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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Only Rhyme with Nicholson Baker

I just finished listening to Nicholson Baker’s 2009 novel, The Anthologist. It is a meta-fictional exploration of the creative process and really gets into the technicalities of poetry, particularly rhyme. 

The protagonist, Paul Chowder, is a poet. Baker has said in interviews that while he isn't a poet himself, he shares Chowder’s obsession with rhyme and meter. Through Chowder, Baker delivers highly technical "lectures" on the 4-beat line, the history of iambic pentameter, and how these things are used by certain poets. Paul is a middle-aged, moderately successful poet tasked with writing the introduction to a new poetry anthology titled Only Rhyme. But he is stalled by procrastination. He has selected the poems, but he cannot seem to write a single word of the introduction.

His struggle is mixed with his personal life. His long-term girlfriend, Roz, has recently moved out because she is tired of his inability to move forward with his work and his life.

Poets should enjoy his deep dives into the lives and techniques of poets like John Dryden, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louise Bogan, and Elizabeth Bishop. He treats these historical figures like personal friends or neighbors. 

I'm not a big fan of rhyme in modern poetry, but I liked the lessons and anecdotes about poets. His introduction becomes a meditation on how we use art to make sense of our failures and our loves.

After I finished the book, I stumbled on "Endymion" by John Keats and took a closer look than usual at the rhyme.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Its loveliness increases,
it will never pass into nothingness
but still will keep a bower quiet for us

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made of our searching; yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits.

The rhyme still doesn't work for me the way it does for Paul Chowder or Keats.

I have read almost all of Baker's books. Here are 4 that I enjoyed. 

The Fermata (1994) is my favorite of his novels. A provocative and controversial story that blends magical realism with erotica. It follows a man who can stop time by snapping his fingers (a move he calls "The Fold"). While time is frozen, he moves through the world unobserved, and spends part of his stopped time (Can you spend stopped time?) doing what any adolescent male would do with that power - though the protagonist is an adult - and that's why the book is frequently debated for its "ethical implications" and its "voyeuristic" premise. One reviewer called it a "X-rated sci-fi fantasy," which will either intrigue you or turn you off.

U and I is non-fiction about Baker's obsession with John Updike, though he hasn't met him. I am a big fan of Updike's writing, so I could identify.

The Mezzanine (1988) was Baker’s debut and is known for its hyper-focus on the mundane details of daily life. The entire novel takes place during a single lunch hour as the narrator, Howie, buys a pair of shoelaces and returns to his office via an escalator. It has Baker’s signature style of minute observations (here, footnotes) —such as the mechanics of a straw, the design of a paper-towel dispenser, or the philosophy of office etiquette. I know it doesn't sound like a page-turner but it will surprise you.

Vox (1992) was a commercial success. That might be surprising as it consists entirely of a single phone conversation between two strangers on a pay-per-minute erotic chat line. It was a New York Times bestseller and gained some notoriety when it was revealed that Monica Lewinsky had given a copy to President Bill Clinton. But more importantly, it shows mastery of dialogue and human connection through technology decades before AI was all the buzz.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Like a Seuss

“From there to here, and here to there,

funny things are everywhere.”

- from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss

For this month, we are writing poems in the style of Theodore Geisel - better known as Dr. Seuss. Is he a poet? We certainly think of him as a children's book author and we know he uses rhyme, but few people think of his books as poems. If you take a look at one of his books in its entirety, using his line breaks, it certainly looks and sounds like a poem. Take a look at Oh, The Places You'll Go  as one poem.

Dr. Seuss came into being partly because of a 1950s report on illiteracy among American school children called "Why Johnny Can't Read." That report placed part of the blame on boring children's books. Random House and Houghton Mifflin commissioned a young author and illustrator named Theodore Geisel to create a new vocabulary primer that would inspire and excite its readers. He wrote The Cat in the Hat and became Dr. Seuss.

