Susan,
Don't feel sad for them - to hell with 'em! They'll get it eventually, maybe. You're right, I think: it's learned behavior. They should read G. K. Chesterton on rhyme - he makes it all so fun - or someone like that. Kids don't have a problem with rhyme, adults do. Come to think of it, the same thing could be said about playing.
Andrew

Susan and Andrew, I don't disagree at all that a dislike of rhyme is a handicap. But I wonder why such a handicap isn't discussed as one and isn't addressed specifically in education.

In fact, I wonder how it originates. People who become certified to teach English literature at the high school level have to read works from a broad range of literary periods; that's a severe trial if you hate rhyme. So I don't think rhyme-hating originates with teachers. It simply seems to me we could learn a lot more about dislike of rhyme. (I'm not suggesting we cater to it--I may have sounded as if I were, so let me correct that.)

My guess would be that rhyme-hating derives from the fact that - while much of the very best poetry is written in rhyme - so is much of the very worst, almost all of the dreary Hallmark stuff, web site after cloying web site of heart-and-flowers dreck, etc. and etc.

When somebody starts out to write in form, and what emerges botches the meter (and is consquently far more assaultive to the ear than bad free verse), is built on awful rhymes, flies up its own asshole with rhyme-driven inversions, pads in every line to force the meter, and focuses on simplistic themes - puppies are cute, kittens are cuter, spring is coming - it does a massive disservice to rhyme and meter.

I have a strong sense - this is instinct: I can't prove it, and would be interested in other opinions - that most neophytes and truly world-class bad poets write in rhyme. Quincy's DWA site has a long thread, for example, on the Worst Poem Ever Written, and virtually everything cited is rhymed. This has to rub off on people. When I listen to people and editors who "hate" rhyme what I believe I hear is a built-in prejudice against rhyme because of so much exposure to mediocre rhymed poetry, not through any sense of an inability to "hear" or "appreciate" rhyme.



[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited January 14, 2008).]

Michael,
Allow me to pour a little friendly fury on your words here.

All bad music uses the same scale that good music uses. That proves what precisely? That we are mired in snobbery and fear of being confused in the minds of the tone deaf with bad music/poetry?

So primitive naturals sing the diatonic scale. That shouldn't drive us off to twelve-tone music as we cover our ears in fear of thirds and sixths.

All the tunes that drive me mad and infect my brain against my will are in the diatonic scale. So is Beethoven. So is Bach.

Women have been ill treated by men for centuries but most women know the difference between good sex and exploitation.

Any editor who is so atrophied or undeveloped as to be still affected by such things is a pea-brained moron.

Can it be that the talentless have managed to take over since they are in the majority?

Just for the sake of argument.
Janet

PS: Andrew, those Dante rhymes make me realise how Italianate John Whitworth's rhymes are. Thanks for posting them. A shame you can't say them. The sound is important and non-Italian speakers won't get the wonderful matching sounds.



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited January 14, 2008).]

Janet - note that I made a correction in the post you quoted. I mean to say, "most world class bad poets".

Corrected Michael. I understood your meaning but it's best to be accurate.
Janet

I agree with Michael. What he says is certainly true in the world of children's publishing. I now frequent the boards and blogs in the area, and read lots of interviews of children's editors and agents, and they say pretty much the same thing to aspiring writers. They say "do not write in rhyme," but then, when asked to explain, they pretty much say, "I have no prejudice against rhyme, it's just that the rhyme we get is so bad, and we get so much of it, that we want to spare ourselves having to read through it, so it's a general rule."

If you saw the manuscript exchanges on the children's writing forums, where those who routinely submit manuscripts to publishers often post their work before doing so, you would understand why editors say they don't want to look at rhyme. But then look at their books, and you'll see that many of them rhyme after all.

It's like my attitude toward seafood. I often decline to order seafood because I don't trust the restaurant to serve it fresh, but, if I'm in a good restaurant, I go ahead and order it. My general attitude toward seafood is actually a fear of food poisoning.

Oh, there is something uniquely awful about badly rhymed poetry--the distortions to get the rhymes, the obviousness of them, the way that the poorly chosen rhyme word can completely undercut any meaning built up.

And really, rhyme's an obvious poetic device, and at the end of a line, it's pretty easy to identify. Sit through a few open mikes. Particularly in New York City. Listen to the bad rhymed stuff. It is actually worse than unrhymed stuff of similar imaginative and linguistic poverty. The unrhymed stuff just sounds like drivel or stupidity or what have you. You get all that with a godawful rhymed piece, but with the ugliness of a badly used device, often with the language distorted in such a way as to call attention to its ill use.

