Comments on: Rhyme Driven

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:01:12 +0000

Alicia and Tom – thanks so much for your kind words. Tom, I may be too lazy to try anything new. It’s a full-time job just keeping myself amused. Alicia, if she’s not already doing it herself, will know what’s new in rime. (why do you spell it rime? easier to type, that’s for sure.) Now about the name — hmmm — ??? –
Hacker Hedonist
Stallings Sybarite
Formal Hedonist
Chiming Hedonist
I could see calling myself something like this.
PS: Good to read your poem, Henry!

By: Tom Jardine

Tom Jardine — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:30:45 +0000

Mary,
I had listened to your rhyme, and you do have a wonderful voice. The piece does sound, to me, like Appalachia, an old diddy from the hills with a touch of seafaring and old world English. I enjoyed it. But in essence reduced, it is retro.
Is anyone doing anything new? Is there any new ground? Is anyone even trying?
Tom

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:43:37 +0000

One of rhyme’s advantages : it can attune one to all the other sound effects going on. The very effort to avoid clunky or trite rhymes focuses attention on the whole line. It’s a kind of physical exercise – the “materiality” of rhyme seeps into the rest of it.
Of course it works the other way, too, whenever lax writers lean too heavily on the end rhyme – like a prop supporting shoddy carpentry. And there’s also the problem of overemphasis – a belabored preciosity, when sound for its own sake takes the place of sense.
In my case, rhyme seems to have become sort of second nature, for better & worse. I know how some rappers must feel. An example (from 10 yrs ago) :
BALLADE INDUSTRIEL
Now that the world is one great marketplace
and all its treasuries (from sand and tar
to elephant and diamond, outer space
to ocean floor, urbs to jungle) are
for sale–now Party is turned Commissar
and Russia, China, even Cuba climb
that pyramid (from serf to millionaire). . .
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.
Now that computers prowl at cheetah pace
combing the earth for Cheapest Laborer
and every digit in the human race
must scrabble for superfluous welfare
and bide no time, by coffeespoon or star,
no time to dawdle, fiddle with a rhyme. . .
(you’ve got to get those groceries in the car!)
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.
When hoary banks account your state of grace
and future hands are cloning in a jar
and skillful engineers can scan your face
and clever churls can turn you into char
while mafiosi split their wanderjahr
between Manhattan and some sunburnt clime
one mourning dove still murmurs from afar
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.
A lame albino gypsy cried: I lost my dear
sweet darling’s ring–I’m liable for this crime!
Lord, if there’s justice in this world–draw near.
Now is the time, O now is the precious time.

By: Steve Mackin

Steve Mackin — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:56:52 +0000

Alicia, remember the first rule of Creative Writing 101: Don’t tell ‘em; show ‘em!
Maya
Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things
as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand.
For a second you see – and seeing the secret,
are the secret. For a second there is meaning!
A Long Day’s Journey into Night, Act IV
Eugene O’Neill
Often I’ve stared at liquid in motion,
at water seeking to reveal its nature,
and thought I saw electricity. Then heard
reason tell me it was all an illusion,
a trick of light upon swift sluicing surfaces.
But I believe that I touched something truer,
what lies beneath the skin known by senses,
immaculate, immutable existence as essence.
But the gadfly reason always calls me back
to the corroding narratives of the intellective,
to beginnings and endings, to good and evil,
to joy and despair, to pain and pleasure, to
belief and doubt, the banal templates we use
to shield us from the paralysis of meaning.
SPMackin

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:19:41 +0000

Great voice, Mary!
Andrew, I love that quotation from Hacker. Yes, maybe instead of a “formalist” I should go around telling people I am a “hedonist”…

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:28:53 +0000

Ms. Rhyme is crushed that Tom thinks she's dead and not a literi, and she has a bad case of stage fright. Nevertheless, she said she would, so she's posting the link to Soundzine. Ms. Rhyme can be found driving her rhymes here in the second song.