Rhyme and repetition were clearly two of the poetic tools Seuss used. In One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish Seuss uses words that rhyme exactly. These straight rhymes create a simple rhyme scheme.

Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?
Did you ever milk this kind of cow?
Well, we can do it. We know how.
If you never did, you should.
These things are fun and fun is good.

Dr. Seuss did not always use straight rhymes. He sometimes played around with words by using half rhymes - two words that sound alike but don't rhyme exactly - to add a different rhythm to a book. We can find an example of this in Yertle the Turtle.

"You stay in your place while I sit here and rule.
I'm the king of a cow! And I'm the king of a mule!
I'm the king of a house! And a bush! And a cat!
But that isn't all.  I'll do better than that!

My throne shall be higher!" his royal voice thundered.
"So pile up more turtles! I want 'bout two hundred!"

If you say 'thundered' and 'hundred' out loud, you can hear their sneaky half rhyme.

The beauty of many of the rhymes is that the words are unexpected.

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)
     From: Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

‘Maybe Christmas,’ he thought, ‘doesn’t come from a store.
Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!’”
     From: How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

I meant what I said, and I said what I meant…
An elephant’s faithful, one hundred per cent!
     From: Horton Hatches the Egg

Using the same words and phrases was one way he was able to get young children to read his books on their own. Green Eggs and Ham is a good example of his use of repetition. (This was one of my youngest son's favorite books, though I must admit the repetition drove me a bit mad on the hundreth reading.)

I will not eat them in a house,
I will not eat them with a mouse,
I will not eat them in a box
I will not eat them with a fox,
I will not eat them here or there
I will not eat them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them Sam I Am.

Dr. Seuss had a 53-year career and is one of the most beloved authors of children's books. His clever rhymes, humor, invented words and colorful illustrations continue to capture readers. His books have sold over 220 million copies and have been translated into 15 languages, and beyond the books are the films and merchandise that has no poet competition.

In that first book,The Cat in the Hat, there is less repetition and more of a narrative, which might be the approach you take in your poem this month.

Then our mother came in
And she said to us two,
"Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did you do?"

And Sally and I did not
know what to say.
Should we tell her
The things that went on
there that day?

Well... what would YOU do
If your mother asked you?

His book The Lorax has become an environmental classic that is read by children and adults. Though it is a light-hearted story, it is also a cautionary tale. It has a message about taking collective responsibility for the stewardship of the environment. Not doing so would mean our own world will soon be like the one that the Lorax left behind.

I am the Lorax.
I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees,
for the trees have no tongues.

I meant no harm.
I most truly did not.
But I had to grow bigger.
So bigger I got.

Oh, the Places You'll Go! (1990) is his last book to be published during his lifetime. The book concerns the journey of life and its challenges. It has become a popular gift for high school and college graduates and also for retirees.

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!

Though it has much of Seuss' style, it also has a narrator and the reader as characters. A young boy, the "you", is the reader and it is written in second person and uses future tense. YOU is setting forth on an adventure which may be starting kindergarten or college or a new job or retirement.

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

The book is very much about making good choices as you choose the "streets" you will go down, and hopefully avoid ones that are "not-so-good."

You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, 'I don't choose to go there.'
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And there is also the possibility that none of the usual streets will be to your liking (a road not taken?) and so you have the option to head "out of town."

And you may not find any
you'll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you'll head straight out of town.
It's opener there
in the wide open air.
Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.
And then things start to happen,
don't worry. Don't stew.
Just go right along.
You'll start happening too.

This month's prompt is to write in the style of Dr. Seuss. Does that mean a "children's poem?"  Not at all. We would expect rhyme, some half rhyme, some repetition, perhaps some invented wordplay. Be clever with your theme or message, if there is one. Of course, all that cleverness can be used to entertain too.

Submission Deadline: March 30, 2019

Rhyming Dictionary

For some of our writing prompts, rhyme might be important. That is true of our September 2015 prompt about light verse.

