Spherian tips for better writing skills
 

I know that many poets and writers keep notebooks of advice they have gleaned along the way from the truly fine poets, both contemporary and historic. I thought it might be interesting to give some rainy day attention (or insomniac nights attention) to share some of our favorite tips and how-to's, advice we might have stumbled across and then written down as "words to/from the wise".

Before there is a general outcry of reined-in poetic freedom, let me hasten to add that I don't mean "rules" but "guidelines". To paraphrase the old Abe Lincoln aphorism, these might suit some of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but will in all likihood not suit all of the people all of the time.

My thought is that if each person also gives the source, we might glean new ideas for our summer reading.

So I offer two from my own notebooks to start with.

From "After New Formalism" edited by Annie Finch.

In a good poem, as everybody knows, form is inseparable from sense and tone. No poem worthy of its name can be formless, whether it is written according to metrical rules or in free verse. The sounds, rhythms, pitch and intensity of the lines ARE the poem. Every poem IS its form.

Essay, "The Trouble with a Word like Formalism", by Anne Stevenson, p. 219.

and

From: "Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End". Barbara Herrnstein Smith, p. 51.

Now it has often been observed that the terminal rhyming couplet of the English sonnet allows the poet to end it with striking resolution, finality, punch, pointedness, and so forth. It is also true, however, that many sonnets are poorly concluded, their endings limp or flat. No matter how perfectly constructed the poem may be with respect to form, if its thematic structure is inadequately concluded, the terminal couplet will not do the job by itself. We may still ask how much of a job it does and how it does it—realizing that to speak of its epigrammatic force, or rounding off or knitting up powers, is only to restate the fact, but not to explain it.

There is good reason to maintain that a rhymed couplet, when it corresponds to a syntactically complete utterance, is, in itself, an effectively closed form. Nevertheless, the sense of closure produced by a sonnet ending does not arise so much from the independent effectiveness of the rhymed couplet as from its effectiveness in relation to the formal structure that precedes it.

I am assuming that most keep a notebook of sorts for this kind of reminders.

And of course, it's fine to discuss, disagree or be dubious.

Added in. I find that by concentrating on a rule/guideline and working on it via an exercise, I can incorporate it mentally rather than just attempting to remember that the idea/method exists.

Okay, I'll play. Off the top of my head, here are six things I've learned the hard way about working with rhyme:


1. It is always, ALWAYS better to write a good poem than a mediocre poem.

Most "poetry rules" have exceptions. This one doesn't.

Not even for rhyme. See #2 below.


2. It is always, ALWAYS better to write a good free verse or blank verse poem than a mediocre rhymed poem.

Strangely, many people who wholeheartedly agree with #1 seem to have reservations about #2. The brutal truth is that you get no brownie points for rhyme, acrostics, or any other difficult feat, if these handicaps make your poem stink. And if the stinkiness is actually caused by the extra effort of achieving that rhyme, acrostic, or whatever, then why bother with something that is clearly doing your poem no favors? By all means, cast off those shackles and write a better poem.

Again, a good free verse or blank verse poem beats a mediocre rhymed one, EVERY SINGLE TIME.


3. Rhyme is less important than meter, mood, and syntax.

Bartering those three away to achieve rhyme is a bad bargain.


4. Rhyme is a tool designed for emphasis, and emphasis is what it will deliver, whether you want it to or not.

If a rhyming word doesn't contain an idea, image, or emotion worth emphasizing, don't end-stop that line. If you do, you'll only be emphasizing how weak that part of your poem really is.

Enjamb that line if the content is necessary; cut it if it's not.


5. Don't enjamb rhymed verse too much.

Judicious use of enjambment de-emphasizes some rhymed lines in order to lend emphasis to others. Enjambment can also be very effective for accelerating the tempo of a poem. Many people feel that, by downplaying the rhymes and eliminating pauses at line ends, enjambment makes rhymed verse feel more modern and natural.

