To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme. That Is a Question.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos was defending major layoffs at his Washington Post, and when asked why, with all his money, he wouldn't just subsidize the paper, he argued payment was a “signal” of relevance. “If people won’t pay for our product, we’re not doing, it’s not a good enough product […] It would be like poetry without rhyming. It’s too easy.”

The analogy was mocked almost immediately, including by a former Washington Post literary critic who imagined Poetry magazine rejecting T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" for insufficient rhyme.

An article at theconversation.com took off from there and reminds us that English loves a rhyme. Because rhyme is so audible, some have decided it must mean the poet is Working Very Hard and Being Serious. Which is funny, because for a very long time nobody could even agree what it was called. In Middle English, "rime" could mean rhyme, but it could also mean meter, or just verse in general. 

And unrhymed poetry?

1. Beowulf. No rhyming couplets about Grendel's bad manners. The Old English poets had a completely different sound system. Heavy stresses, a big dramatic pause in the middle of the line, and lots of alliterative beats like a drummer 
   Rhyme only really moved in after 1066, when the Normans arrived with their Frenchified vowels and their Frenchified taste for everything to match. Rhyme is memorable, teachable, and you can hear it from the back row without really listening. So naturally, it staged a hostile takeover and started pretending it was poetry.
2. John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, containing all of Creation and the Fall of Man entirely without rhyme. He even added a passive-aggressive preface explaining why. Rhyme, he said, was "no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse." What bothered Milton wasn't just the ding-dong-ding, but that rhyme tempts you to sound finished before you've actually finished thinking. He calls it the "jingling sound of like endings" and "the troublesome and modern bondage of riming." 
3. Mr. Shakespeare, when he actually needs to get something done, like, say, invent interior consciousness and run a five-act tragedy, he doesn't rhyme. His plays are built in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. The music comes from the push and pull of the rhythm against the sentence, not from two words kissing at the end of a line. Rhyme is saved for when someone is falling in love, being witty, or about to exit with a flourish.

T.S. Eliot wrote in "Reflections on Vers Libre," that there is “no freedom in art.” No rhyme does not mean no structure. Rhythm, word order, line, repetition, and other devices become more exposed.

I think that writing poetry without concern for rhyme does feel easier at first. Rhyme is a very visible kind of difficulty. Some poets wrestle with it and if you get something that doesn't sound like a greeting card or children's song, you get a dopamine shot of accomplishment. Rhyme tells you when a line is over. It tells you where the next line has to go. It even gives you a cheap way to sound musical when the rest of the line is prose. 

Writing unrhymed (blank verse, or free verse) is hard because you have to build the music out of other things. Poets learn to use the weight of stressed syllables, the length of the sentence against the length of the line, alliteration, vowel echo, the caesura. Many readers can't point to why-this-is-a-poem. It may read to some like broken-up prose that is quietly asking to be put back together. 

Most of the poets who last — O'Hara, Milton, Williams, Bishop — can do both, and they choose the tools for the job.  

 

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Poems at Lunch with Frank

I read an article in The Times a few weeks ago that suggested Frank O'Hara as the perfect poet for my lunchtime reading.

"It's my lunch hour, so I go / for a walk..." wrote O'Hara in his Lunch Poems. It's a small book from 1964. Frank would have turned 100 this year, but the poems don't read like an old man. They are un-intimidating, and feel a bit like he was writing them at the table across from me outside on this July afternoon as the world passes by my cafe table.

 

The small book was published by City Lights Books as number nineteen in the Pocket Poets series with their unassuming covers (as with Ginsberg's Howl) and was edited by the poet in collaboration with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Donald Allen, who had published O'Hara's poems in his The New American Poetry. 

O'Hara studied at the New England Conservatory when he was a teen. Concert piano. But he traded that for words. He moved to New York in 1951 at 24. He took a no-pay "job" at MoMA so he could see the Matisse and eventually became a curator there. He championed Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, and the rest of the Abstract Expressionists, and he was writing art criticism.

He was a lunchtime walker, and that was where many of the Lunch Poems came into being. They are formally inventive and casually composed. He wrote in his office at The Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime, and on the Staten Island Ferry en route to a poetry reading.

He belonged to the New York School quite literally. He hung out with painters and poets in the Fifties and Sixties. Pollock, his old college friend John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Jane Freer and they traded studio space, gossip, and line breaks. 

"How funny you are today New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swing Time..." he says to the city in begins "Steps." The poetry lesson here includes his idea of the importance of place. And specific places - Bergdorf's, Christmas trees being hauled down Park Avenue, "cool graced light" hitting the enormous glass towers of midtown. You probably haven't lived in NYC. Either have I, but I get it. 

