllable for Chapter 1, progressing through entries of two syllables, three syllables, even a hundred syllables, until finally the book finishes with a complete transcript of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D. H. Lawrence, whose story of 7,228 syllables ends on the word, “winner.”
No. 111 calls to mind the rhyming dictionaries used by versifiers to find the mot juste that might end the line of a sonnet. While most modern poets tend to avoid any obvious use of rhyme, many unitiated consumers of verse still regard rhyme as the defining characteristic of poetic speech. For such readers, rhyme provides a kind of rigorous standard against which the formal merits of a poem might be easily judged. For such readers, the constraint imposed by the euphonic, metrical patterns of rhyme supposedly aid in the rote recital of any didactic, cultural messages communicated by the poet. The above excerpt, however, does not convey any instructive information, but takes delight in the music of rhyme itself.
No. 111 responds directly to the polyvocal discourse of the digital economy by sampling some of its longer passages from chatrooms and homepages found on the Internet. The poem attempts to lend aesthetic structure to a discordant assortment of argots and motifs. The above excerpt, for example, consists only of extant rhymes that contain four syllables and begin with the word “the.” The list crams together diverse examples of cultural detritus, skipping from a masterpiece by Duchamp to the catchphrase of Truman, juxtaposing references to books and commercial art, films and television ads. The poet implies that, when we pay sensitive attention to the music of words, no phrase, no matter how cliché, is ever unpoetic.
No. 111 constitutes a kind of core-sample extracted from the everyday, millenial language of capitalism. Goldsmith suggests that, hidden among the fragments of adverts and sitcoms, there exist the broken lines of a titanic, rhyming poem in the process of being written by everyone. The disparate fragments of such speech compose a potential orchestra of noises, always venturing into chaos, but always returning to the same sound that acts like a punctuation mark within the language itself. The poet merely becomes attuned to this given sound, recording it whenever he hears it amid the cacophony of his life. The resulting poem escorts the reader through a series of hypnotic litanies, each one more complicated than the last one.
“While most modern poets tend to avoid any obvious use of rhyme…” — do you genuinely assert that? Do you actually believe that’s correct, up-to-the-minute-date? You are not, I hope, I guess, playing into that implicit and deeply erroneous connection, that smug iron-clad bond, made by “many unitiated consumers of verse” (most, in fact) today, between modernity and free verse, rhyme and traditionalism, between, in fact, strict and and absurd formal constraints (of which rhyme is the oldest and many ways still best example) and utter backwardness, lack of freedom? You have noticed that Paris Hilton’s poem does not rhyme?
The Kenneth Goldsmith you quote is fun–he is clearly enjoying the sounds and the metrical impulse here, though I don’t know how I would feel about reading a whole book of it. One dips in and out, I suppose, much as I enjoy flipping through a dictionary (though I don’t have a rhyming one).
I have to agree with Vivek, however, that a lot of your assertions about rhyme and its place in contemporary poetry and readership seem off the mark. His point about Paris Hilton’s poem is very well made. Actually, very FEW readers consider rhyme the end-all be-all of verse, MOST poetry the public is exposed to is pretty plain-spoken unrhymed free verse–as in the average poem on Garrison Keeler’s Writers’ Almanac. Or Maya Angelou. Even poetry for children. Most of the bad adolescent poetry–unless, perhaps, it is written as song lyrics–is unrhymed. Unrhyme is the default mode now. Even people who know nothing about poetry are surprised when I tell them that a lot of the poetry I write is in rhyme. They didn’t think it was done anymore.
I also think that avoiding the “obvious” use of rhyme no longer holds true for a lot of people (hiding the rhymes, if you will, being formal without getting caught at it). Most poets–or versifiers–that I know that work in rhyme are quite happy to have it out there for all to see and hear. Rhyme is out of the closet.
Paris?
Paris Hilton?
Paris Hilton writes?
Paris Hilton writes poetry?
Paris.
Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton writes.
Paris Hilton writes poetry.
Zut!
I’m still in a travel daze, but I thought of this discussion on opening up to the funny pages yesterday, when there was a cartoon (the Family Circle or whatever it is–one of those unfunny ones) where one of the kids has got down a book from the bookshelf and is explaining to another one of the kids that this is one of Mommy’s poetry books, even though the poems in it don’t rhyme. If the mommy in Family Circle reads free verse… Wish I could link it here!