[Janet Kenny]

Those of us who love rhyme are well accustomed to the amused condescension of those who see it as infantile and "popular". As the delight of exploring rhyme grew, the near rhyme sounds became for me, a delightful variation that removed predictability and opened up fascinating offshoots of sound and meaning.

I have become very inhibited about using them since I started posting here as they are frequently treated as a "mistake" rather than a deliberate and careful choice. I find that near rhyme has an interesting atonal effect--a sort of chromatic scale that stops a poem being too neat and Hallmarkish. They also can leave an interesting emotional undertone.

Near rhyme seems to be (IMO) a rhymster's path to modernity and interesting dissonance.

I wondered whether I am alone in this frustration?
Janet

[Fred Longworth]

Janet,

The aesthetic seems to be bifurcated into the rhyme adherents and the free-verse proponents, so that if you write something in between, the formalists scold you for corrupt rhyme and meter, and the FV fanatics chide you with complaints like, "L3 and L4 generated an expectation that was not sustained throughout."

This is a real problem. In music, we can pre-define and pre-declare ourselves though notation. Poetry, being generally unnoted, does not pre-define its terms: they are extrapolated from the work itself.

Then, if you preface the work with something like, "This poem uses many half rhymes and a loose iambic meter," people will say, "The poem should speak for itself."

In a way, given current conventions in the English poetry scene, you can't win. Perhaps others will advise on best presentation of half-rhymed poems. My only suggestion is: choose editors who "get it."

Fred

[A. E. Stallings]

I think near-rhyme skillfully handled is appreciated and admired here. I'm certainly a fan!

In a poem made up almost entirely of perfect rhyme, though, a slant rhyme can look on a workshop board like accident, laziness or ineptitude, particularly if it is assonantal (moon/room), which is more the provenance of nursery rhyme and folk song, rather than consonantal (love/prove), which tends to be more literary.

Generally, here, the expectation has to be set early on, or else the effect be obviously deliberate (as an emphatic dissonance at the end of a poem).

If you are running into a lot of unhelpful comments, you might do as Fred suggests and announce at top of the post that you are experimenting in near-rhyme.

Good luck!

[Janet Kenny]

Hi Fred

It is true that a poem can't declare its nature in advance unless it follows an established form. It is the expectation that that is what one must do that is inhibiting. And any announcement may set up expectations and prejudices.

Some established forms are rightly loved and protected although even then our modern vocabulary can push us in slightly different directions.

Janet


Thank you Alicia.

I knew of course that many individual poets here enjoy near rhyme but I find that whenever it is questioned by someone who doesn't, the poet rarely defends it but instead changes the rhyme.

The danger in all the arts is to confuse symmetry with balance. Japanese gardeners have a saying that there is nothing so vulgar as an excessively tidy garden. I feel that is also true of poetry. In the rules of one formal poetry contest it is stipulated that any variation must be repeated in the same place in every stanza of the poem. That seems very mistaken to me.


I'm not saying that poems deliberately written in established forms should break the accepted rules but sometimes a poet is stretching for something extra.

I appreciate your advice. I'll try to follow Fred's and your advice.

regards
Janet


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[nyctom]

Why should tradition be a straightjacket? If you can make it work, then it works.

And that goes for free verse as well. Not all free verse that rhymes is ipso facto doggrel. I would have a massive case of carpal tunnel syndrome if I started listing examples of perfect and slant rhyme found in free verse that doesn't deserve that description. It just usually isn't regularized--much of it is internal, for example.

What I find much more interesting--if not downright revealing--is this apparent unquenchable desire for following some arbitrary "standard"...

[Tim Love]

Yes to most of this. I think that once half-rhymes are introduced, some readers are going to wonder why some rhymes are tighter than others. I seem to recall that Larkin's rhymes get tighter in the course of a poem. In comparison, "random" use of rhyme can easily look like a loss of control. And the use of rhyme in a mostly free-form piece is even harder to pull off.

Peter Dale amongst others has tried to widen the acceptable range of rhyme. His "An Introduction to Rhyme", (Agenda/Bellew, 1998) demonstrates some options and his article "The New Freedom of Rhyme" (in Outposts 168 (1991) and elsewhere) lists 8 different kinds of rhyme.

One type that I think he doesn't mention was described as
"Accordian Rhyme" by Mary Jo Salter. In "Sandpiper" by Elizabeth Bishop there's "mist", "minute" and "mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst", but I wouldn't have noticed it unaided.

The word is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear.
.......................
The millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst

[Susan McLean]

Rhyme is a matter of taste. Whatever you choose to do, do it with conviction. Emily Dickinson, one of my favorite poets, uses near and slant rhymes frequently. I had to learn to like them, because at first I kept wishing she would just use exact rhymes (which I was used to). But once I saw what she was doing with them, I realized that much of her personality is conveyed through those rhymes, and now I wouldn't change them. Workshops can seem tyrannical if you are too suggestible, but the choice is always up to you. No one else can tell you what your own voice should sound like.

Susan

[This message has been edited by Susan McLean (edited November 12, 2003).]

[Julie Steiner]

Another factor in a workshop setting: slant rhymes are something easily observed, and thus something many critics feel confident commenting on--sometimes in too much haste.

Julie Stoner

[Robt_Ward]

The amusing thing about all this is that a LOT of the poets in the "canon" used all manner of slant- and off-rhymes with regularity. There's nothing modern or trendy about it IMO.

When I'm called to task for this sort of stuff, I mostly ignore it.

(tobt)

[Janet Kenny]

Tom, Tim, Susan, Julie and Robert,

I'm going to be out all day (early morning here) but I greatly enjoyed each response. A great set of thoughtful responses.

I don't think near rhyme is "trendy" Robert and wouldn't care if some thought it was. It's a choice--just one more building block or colour. It has always been used as you say but, because of the apparent recent polarisation in poetry, formal poets have painted themselves into a corner.

After all, poetry aims to "be". To create an experience--not pass a stiff departmental test. Many "correct" poems are intensely boring. And nobody should need permission before following their inner voice. Traditions all must start from something and it is the introduction of small changes that maintains any art form as a living and visceral expression.

very best
Janet