But if almost every line is enjambed, why bother with rhyme at all?

Seriously, what is the point of using rhyme--a tool designed for emphasis (see #4)--if you're going to de-emphasize it most of the time? It's like using a chisel as a screwdriver, or vice versa: sure, it works, after a fashion, but it's unnecessarily awkward, and the finished product is likely to be less impressive than if you'd used the proper tool for the job all along.

And sometimes the proper tool for the job is, indeed, blank or free verse. See #1 and #2 above.


6. Never settle for the wrong word, just because it rhymes with the right word (or words). The poet's challenge is to get all of the words right.

Two thoughts on this:

First, thinking that the wrong word will be excused by the fact that it rhymes shows a failure to grasp #4 above. The wrongness of a wrong word is emphasized when it is in a rhyming position.

Second, behavioral scientists have long observed something called the Einstulling ("settling") effect: when most people are presented with a three-step solution to a problem, they "settle" for that method and stop looking for a two-step solution. The Einstulling effect goes beyond simple laziness: people become emotionally attached to that first solution, to the point that their problem-solving creativity becomes blocked by it. They are quick to conclude that problems that can't be solved by their beloved method can't be solved at all.

Likewise, it's tempting to fall in love with the first set of rhymes that seems promising, especially in multi-rhymed forms (e.g., Petrarchan sonnets and villanelles). And when we fall in love, we settle. We overlook, or even become defensive about, our beloved's shortcomings.

How many times have we heard, or said ourselves, something like "But I have to say 'micturition' there, because if I don't I'll have to change three other lines, too!" (Yep. Better get started.)

I find it useful to remind myself, even in the initial excitement of finding a set of rhyme words that (sort of) works, that there may be a more elegant solution out there--another set of rhyme words that works better. I try not to get too infatuated with and committed to a particular set before I've explored a few options.

Oh. Oops. This is probably one of those "Musing on Mastery" type thingies where we're not supposed to post our own stuff, isn't it? Oh well.

Couldn't agree more Julie, enjambment has become the drug of choice on Erato and in my opinion spoils many poems by relegating the meaning/emotional impact of the sentence to second place.
On other forums I post/used to post many people hate rhymes, they are sick of them, sick of all the old forms that people love so much here, one can understand that as almost every word that can be rhymed has been rhymed, but I love songs so I love the power of rhyme, how it unites a poem. Rhymed words produce the same musical note and give a poem a melodic coherence free verse often lacks. But I love free verse for its freedom, why limit oneself?
I don't read books about poetry, except I've read The White Goddess by Robert Graves (twice) to see something of the Celtic/magical/classical roots of poetry and The Vision by Yeats, it's about the occult but I think poetry is often a part of magical practices so it was interesting to me given Yeats is such a great poet, I also read the biography of Dylan Thomas by his wife. I gleaned from it that Dylan Thomas wrote out his poems many times ( up to 70) as a way of polishing them and finding better means of expression. I also learnt that he used a Thesaurus but his wife complained that this practice lead to his poems becoming incomprehensible, he even admitted so himself but said it was justified by the 'sound' of them, I think that's a mistake, if you see poems as more sound than sense you might as well scat sing instead.
Two sayings that come from other disciplines often occur to me when on Erato, one 'form follows function' from architecture, echoes Janice's excerpt, if the form is right the poem is more likely to work, if the form is wrong the poem will never work so think what the function of the poem is, is it to instruct, tell a story, create an emotional response, it is about the contemporary world, this moment or about the past, history or one's memories, etc etc, what ever the function and function is diffferent from content, the form must be appropriate.
The last is a buddhist saying 'first thought, best thought' in relation to my own poetry and those of others I'm often aware that poems can be spoilt by over-working them. I used to paint as much as I wrote and in painting it is even more true, it is very easy to spoil a work by over-doing it, you can go back with poetry if you keep drafts but even so I think you can end up too far away from the original impulse and then you've lost it. This to some extent contradicts what I learned from Dylan Thomas, 'it's all about balance' shall be my contribution to notebook wisdom.
Janice.. I think this may prove a very useful thread to have started.