Quincy

Awful poetry comes in so many packages; bad rhyming simply calls more attention to itself with its sing-song. Here's a good comment on rhyme from Robert Graves, which Anthony Hecht quotes in his essay "On Rhyme":

"Rhyming must come unexpectedly yet inevitably, like presents at Christmas, and convey the comforting sense of free will within predestination."

Andrew

I recently encountered this in a Richard Wilbur essay entitled "The Bottle Becomes New, Too," and I daresay it says well what most of us have sometimes experienced in the writing of our best rhyming efforts.

Excellent quotation, Bob, thanks for posting it. What is the name of the book that it is taken from? I don't have Wilbur's essays, just his interviews.

Andrew

But I find that very often rhyme-hating critics will do this: they ferret out the weaker rhymes in a metrical/rhyming poet's work and hold them up as exemplars. Every poet has weaker poems in a volume and some reviewers, it seems, will pounce on these poems, parade their weaknesses (especially if the rhymes are not as good as they should be), and suggest that the things they point to are characteristic of that poet's work, when they are not, when there are many brilliant, lovely, well-done rhyming works elsewhere in the volume.

The nasty review of Alicia's work that was in Poetry a while back did this, I think. Poet Joan Houlihan did the same thing to Timothy Steele's Winter Solstice. Both reviews followed this paradigm of selective unfairness.

It seems to me that a person would do this only if they had a predisposition against rhyme. So I think there are rhyme-haters out there. Maybe the sing-song Hallmark gang has given them a certain amount of spleen to vent against bad rhyme, but it also seems they are ill-disposed to all rhyming work and we see their prejudice.

dwl

Andrew, it's from "Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976", from Story Line Press.

But David is right. There are plenty of people who are hostile to rhyme even when it is done well. And many others who are not overtly hostile, but do not seem to recognize its importance. I think of all the translators out there who so blithely omit rhyme and meter because they feel that this was just a minor embellishment the original poet chose as a sort of pretty bow to place on the profound thoughts that would be lost in a translation that tried to translate the bow. Translators who take this view are generally unable to write meter and rhyme at all, and so it's a rather convenient philosophy to adopt. Still, convenient or not, I fear it is often sincere.

[This message has been edited by Roger Slater (edited January 15, 2008).]

Thanks, Bob. I’ve already ordered a copy of the Wilbur book from Alibris. I’ve been meaning to read his essays for a while now.

And David, I remember that review on Alicia’s book too, and have seen similar pieces elsewhere. Given what Bob is saying about “many others who are not overtly hostile, but do not seem to recognize [rhyme’s] importance,” no wonder a lot of people don’t have the discernment to tell the good rhyming from the bad.

It makes you wonder: is it just a matter of not having read a lot of poetry of the past? If a person (or critic) loves the sonnets of Shakespeare, say, or Donne or Keats or Emily D., why would that person not like rhyme in a poem of the present, assuming it’s done well and the poem is substantial and written in current idiom, etc.?

Beats me.

Bob, my thanks too for your quotation from the Wilbur essay. I'll be looking for the book also.

Andrew, a hypothesis occurs to me about your question, which I'll boil down to "Why would readers value rhyme in older poetry and not in modern and contemporary poetry?"

Perhaps we can blame it on the tendencies of English lit syllabi, which stress only what's Historically Important, what comes to constitute a Movement. For the last century, until New Formalism, rhyme hasn't been part of "a movement." It's been "what was left behind". A survey-course familiarity with modern poetry--which is all most students of literature have--could leave one with the idea that it was something to pass beyond, a thing we weren't supposed to enjoy any more.

This is guesswork on my part, because my student days ignored the modern era almost completely, so it would be good to hear more from people currently learning or teaching.

Addendum: for some sterling examples of awful rhyming, and awful meter too, check out this essay on Poetry Daily.

It's not really a question of not valuing rhyme in modern poetry, at least for me. I can see the lure of free verse quite well, and I do not fault anyone for loving to read and write it. It's the scorn that some people have for meter and rhyme that confuses me, as if meter and rhyme alone are the poetic devices of the past that should be discarded. All other poetic devices, even if they are present in the hoary old poems of yesteryear, are still acceptable. If it were just a question of not wanting to recycle the past, then how did rhyme get to be the scapegoat? You might as well do what Perec once did and write without the letter E, since that vowel has been done to death.

I do question, though, whether anyone who truly loves and appreciates the rhyming and metrical poems of the past, rather than merely having been exposed to them in a class sometime and taught to "respect" them, could have no ear or appreciation for rhyme and meter of the present. I can't prove it, but I think that people who scorn rhyme and meter today are in fact covering up for their own deficiency in the area, like an abstract artist who scorns representational drawing and, by the way, can't actually draw a recognizable human face on a bet. How convenient that the talents we lack are not worth having.