There are lots of online and print rhyming dictionaries available. A while back, Janis, who runs a site with a rhyming dictionary and other creative writing tools for poets called rhymedesk.com, offered me the code for a widget to add a rhyming dictionary to my website.

I also added it to our own poet links page.

Give it a try.

Enter a word in the search box above.

Provided by Rhyme Desk

Didactic, rhyming, list poems. Tall order.

This month I chose the poem "How to Live" by Charles Harper Webb as our model poem.

Charles Harper Webb was a rock guitarist for fifteen years. He's a licensed psychotherapist. He's a professor at California State University. He has written five books of poetry. He uses three names because there are so many Charles Webbs in the world. (Full disclosure: I first looked at his poems a few years ago because I thought he was the guy who wrote The Graduate.)

I stumbled upon his poem "Bombs Over Everywhere" on the Huffington Post blog and I got excited because I thought he might be a blogging poet (he's not).

I suggested that because his poem begins with an epigraph that is a line from a poem by Sharon Olds: "I don't know how to live," we can read the poem as a response to her. Advice on how to live.

It's also a list poem, a form that has often been used. It's a form that I believe many readers and writers dismiss as too easy or less "poetic." It's a form teachers use with students to get them into writing poetry because it is easy.

Then, what makes a list go beyond list to poem? It's worth noting that Webb has a book of prose poems, Hot Popsicles, and that form deals with the same question. If you read other poems by Webb, you know that it's not a question about his ability to write poetry.

The poem has a structure of 5 line stanzas, but the stanza breaks seem arbitrary. Even the line breaks seem to be controlled more by the physical length of the line than by a meter or syllabication. Do you find it full of figurative language? I don't.

There are literary moments in his advice - "Read Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Kafka, Shakespeare, Twain." - followed by "Collect Uncle Scrooge comics." One theme that does run through the advice is contrast - "Don't think TV characters talk to you; that's crazy. Don't be too sane." and "Work hard. Loaf easily."

I have long been a believer in the ars poetica all-poems-are-about-poetry school of reading. Can we look at this poem as not only advice for living but as advice to poets? Should poets try forms that go against their own sense of what is poetry?

At Poets Online, we have gone down the advice path before: advice to poets, and advice to poets in a poetic form, good advice gone bad, so we don't need to try that again.

To make it more challenging, we want it to be didactic poetry, and put in that pesky rhyme in the way of several poetic games. Ever heard of bouts-rimes (boo-REEM - literally "end rhymes") which is an 18th century parlor game. Partygoers get a list of rhyming words and then have to make a poem from the list keeping the rhymes in their original order. There's also crambo where one player gives a word or line which is matched in rhyme by the other players.

Didactic poetry gives instruction (often moral instruction), so your poem should instruct.

An example often used is Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism."

Here's the opening stanza:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!

And it is a list poem we are writing. Sometimes you hear that called catalog verse - a list of persons, places, things, or abstract ideas which share a common denominator. It's an ancient form.

Your working set of rhymes (in the way of bouts-rimes) is:
surprise/rise, white/bright, mind/behind, rock/lock, head/bed, share/hair, way/day, place/embrace.

I ask that poets use them in any order or scheme. You don't need to use all of them, but it does suggest a line limit of 16 lines (yes, there are ways around that - internal rhyme is one possibility). There are 8 couplets suggested; use 7 and you have a sonnet form.

I feel that that creates a box for your poem, but leaves lots of room for your own decoration.

Check the Poets Online Archive for responses to this prompt and others

Donald Hall and the Position of Poet Laureate

I spent some time reading articles about Donald Hall being appointed the 14th Poet Laureate of the United States.

ON DONALD HALL:

"I think Don's a natural choice for our new laureate. He's been part of the poetic conversation ... for 50 years. He's a poet who's deeply rooted in a place, as fewer Americans are now, and also one even more rooted in the history of the language, in a lifelong love of musical speech." - Mark Doty

He is the third poet laureate from New Hampshire. (Robert Frost and Maxine Kumin are the others)

He is 77 and still has a reputation for outspokenness, particularly on 1st Amendment issues, so there's hope that this resident of the "Live Free or Die" state may stir things up.