A few random thoughts in this vein.

-There's nothing wrong with the occasional metrical substitution.

It took me a long time to realize this. A lot of my earlier poems are admittedly metronomic. Being around the 'Sphere long enough prompted me to realize that throwing in the occasional extra trochee or iamb in an established meter can sometimes benefit the poem as a whole. Sort of like slipping in an "accidental" in a music composition. Too many and you lose sight of the key signature, but once in awhile variety is nice.

-If you're going to use a modifier or qualifier, make it interesting.

I'm seriously thinking of writing an essay, if not a chapter, on how detrimental words like "such," "so," and "very" are to modern metrical poetry. Sure, they can be used sometimes in the right contexts, but often they are nothing more than metrical detritus. There are many ways to emphasize a point in an interesting way. "Very" just doesn't cut it very often.

-"Big words" are great. Accessible words are greater.

I can't count the number of times that I've read poems here that seem to deliberately plunk down a big, fancy, gotta-grab-a-dictionary word at random. I suspect that a lot of slightly insecure poets do this so that the reader will assume the poet is erudite. But in most cases, if you're writing a half-decent poem, the reader will know that you're erudite (unless you're Longfellow, but I digress). There are few points that I preach repeatedly around these parts, but attempting to balance depth and accessibility is one of them. While it's nice to learn a new word or two along the way at times, it's frequently the case that an obscure word does not add anything to the poem. And it's exactly the reason why I have yet to whip out "paraskavedekatriaphobia" in one of my poems, despite how delightfully trochaic it is...

-Meaning is paramount. (Duh.)

Julie covered this quite nicely, but it cannot be overstated. Poems that prize meter over meaning usually come across as mere exercises in form. I mention above that there are few points I preach about here. Well, the other big one is that a balance between the objective (form) and the subjective (meaning/content) is key...though over the years I have come to accept that if you have to lean one way or the other, lean toward meaning. Poetry is more of an art than a science, after all, though I think the very nature of metered verse requires at least some science or math. I've said before that a 50/50 balance between form and content is ideal. Well, I'm older and more experienced now, and I'll take it to 40/60.



Edited to add: cross-posted with a few folks. Maybe this thread is going in a bit of a different way than Janice intended, but I can imagine it would be helpful to some regardless.

In defense of enjambment:

Rhythms should vary; enjambing allows you to put the pauses in different locations, which adds interest.

Location adds emphasis. The beginnings and especially ends of lines call attention to themselves. Dick Davis points out that if you look only at the rhyme words, you should have a clear idea of what the poem's about. Put key words in rhyme position. I would add that if you are writing obscene poetry, rhyme on the obscenity, if possible.

Susan

Hi Julie, I agree with much of what you say here with one glaring exception.

#5. Don't enjamb rhymed verse too much.

I went back to all the Nemerov winners and found that most winning poets enjambed the heck out of their poems. I kind of consider the Nemerov the"Cadillac" of formal poetry prizes. Many of the winning poets were not bashful with enjambments. I realize it's a relatively small sample, but it is the best I can find. My take on it is if the best poets are doing it then why shouldn't we? Several of those poets are members of the Sphere. I would love to hear from them and why they do it.

If the thoughts in or meaning of a poem can be clearly and completely paraphrased, then I believe it is not a poem. Poetry is for the expression of those states that cannot be expressed in the usual logical language of so-called meaning. It's the difference between allegory and symbol. An allegory is a stand-in for something else, a riddle with an answer. A symbol is chosen because there is no other way to express the inexpressible something that it dares to approach. It is a question whose only answer is itself. This is I think what Rilke meant when he said (in his Letters To A Young Poet) that the point was to "live the questions now" rather than "to seek an answer". Poetry is symbolic language, not allegorical language. If there is not some crucial core to a poem that cannot be translated or interpreted or reduced to the clear-cut meanings of the language of discursive thought, then it isn't speaking in the language of poetry. It is only the inexpressible that poetry expresses. And, of course, there are exceptions to every rule--even this one!