Well said Roger/Bob. One thing though, I've mixed with a great many abstract painters and I've never heard a good abstract painter sneer at a drawing that is representational because it is representational. They "sneer" at any drawing, abstract or representational if it lacks important pictorial qualities such as tension, movement and general positive compositional qualities which are just as important in representational drawing as they are in abstract.

Pallid or pompous poetry is still that when the rhyme and meter is "correct". Vitality and purpose are what we admire.
Janet

Yes, irrational hatred of anything as harmless--nay, pleasant--as well-done rhyme must be a psychological defense of some kind. Why kick the dog if the dog is just doing what dogs do?

But even aside from writing verse, it's worthwhile too to become a skillful reader of poetry--not necessarily a critic, not a professor of poetry, just an artful, adventurous reader. And I don't see how that's possible without being able to appreciate rhyme as one of poetry's pleasures.

Yet even just plain ol' readers of verse give the old dog a kick these days, when all he wants is to bark in peace.

Maryann wrote most of what I was about to. I think that her hypothesis explains why some people excuse rhyme in pre-Modernist poetry and scorn later instances: Earlier poets, the thinking might go, just didn't know any better. Sort of how some of us will forgive very, very old people for their uncomfortable views on, say, gay people. It's worth noting that, ultimately, to proffer this sort of excuse is to practice a type of polite condescension.

Anyway. I also wanted to share an unrelated anecdote. I went to a Kay Ryan reading a week or two ago. (An amazing reading, by the way; anyone who has the chance to hear her, should.) During the Q&A that followed, she got to talking about rhyme, and in the discussion, mentioned that she finds end rhyme "paralyzingly funny."

At the same time, subscribers to Poetry have seen her write quite a bit about Frost, so who knows.

This piques my curiosity, Andrew. What sorts of things do you recall reading that tell you even plain folks are kicking rhyme? I ask because sometimes the opposite is asserted, as when we saw the announcement that John Whitworth's poem had won the TLS competition.

I've seen the warning "no rhymed poetry" in the various entries in Poets Market, and I've read a comment from a reader on another, more FV-oriented site to the effect that rhyme "sticks out" too much, and I've seen reference, in a review in EP&M, to a professor in a creative writing program who doesn't want students to rhyme. And just recently, we've seen the commenter on Alicia's essay, who's surely a poet and a reader of contemporary poetry. So that's editors, teachers, and FV poets, but not plain folks, as I see it.

I'm not meaning to challenge or refute the idea, just wondering how much we know.

editing back: John, we cross-posted, but it looks like we're in agreement http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

When I teach the poetry section of Creative Writing, I have students bring in and read a favorite poem then explain why they like it. About 80% of the poems they bring in are rhyming poems. When regular people think of poetry, most of them think of rhyme. My students will occasionally ask of free verse, "What makes this a poem?" To most people, poetry rhymes. I think the abandonment of rhyme is part of the reason why poetry has dropped off the charts as a popular form of literature (not just that, but it's a big part).

Now, something else. Re-reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," I came across one of my all-time favorites, near the end:

He went like one that hath been stunned.

Love that rhyme! Not an exact rhyme but unexpected and good.

So that's editors, teachers, and FV poets, but not plain folks, as I see it.

That's right, Maryann.

The resistance to rhyme (and traditional devices in general) originates in the universities, where any poetry older than last century is considered to be fatally infected with colonialist ideas. And so, anyone writing today and using such devices must be a closet colonialist, whose work should be ignored.

The non-academic reading public generally adore rhyme.

Well, sure, Mark, but wouldn't you say, in fairness, that most of them are?

Heh. Just kiddin', Mark. I wanted to see how high your blood pressure could get within the interstices of two posts.

No worries, John http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

That's right - it is an absolutely ridiculous association, but I have SEEN it in operation - metrical verse is tarred with the brush of the despised "old".

Maryann,

I made that statement about "plain ol' readers of poetry" too off-the-cuff. Of course lots of readers of poetry like rhyme. But my impression has been that the associations with rhyme we've talked about--"outdated," "sticks out too much," "colonialist," etc.--are also held by some or even many people who don't write poetry much or at all.

I'm thinking of people in my life--in-laws, friends, friends of friends. I'm quite certain that they feel a bit leery of rhyme in a contemporary poem ("hate" would be too strong a word, since they don't give poetry much thought, period). They're more comfortable with free verse, it's more on their radar, is all.