In the final scene of the opening episode of the second season of Mad Men - the TV series set in the world of NYC advertising in the early 1960s - we see the show's protagonist, Don Draper, picking up a slim volume of O'Hara's poems (Meditations in an Emergency from 1957). Don recites the final lines from "Mayakovsky." It fit in quite well. 

I know so many poets who bemoan the lack of time they have to write. O'Hara says you don't have to wait for some weekend retreat or a residency in a mountaintop cabin. It happens while eating lunch, on a walk, between errands.

Reading poems on your lunch hour is a particular kind of pleasure. You've eaten, you're sated, and if the poet has done their work, you're sated in a second way too — that small, lit-up feeling that says: go write something, go read something, go look harder at the street for the rest of the afternoon.

Lunch Poems is, in the best sense, pure Americana. Lunch, for one thing, is literal. O'Hara really does eat his lunch in these poems. There are chocolate malted milkshakes and cheeseburgers and sweating bottles of Coca-Cola, all recorded with a kind of sensual delight in abundance that feels utterly American. And then there are the movies. He has a great appetite for them.

"Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies! /It's true that fresh air is good for the body / but what about the soul / that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images..." ("Ave Maria")

I wish the end of O'Hara's own story was more like these poems. In July 1966, on a dark beach on Fire Island, he was struck by a jeep. He was 40. His funeral on Long Island was a who's who of the New York art world. They gathered for their friend whose poems never really believed in tragedy.

Rather, let us end with walking with Frank at lunch.

It’s my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look 
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust...
           from "A Step Away from Them" 

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Emily Dickinson, Children's Poet

Illustration from St. Nicholas magazine for children
that accompanied one of Emily's poems

I learned this week that after Emily Dickinson died, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd were left to handle Dickinson's work. Todd was deeply involved in a love affair with Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother, who was married to Susan, who was a very close friend of Emily.

Emily had been famously hesitant to publish while she was alive.

In an effort to promote the posthumously published volumes of Dickinson's poetry, her editors sometimes positioned the work as children's literature. These edits ranged from changing punctuation to amending the rhyme schemes to be more elementary and even changing entire lines. Todd said she altered some of Dickinson's poems to be more lullaby-like, changing them “in order to have the rhyme perfect."

I still have a tough time as an adult interpreting many of Dickinson's poems, and could not imagine reading them as a child.

One famous example of an edit is in  "I taste a liquor never brewed." Dickinson originally wrote:

Not all the Frankfort Berries

Yield such an Alcohol!

Todd and Higginson published it as:

Not Frankfort Berries yield the sense

Such a delirious whirl!

which substantially changes Dickinson's imagery and rhythm.

Some Dickinson poems appeared in children's magazines in the 1890s. Here is one poem from a children's magazine.

Here is Emily's original version:

Will there really be a "Morning"?

Is there such a thing as "Day"?

Could I see it from the mountains

If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?

Has it feathers like a Bird?

Is it brought from famous countries

Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!

Oh some Wise Men from the skies!

Please to tell a little Pilgrim

Where the place called "Morning" lies!

You can see that the only changes here are Emily's distinctive capitalizations.

St. Nicholas was the premier magazine for children's literature and it serialized some of the most famous classics in children’s literature, including: The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain, Little Men by Louisa May Alcott, and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The purist in me objects to changes made to her poems after her death, but the example above does read fine as a poem for children. 

What are your feelings about what the editors did with her work?

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Prompt: At The End Of

For our July prompt, we look at Jane Kenyon’s poem “Three Songs at the End of Summer,” which features three portraits of late summer.

For our August issue, we ask for poems that use her title as a starting place. Not poems about summer, but about endings. Your title should be "Three ______ at the End of ________."  For example, you could write "Three Scenes at the End of an Affair," or "Three Haiku at the End of Life." You might write three stanzas, or three short poems, three sections, or even "Three Lines at the End of Day."

I do like how Jane's poem's three parts are connected through nature and also distinct in their sounds, moods, and atmosphere. Her second section consists of two three-line stanzas. The poem ends with lines that lead us gently into autumn. The poem views the end of August as the end of summer, the way young people often mark the end of summer with the start of another school year.

I had the new books—words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31

Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) was an acclaimed American poet and translator known for her luminous, spare, and emotionally resonant verse. Her life and work deeply chronicled her lifelong struggle with clinical depression, her spiritual faith, and the quiet beauty of rural New England. 

She was married to poet Donald Hall. Following their marriage in 1972, the couple relocated to Hall's family home Eagle Pond Farm in Wilmot, New Hampshire. That location provided the natural imagery for much of her writing.

Her poetry includes From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990) and Constance (1993). Her Collected Poems contain all four collections.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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