Here is a brief collection of tidbits from my own teachers, some of whom contradict each other.


People pretend not to pay too much attention to the fact that the logical mechanism of the sentence alone reveals itself to be increasingly powerless to provoke the emotive shock in man which really makes life meaningful.
(Andre Breton
Second Manifesto Of Surrealism/trans Mary Ann Caws))


So were assembled in my mind before the birth of a poem the ideas implicit in it. But when the poem was born it was as much a surprise to me as if a flower had suddenly glowed before me in the hollow of air... I can only assume that the philosophical antecedents in some way followed the psyche into that high state where, as the seers tell us, the gold-gleaming genius makes beauty, joys, rejoicings, dance, and song, and it changed the dry-as-dust logic into color and music and a rapture of prophecy.
(AE
Song And its Fountains)


Even if we measure the footsteps of the goddess, note their frequency and average length, we are still far from the secret of her instantaneous grace.
(Paul Valery
The Art Of Poetry: Problems Of Poetry/trans Denise Folliot)


You could almost touch it. But you did not touch. Because you cannot touch a music, a flowering of water, the white smile on the sleeper's mouth.
(Patrick White
The Aunt's Story)


.....a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest that which is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment.
(Martin Heidegger
Poetry, Language, Thought: "...Poetically Man Dwells..."/trans Albert Hofstadte)


The poet must seek in himself the impression of being mute, of not being able to say what he has in his hold, and then strive to phrase it without ever finding fulfillment.
(Ramon Del Valle-Inclan
The Lamp Of Marvels/trans, Robert Lima)


We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.
(W. B. Yeats
Mythologies: Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis)


In a poem, therefore, the sense must not triumph over the form and destroy it beyond recall; on the contrary, it is the recall, the conservation of form, or rather its exact repetition as the sole and necessary expression of the state or the thought it has provoked in the reader, which is the mainspring of poetic power. A beautiful line is constantly reborn from its own ashes, it becomes again—as the effect of its effect—its own harmonic cause.
(Paul Valery
The Art Of Poetry: Commentaries On Charmes/trans Denise Folliot)


We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & inobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. —How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, "admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose!"
(John Keats
Letters, Letter of February 1818/ed, Robert Gittings)


So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight a girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
(Virginia Woolf
Orlando)


The essential poem at the center of things,
The arias that spiritual fiddlings make,
Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good
And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs,
A difficult apperception, this gorging good,
Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold,
This fortune's finding, disposed and re-disposed
By such slight genii in such pale air.
(Wallace Stevens
A Primitive Like An Orb)


Without metaphors it is impossible to express a single thought. All effort to rise above images is doomed to fail. To speak of our most ardent aspirations only in negative terms does not satisfy the craving of the heart, and where philosophy no longer finds expression, poetry comes in again.
(J. Huizinga
The Waning Of The Middle Ages)


Things seem pretty crummy, but if they could carry us away with them, we'd die of poetry.
(Louis Ferdinand Celine
Death On The Installment Plan/trans, Ralph Manheim)


Contrary to opinions prevalent in the Twentieth Century, for him a poem was not a linguistic structure whose meaning originates in, and is inseparable from, the structure, but rather the by-product of a spiritual attainment which must precede a poet's struggle with the insufficiency of language.
(Czeslaw Milosz
The Noble Traveller, The Life & Writings of O.V. de L. Milosz: Introduction)


.....poetry cannot be defined as being either the subject or the form of the composition; poetry is a state of mind or soul—'un etat d'ame' the Symbolists were to call it later—and this state of mind or soul will find its own inevitable expression.
(Enid Starkie
Biography of Arthur Rimbaud))