He lives at Eagle Pond, in a New Hampshire farmhouse built by his great-grandfather in 1865 with his two cats, Thelma and Louise.

Eagle Pond was built by Hall's great-grandfather in 1865 and it's been in the family ever since. This places figures in much of his poetry. He says he remembers his grandfather telling stories here and reciting poems and summers haying in the morning and reading in the afternoon. He wrote his first poems about this house when he was 12.

He said that at 12 he wrote his first poem and it began: "have you ever thought about the nearness of death to you?"

Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins, called Hall a poet of "elegiac preoccupations," for whom "death is a favorite lens."

At 16, he was a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont.

Got his bachelor's degree in literature from Harvard in 1951. Dated poet Adrienne Rich there and knew Robert Bly (still a close friiend), Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch.

At 29, he went to teach at the University of Michigan, where he remained until 1975.

There he met Jane Kenyon, then 19 and a student of his.

They married in 1972. Jane persuaded Hall to stop teaching, move back to Eagle Pond and support himself by writing. The prospect of no regular income terrified him, but they did it.

Hall and Kenyon together attracted almost as much attention as their poetry. Bill Moyers made an Emmy-winning documentary about the couple called "A Life Together."

Hall was appointed poet laureate of New Hampshire from 1984 - 1989.

In 1989, he learned he had colon cancer which metastasized to his liver. After chemotherapy, he went into remission, but was told he had a 1 in 3 chance of living three years.

In 1994, Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia. Fifteen months later, at 47, she died.

Their life together, their love and her dying has been the subject of much of his writing since.

"I really got going as an elegiac poet when Jane died. It was the only thing that gave me comfort. I spent about 22 hours yelling and screaming and then I sat down to write. I was happy when I was writing to her. After a year it became impossible to say 'you,' while addressing her. I would like to write her many letters. There's so much she doesn't know."

He enjoys watching baseball on his satellite dish and like many from that area of the nation is a Red Sox fan.

These days, Hall wakes early, often by 4:30 a.m., and puts in several hours of writing, editing, revising ("the first drafts are always hideous") and dictating letters before taking a midday nap. He will assume his duties as poet laureate Oct. 1, but is not entirely sure how that will change his routine. "I will," he said, "administer prizes and fellowships and oversee a reading series at the Library of Congress." He will travel to Washington every six weeks and would like to start a poetry channel on satellite radio.

He has 15 poetry collections, several children's books, and essays on poets and their work. His latest poetry collection is White Apples and the Taste of Stone (Harcourt).


ABOUT THE POET LAUREATE POSITION

• Established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937.
• Usually held for one year but can be extended to as many as three.
• Hall succeeds Ted Kooser, from Nebraska, who held the post since 2004.
• It "pays" $40,000 a year ($35,000 for expenses and $5,000 for travel) The money is not paid by your taxes. It is donated by the Archer M. Huntington Foundation who endowed the position in 1936.
• The official title is "Poet Laureate Consultant to the Librarian of Congress.
• Official duty is one thing - an appearance at the opening of the Library of Congress' annual literary series in the fall.
• Some Laureates take up a cause or focus on a project.
• Ted Kooser set up a Web site americanlifeinpoetry.org where there's a poem a week with an introduction by him and is intended to be used by newspapers to promote poetry.
• Billy Collins created Poetry 180 at www.loc.gov/poetry/180/ which also became a book and has produced a second volume. It was intended to promote K-12 teachers using a poem a day in their classes.
• Robert Pinsky started the Favorite Poem Project favoritepoem.org
• Robert Hass promoted the River of Words project for writing about nature and the environment by children riverofwords.org
• Still, some poets just act as ambassadors of poetry without any special project, like Louise Gluck (2003-04) or the late Stanley Kunitz (2000-01) who, of course, was 95 at the time.