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 14:11:20 +0000

Thanks, Aaron. Maybe it isn’t clear here, but I adore internal rhymes & slant rhymes & off rhymes & pararhymes and mosaic rhymes & rime riche & eye rhymes and all that jazz. True rhyme interests me too as a subspecies. I am also interested in how one sets up and then fulfills or overachieves or subverts or even disappoints expectations, which is part of the excitement of rhyming.
Yes, ” a poet who works in form” is a tautology–I guess I was just trying to avoid that dreaded -ist word again. Trust me, I am the queen of tautologies!

By: Aaron Fagan

Aaron Fagan — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 13:30:04 +0000

I have great respect for your art, so please don’t get me wrong. To say you are “a poet who work in form” is like saying a plumber works with plumbing. Your bone with “rhyme driven” is cool to read about. But is it at the expense of overlooking that there are various ways poems rhyme that go beyond conventional or familiar rhyme schemes. Internal rhymes, slant rhymes, visual rhymes. In that sense, given all the ways people fuel or build and destroy the poem’s sonic machinations these days, rhyme driven seems like a healthy tool to understand how one poem is working over another.

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:52:59 +0000

Steve,
you know, I don’t think I have thought consciously about that quirk of English before–that nouns tend not to perfectly rhyme with their verbs–though it is something I often work around (to avoid a very ugly effect). The truth is, a noun and verb are likely going to be separated by some sort of clause if they rhyme. And it is very easy to put a verb into the infinitive to “fix” the problem, or to use a singular noun instead of its plural. In other words, there’s no excuse!
I do think about Byron all the time! He’s close to my heart. Here he is of course a major historical figure as well as literary one–streets are named after him, there is a beautiful statue of him receiving the blessings of Hellas in the center of town, etc; his name inflects as though it were an ancient Greek one. In the West, Byron’s service to Greece is often dismissed as a celebrity stunt, but his aid was real and pragmatic (he ploughed his personal fortune into the war, without which the Saronic shipping houses would never have entered the navy), and I think hard to overestimate. There’s a terrific and insightful book on this subject you have probably read (I think you must read more in a week than I do in a year!), On a Voiceless Shore by Stephen Mintna about Byron and Western Greece.
And of course Byron may be the best rhymer in English ever. OK–there are the stunners like “intellectual” and “hen-pecked you all”. But my personal favorite:
If Pindar sang horse races, what should hinder
Himself from being as pliable as Pindar?
(The delightful and deliberately ironic set-up to the Isles of Greece…)

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 10:36:25 +0000

Thanks, folks, for more interesting thoughts on this subject. I absolutely agree with Susan that far from being a constraint, rhyme can open up a poem to posssibilities the reader might not otherwise entertain. A rhyme might give “permission” as it were for a poem to go in an unexpected or even unwanted direction. They are associative in subconscious sorts of ways.
Some criticism of my own work has centered on the fact that poems rhymes–the suggestion being that the poems did say and do interesting things, but that they would be better without the rhymes. I am always thrilled to write a good rhymeless poem, of course; but these criticisms show me that the critics do not fully understand how rhyme works. What those rhyming poems say and do is because of, not in spite of, the rhymes. Otherwise they would not exist–I would have written something else. Such criticism suggests that a poet knows what she wants to say and then just gussies it up with rhyme and meter–versifies it. Not so. At least not for me. The rhymes are engine, not ornament.
As a reply to Jim–I think that how rhymes look on the page and what they say is just as important, of course, as their chiming. If rhymes appear to be predictable, however, it is surely the thoughts that are predictable. Surely this is not good rhyming poetry. And rhyming is something of a tightrope act. Do it badly and everyone can see you wobble.
Criticism of rhyme is a lot older than free verse, of course. There is Milton saying it is a matter of taste and that since the ancients didn’t use it for epic, neither should we. (He had no problem rhyming lyric.) And there is Pope’s delightful “Essay on Criticism”:
While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.
But look what he does here. The rhymes are predictable because the verse is dull and unoriginal, he seems to be saying. And yet at the same time he carries off the very rhymes he criticizes by putting them into a new–satirical–context, so that he shows us how it is done well even as he tells us how it is done badly.