Poetry occurs less in what is being said than in its passing through language all the way to silence, the beginnings, the inaudible. The greatness of this poet is not that he fell silent, but that he arrived at silence: Rimbaud's work was not abandoned, it is complete.
(Alain Borer
Rimbaud In Abyssinia)


Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore, around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Crack-Up: Letter—August 3, 1940/ed, Edmund Wilson)


A poem must be entirely inexhaustible, like a human being and a good proverb.
(Novalis
quoted in Novalis: A Romantic's Theory, Kristin Pfefferkorn)


Within this temporal body composed of a hundred bones and nine holes there resides a spirit which, for lack of an adequate name, I think of as windblown. Like delicate drapery, it may be torn away or blown off by the least breeze. It brought me to writing poetry many years ago, initially for its own gratification, but eventually as a way of life. True, frustration and rejection were almost enough to bring this spirit to silence, and sometimes pride brought it to the brink of vanity. From the writing of the very first line, it has found no contentment as it was torn by one doubt after another. This windblown spirit considered the security of the court life at one point; at another, it considered risking a display of its ignorance by becoming a scholar. But its passion for poetry would not permit either. Since it knows no other way than the way of poetry, it has clung to it tenaciously.
(Basho
The Knapsack Notebooks/trans Sam Hamill)


Nemo

Cart before horse
 

Hi, Janice:

As you know, I usually leave rules, laws and guidelines to Dennis Hammes, Earl Gray or Peter John Ross but I was struck by this:

Annie was wise to stress the present tense here. It cautiously avoids the most obvious objection: there was poetry for milenia before form or meter and before attention was paid to "sounds, rhythms, pitch and intensity." Even so, the ghost of an elephant in the room remains, that being the question: "Why did we develop these things?"

-o-

Oh, I have no problem with enjambment per se. I use it extensively, in almost every poem I write. I only have a problem when enjambment is overused (and, yes, I'm aware that overuse is in the eye of the beholder).

When the majority of lines in a rhymed poem are enjambed, it's hard for me to see any reason for either the rhymes or the enjambment...except, perhaps, to allow the poet to announce, "Behold! I'm avant-garde enough to end most of my lines in untraditional places, yet I still manage to fill in all the blanks of a traditional rhyme scheme! Aren't I a poet for all the ages?" At which point I notice the poet more than the poem, which is not a good thing.

How much enjambment is too much is a matter of taste, and also depends on the poem. If the enjambment is not there just for enjambment's sake, but is being used to accomplish something metrically or moodwise, I'm all for it. One of my favorite sonnets is E. E. Cummings' "next to of course god america i", which is about as enjambed as it can be, and brilliant.

Digressing a bit, I agree with Nemo (I think--he'll tell me if I've got him wrong) that, where poetry is concerned, meaning is not the same thing as sense. The meaning of a poem is the overall mood or experience it conveys (sometimes through sonic effects), not its "message".

That's why, even though poetry and prose use many of the same literary devices, a poem cannot be paraphrased in linear, logical terms, the way prose can.

Paraphrase (or even un-enjamb) the Cummings sonnet and you lose the experience of being showered with the speaker's slightly-rabid spittle. Which is a huge part of the poem's meaning, for me at least.

Julie, thanks so much for kicking this off. I did not have any hard and fast rules in mind about how to give good advice. If it has helped you, made you think, ponder, or made you formulate your own axiom, I'm delighted to share it and I'm sure I'm not alone.

It's nice if someone choses to point to a source (as I did initially) that might point the way for someone else keen to read more, but broadcast seed can also take root.

Everybody else. Thanks so much for contributions.

