Comments on: Quick Review 03

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:26:05 +0000

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!

By: elle

elle — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:24:43 +0000

Paris?
Paris Hilton?
Paris Hilton writes?
Paris Hilton writes poetry?
Paris.
Paris Hilton.
Paris Hilton writes.
Paris Hilton writes poetry.
Zut!

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 06:58:52 +0000

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.

By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:36:45 +0000

“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?