Unless the poetry is hip-hop or some other popular form--interestingly, that changes the picture.

On the other hand, even those sing-song rhymers at Hallmark have relented, offering a host of mawkish sentiment now in free verse greetings (as well as the rhymed ones).

David's statistic heartens me. I'm happy to hear that so many students bring rhymed poems as samples of what they like.

Writing this, I now realize what I meant: it's not "plain ol' readers of poetry" that aren't comfortable with rhyme in the way I describe; it's people who neither read nor write it. My experience has been that they tune in more easily to free verse--when they pay any attention to poetry at all. I assume that this is only because free verse is what they're used to thinking of as contemporary.

Andrew

John, thanks for those links. I need to read both more carefully, but on a quick read I've enjoyed the essay on "Nothing Gold Can Stay" tremendously, both for its own insights and for the chance to smile again at that lovely poem, one that's in my brain's permanent collection.

Andrew, thanks for clarifying further. As I think about the reasons various people have mentioned here for the dislike of rhyme, it seems to me that different groups probably have different reasons. I can't substantiate any of this, but it seems to me that

(1)folks with minimal literary education are the ones who remain in their original, childlike love of rhyme,

(2) folks with only lit-survey exposure to poetry, who stopped reading it with their last required humanities credit, mistakenly believe they're supposed have gone beyond it, and

(3)folks with advanced exposure to creative writing programs will have

(i) been warned not to attempt rhyme because their first efforts at it have all the flaws Michael mentions above, or

(ii) have been exposed to the critical theories Mark describes, or

(iii)both. Unless they have teachers like David, of course.

The would-be authors of children's books that Roger refers to fall, I think, in group (1), while editors of poetry journals are more likely to be in group (3).

What am I leaving out? And what might solutions look like?

gone with the wind

[This message has been edited by Jan D. Hodge (edited March 05, 2008).]

(Only because some excellent poets ((I'm not one)) have posted their own)

I write to amuse myself and these rhymes amused me:

Diptych: Café Schwarzenberg


A paradox—his ancient, unlined face,
this melton-draped, this famed poète maudit,
this finical Ducati-debauchee—
is pomped, paraded to his usual place.
With anecdotes and ardors to retrace
in pruney diction banishing the schwa,
he’ll swirl a ’90 Chateau Lyonnat
and call his too-cold plateware “a disgrace”.

The Strauss and Mozart mezzo (mid-career)
dangles a fork of ‘au torchon’ foie gras
above her soap stud’s youthful, granite chin.
The waiter realizes something queer
yet halts this speech (imagine her chagrin):
“You’ve switched roles to become the Marschallin!”

Mike, it's not only the rhymes that are a pleasure but also the depiction of these characters and their setting.

Now I'm really in a pickle. Here I am enjoying all these poems that, strictly speaking, y'all aren't supposed to be posting. Maybe we'd better try harder to be demonstrating something with them http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Thanks Maryann!

One way to leap free from the pickling barrel is to move the whole thread over to "General Discussion." In the meantime let me be better behaved and nominate Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron," a fitting tribute to George Gordon's humor and fecundity and also a wrestling with them.

Best,
Michael

Mike, I've just found the Auden online and am grinning over the first few stanzas.

Let's stay here rather than move to GT. We actually have more justification here than there for throwing in bits of our own work--as long as we say something about what gave us particular pleasure in using those rhymes. I really don't see any pure vanity going on here--I have, as usual, been overly nervous! Let's carry on.

I think of end-rhymes as inflections for lines. For me it's the freshness of the lines as much the originality of the pairing that determines the quality of the rhyme. I think this has been said otherwise elsewhere. Just my take, is all.

Probably my favourite rhyme comes at the end of a Frost poem, Evening in a Sugar Orchard:

From where I lingered in a lull in March
Outside the sugar-house one night for choice,
I called the fireman with a careful voice
And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:
'O fireman, give the fire another stoke,
And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.'
I thought a few might tangle, as they did,
Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare
Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,
And so be added to the moon up there.
The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
On every tree a bucket with a lid,
And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.
The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.
They were content to figure in the trees
As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.
And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

I imagine most everyone has read this, but I went back and reviewed Ira Sadoff's article on neo-formalism, available on line, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sadoff.html He attacks rhyme and meter as "dangerously nostalgic" and charges that poets who use rhyme trade complexity for ornamentation.

So he says things like "Poems that privilege sound and meter are conservative, then, not so much because they privilege tradition, but because they decontextualize poetry"; or "The neo-formalists' perhaps unconscious exaltation of the iamb veils their attempt to privilege prevailing white Anglo-Saxon rhythms and culture."