Here is something else from my own notebook. It was copied from a 1996 "Field" (a literary journal which has the subtitle "Contemporary Poetry and Poetics". It opens a brief essay on Emily Dickinson by Stanley Plumly, "Doors Ajar." (p. 21)

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant," like the slant of light on winter afternoons. Angles of vision, angles of light, angles of insight: Emily Dickinson is the master of indirection, implication, rich ambiguity; and her poems are the mastery of--to quote Keats, one of her heroes--loading every rift with ore. We think of her symmetrical brilliance, in which the lines and rhymes balance the silences as perfectly as "syllable from sound" and the epigrams of thought act out their meanings "as imperceptibly as grief" as they speak to us at just the moment, it seems, of their inscription. I can think of no other poet who seems so imperatively to speak and write at once (...), to "tell all" yet understate at the same time.

I'm not sure how much I agree with the proposition that rhyming is designed for emphasis, though obviously it can be used that way and obviously it does draw some additional attention to the rhyming words. But I think rhyme accomplishes other important things as well. At any rate, the "emphasis" it supplies isn't always limited to the rhyming words themselves, but often emphasizes the entire concluding phrase that ends in the rhyme, and beyond that, perhaps emphasizes entire lines since those lines are given a sort of rhyming container that serves as a frame or a pointer of sorts. And meter is often easier to perceive and respond to if the lines end in rhymes, so rhymes help all the words to fit into an intended rhythm. Also, for me rhyme often makes a poem seem almost magical, not because the rhyme words are emphasized but because it seems so unlikely that the perfect expression of something that is true, well observed, grammatical, logical, emotional, insightful, etc., happens to fall into words that rhyme, a little miracle that somehow seems to validate what's being said. Things that rhyme sound truer somehow ("If the glove don't fit, you must acquit") even though it's easy enough to lie using rhymes. Anyway, forgive the ramble.

Sources added, Janice.

Nemo

Nemo.. the moment I started reading your post Seamus Heaney started reading his poem 'Parsley' on the radio, (a recording, not his ghost) I was torn, to keep reading or to stop and listen, I kept reading but half-listened, I found your excerpts marvellous, really affirming.

Spherian tips
 

I don't ask what a poem means, what message is conveyed, but rather what the poet is expressing. A close look at the rhyme scheme can bring out even more, and the discipline makes for quiet screaming rather than incomprehensible ranting.

What is a Spherian?

You are. It is someone who posts on Eratosphere.

I always thought rhyme was there to make poems easy to remember, or memorable, if you like. I can't remember much that doesn't rhyme. Except Shakespeare, that is. I can recite 1,000 lines of Shakespeare. But he is special.

Re post 10.

Wintaka, just to give credit where it is due, the quoted poet Anne Stevenson, the very fine American/UK poet. (Annie F. is the editor of that collection of essays.)

So we're in Connecticut, and I just got some really bad news about what some workers are going to have to do in the basement. They're going to sister up every single joist down there, because the house is falling down. It's going to be durned noisy, and a lot of work. I looked at the guy in charge of the project, and said "better you than me!" I also said "If the architect had just taken the trouble to get the structure right in the first place, we wouldn't be going through this." Revisions suck, and they're always just kludges anyway. They're actually going to have to cut through the concrete floor, pour a footing for a lolly post, and hold the durned house up with that. It'll never reseal, and it'll start cracking at the corners. In my mind, I can see the spider cracks in the concrete now.

But the metaphor breaks down completely when I see those joists. They're on 16 inch center, and they repeat all the way along, from one foundation wall to the other. There's a certain beauty to their symmetry, a harmony of repetition. On the other hand, they're desperately boring. If I were building a structure like that, I'd make one in one style, the next in a different one, the next in still another. Yes, they'd still rhyme, and they'd still hold up the house - after all, rhyme is meant to be structural. But they'd also be interesting, unusual. The repetitions would be far enough apart that it would look more like a Gaudi than a suburban condo. An old friend once defended my rhyming lines several moves away from the accusation that the reader couldn't easily and immediately recognize them by saying "the rhymes can hear each other." Exactly, just as joists need each other to carry and transfer the weight.

