[Julie Kane]

Has anyone read the pro-rhyme manifesto by Alicia Stallings ("Presto Manifesto") in the new issue of Poetry (Feb.)? I just found it posted online at The Poetry Foundation, too--yay. It's absolutely brilliant:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/jour...html?id=182841

[E. Shaun Russell]

Brilliant indeed!

[Catherine Chandler]

Hear! Hear!

[Mary Meriam]

So many points in there made me happy. I got so happy I had to post a quote.

[Wendy Sloan]

Yes! Free the rhymers!!!!
Go Alicia!

[David Landrum]

Yes. By all means. Hear, hear. Just what I wanted to say.

dwl

[Rose Kelleher]

Woo-hoooo! You tell 'em, girl!

[Maryann Corbett]

Yep, I love it too.

(But gee, what are we going to say instead of "rhyme-driven"? Isn't there something we do mean?
Anybody want to talk about that? Up at Mastery, or Discerning Eye?)

[Clive Watkins]

Indeed, and there are other kinds of formal patterning that can drive and shape the imagination in the way that Alicia argues, correctly, that rhyme does - and indeed her piece implies.

Clive

[Roger Slater]

Great stuff indeed.

I do think we should retain "rhyme-driven" as a pejorative, though. Alicia is certainly right that those who write in rhyme are often driven in one direction or another by the rhymes. Everyone here know that very well, I suspect. But if this reality of composition becomes too obvious to the reader, and the reader begins to suspect that something has been said less well than it could because the poet was stuck for a rhyme, the poem is "rhyme driven" in the way we normally mean it when we criticize a poem for having that quality.

I love so much of what Alicia has said. The part about rhymes not needing to be hidden or disguised is especially refreshing. So often in non-met forums or criticism we hear a rhyming poem get praised by someone who says something like, "This is wonderful. I didn't even notice that the poem rhymed until I read it a few times!" It burns me up.