Read it yourelf if you haven't already. This illustrates the kind of knee-jerk reaction to rhyme that is a deep-structure in modern critical attitude.

David, I have to confess that while I've seen the essay, I have never succeeded in reading it through. I get too angry and too bewildered.

Since the essay has been around for so many years, and it remains famous, I have to ask, were there no answers?

My first thought in answer is that people in oppressed classes are human first and the love of musical speech is basic, ancient, and human. (And as I remember Steele's book, I think that's his answer.) Does the opposition ever refute that specifically, or are we all simply talking past each other?

I'll bet there's a bibliography somewhere. Can anyone guide us further?

David:

I hadn't. Thanks for the link, David. The article was almost as funny as Jerry Glenn Hartwig's "ROTFLMAO!" post.

Why is it that so many critics of rhyme and meter (and sonics, in Sadoff's case) make the novice error of confusing poetry with subject matter?


Best regards,

Colin

So he says things like "Poems that privilege sound and meter are conservative, then, not so much because they privilege tradition, but because they decontextualize poetry"; or "The neo-formalists' perhaps unconscious exaltation of the iamb veils their attempt to privilege prevailing white Anglo-Saxon rhythms and culture."


That's right, David.

I have heard this sort of rubbish so many times in our universities.

Just you try and treat ANY OTHER culture on the planet with the slightest trace of disdain, and people like this will be all over you like a rash. But fail to denigrate our own, and watch out.

Of course I want to represent my own cultural inheritance, just like every member of every culture should, and I will never be silenced by PC fools like the one quoted above.

I wonder how this cretin will get on once "the prevailing white Anglo-Saxon" culture has been destroyed, and we all live under another prevailing culture. These people are working as hard as they can to bring it about.

Since I am not involved in academia, I have the privilege of not being required to plow through lengthy and gracelessly written "scholarly" tracts that (a) are devoid of any of the internal rhythms and fresh phrasing that I associate with good writing, whether it is prose or poetry; (b) consequently make a poor case for the writer's credentials.

If somebody writes what is clearly intended to be a major essay on an aspect of writing and, not only isn't it particularly well written, but it plods and slogs and breathes heavily through its mouth as it lumbers along - I don't read it.

Bix to Buxtehude to Boulez,
The little white dog on the Victor label
Listens long and hard as he is able.
It's all in a day's work, whatever plays.

From judgement, it would seem, he has refrained.
He even listens earnestly to Bloch,
Then builds a church to our acid rock.
He's man's -- no -- he's the Leierman's best friend,

Or would be if hearing and listening were the same.
Does he hear? I fancy he rather smells
Those lemon-gold arpeggios in Ravel's
"Les jets d'eau du palais de ceux qui s'aiment."

He ponders the Schumann Concerto's tall willow hit
By lightning, and stays put. When he surmises
Through one of Bach's eternal boxwood mazes
The oboe pungent as a bitch in heat,

Or when the calypso decants its raw bay rum
Or the moon in Wozzeck reddens ripe for murder,
He doesn't sneeze or howl; just listens harder.
Adamant needles bear down on him from

Whirling of outer space, too black, too near--
But he was taught as a puppy not to flinch,
Much less to imitate his bete noire Blanche
who barked, fat foolish creature, at King Lear.

Still others fought in the road's filth over Jezebel,
Slavered on hearths of horned and pelted barons.
His forbears lacked, to say the least, forebearence.
Can nature change in him? Nothing's impossible.

The last chord fades. The night is cold and fine.
His master's voice rasps through the groove's bare groves.
Obediently, in silence like the grave's
He sleeps there on the still-warm gramophone

Only to dream he is at the premiere of a Handel
Opera long thought lost -- Il Cane Minore.
Its allegorical subject is his story!
A little dog revolving round a spindle

Gives rise to harmonies beyond belief,
A cast of stars... Is there in Victor's heart
No honey for the vanquished? Art is art.
The life it asks of us is a dog's life.


[This message has been edited by Brian Watson (edited July 03, 2008).]

For Mark, once again, it all becomes a question of protecting white culture against the PC police who want to destroy it. Though I disagree with the silly article in question, however, what I find silly is that meter and rhyme give any sort of privilege to white anglo saxon culture, and so my defense of meter and rhyme would not be based on a desire to protect white anglo saxon culture. I'm pretty much as PC as any of the pc-fascists that Mark rails against, but I'm as devoted to rhyme and meter as Mark is. Let's try to separate the issue and not assume that everything anyone says proves the single point that we have decided, in advance, is most important to us. Sometimes our bugaboos are irrelevant to the matter at hand.