In my experience, people don't object to rhyme. Instead, they object to end-stopped rhymes, close together, in common patterns. It's the same as when they object to condo construction... the same simple thing, over and over again, all across the american landscape. You walk into a house, you want something different. If a poem is a house in which we can exist, move and dance and contemplate and converse and commune, we don't want to feel we know the whole house before we even walk in the door. Everyone who grew up in the California suburbs knows this feeling: the same house is repeated on every fourth lot. It's like opening a book and finding endstopped rhymes going ABAB all down the page, stretching from one hill to the next.

So: no endstops until the last line. Well, maybe a couple, just for variety, or because they simply can't be avoided. Unusual features, nooks and crannies in the architecture, surprising hidden places, so the house doesn't look like a Texas shotgun shack. A couple, or maybe three, Horatian beams stretching from one foundation wall to the other. And the whole place should be built well from the start, so you don't have to go back in with a jackhammer later. Those things are noisy, and shake like hell.

Best,

Bill

Bill, what's a kludge? I ask because in the land of my mothers a kudgie is a lavatory.

kludge=bodge
Your Friendly Transatlantic Translator

on rhyme
 

In response to Julie's comments on rhyme [posts #3 and 11], I sent this to her via PM. At her suggestion, I post it to the thread.

For years when I taught Browning's "My Last Duchess" in intro to lit classes, I would break up the class into groups of four or five students each, and hand out a list of 12 questions on the poem, e.g.:

#5 What happened to the Duchess? (Be as specific as you can; indicate how you know.)
#6 Does the Duke deliberately reveal this (see answer to #5), or does he let it slip accidentally?
. . . Explain why you think so. (If accidentally, what does this reveal about his character? Is it
. . . consistent with what else the poem reveals about him? If deliberately, why does he say it?)
#12 Do you think the Count will give his daughter in marriage to the Duke? Why or why not?

I would ask them to discuss the questions (in order) to discover what sense they collectively make of the poem. "Eavesdropping" on the groups in turn, I could see that generally they came to a pretty good understanding/appreciation of it.

The next class session, I would ask them (without their looking at the poem again) one simple yes or no question--to indicate (all eyes closed) by raising their hands whether or not the poem was rhymed. In semester after semester, the vote nearly always broke surprisingly close to 50/50, sometimes leaning one way, sometimes the other. And that after they had been involved in a discussion of it for an entire class period.

The poem of course is written in rhymed couplets. But the rhymes per se are hardly emphasized, however significant the rhyming words. Of the poem's 56 lines, 36 are strongly enjambed, 15 weakly enjambed (usually ending in a comma), and only 5 strongly end-stopped [ll. 4, 24, 45, 52, and 56.] Such skillful use of rhyme would seem to qualify Julie's points #4 and 5, and her later comment, "I have no problem with enjambment per se. . . . I only have a problem when enjambment is overused." But then, few poets can match Browning's technical skill.
_____

I wrote the above before Bill Lantry posted his excellent metaphorical analysis of rhyme and its functions, to which this may be a helpful complement. And to John Whitworth's post #18, often rhyme serves more the writing of a poem ["the poet like an acrobat / climbs on rime / to a high wire of his own making"] than the reading/hearing/memorizing of it.

Jan

The Duchess in Alice opined that if you take care of the sense, the sounds take care of themselves, but in light verse I’ve found the opposite is often true. Chasing after a rhyme will often lead to unexpected thoughts and/or insights. Not that I'm a model for success, but I'll often start with a word that rhymes but I don’t think is quite right, for two reasons: first, it may cause the imagination to hit warp drive and find some unexpected felicity; second, trying to make it work may reveal the “right” word.

Although I’m definitely not one to tell people how they should pull their rabbit out of a hat, I’m not sure Bill’s ars poetica – if I may call it that – works for light verse, where rhymes are sometimes meant to be noticeable and outrageous.

Best,

Ed


P.S. I hadn't seen Jan's comment (#23) when I posted this ["the poet like an acrobat / climbs on rime / to a high wire of his own making"], but I suspect it's often the case.

*deleted*

Will add less snarky and more useful post as soon as I have it compiled.

A comment to Jan's post #23. (Thanks Julie, for suggesting Jan post it here.)

I have often noticed that too, Jan, that a rhyme word can open new avenues of thought.

I don't know how common it is that Eratospherians use rhyming dictionaries, but I swear by them. I have several each organized differently and each influences my mind and my working method differently. I also find that the juxtaposition of rhyme words might spark a new idea that uses neither.

This might be a good place to ask and thus get an idea of how dependent poets writing here are on their rhyming dictionaries, thesauruses, and plain ordinary dictionaries (for spelling and definitions).

I find this fascinating! I say this without a trace of judgment, scorn, or general guff, but I've always felt that when I have to resort to using a rhyming dictionary, the poem has somewhat failed. I own one, of course, but it sits on my "pulp" bookshelf, collecting dust, and whenever I have to take out, I feel a slight twinge of shame about it. Moreover, until your post, I've had this (apparently silly) notion that rhyming dictionaries amount to dirty little secrets for a verse poet. Go figure!

I feel less shameful about thesauri, mind you, though still a very slight twinge of shame. Dictionaries evoke no twinges for me, for what it's worth.

I love my rhyming dictionary! It is a profoundly effective tool for distracting oneself from one's narrow intentions, and thus of opening up new ways of seeing and thus of saying what it is that one didn't even realize one wanted to say until it's said.

Nemo

I'm with Nemo and Janis. I wander through my rhyming dictionary - and the near-rhymes, and the not-so-near-but-still-an-echo rhymes - incessantly, and it is not at all unusual for an unexpected rhyme, or hint of a rhyme, to lead to a new approach or a different poem.

To a somewhat lesser extent, the thesaurus performs the same function. As far as I'm concerned, these sources are not simply lists of similar sounds and meanings; but can be regarded as ideas and visions, arranged alphabetically and easy to sort through.

As far as the various suggestions others have made are concerned, the more concrete and specific they are, the more I'm inclined to say it depends, it depends, it depends - on the poem, on your strengths, on hundreds of other factors - and go on again about how context rules. Except for Susan's advice about always trying to rhyme on the obscenity. That's so basic it may change my life.

Janice--bibliography, please? I once had Clement Wood's, and I gave it to my daughter during her exceedingly brief high-school songwriting phase, and I never got it back. I think I need to get a new one. Which others are good?

I kind of remember posting on something like this before but maybe it was at the Alsop Gazebo. I'm very fond of tips for writers from Kurt Vonnegut (easily available on the net) and this is the one I sense was his only non-negotiable:

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

One of the things I like most about the tip is that it strikes me as good advice for everyone, not just writers.

Maryann - I swear by the Clement Woods. The paperback Webster edition I use (920 pages) includes a 90 page appendix on Rhyme, Rhythm and Forms which is a textbook and sourcebook (invaluable for checking out forms and variants) by itself, and better than anything else I've read.

I’ll throw in two of my own and two from Valéry.

If I’m stuck for a word, I often find myself listening carefully to the sounds made by the surrounding context – the modulation of vowels, the fall of consonants – and allowing these things to prompt me.

The expressive and diverse management of syntax is crucial, the way it can postpone or hurry the fulfilment of sense.

“The great painter Degas often repeated to me a very true and simple remark by Mallarmé. Degas occasionally wrote verses… But he often found great difficulty in this work… One day he said to Mallarmé: ‘Yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I am full of ideas…’ And Mallarmé answered: ‘My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words.’” – “Poetry and Abstract Thought” in Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, trans. by Denise Folliot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), page 63.

“Poetic necessity is inseparable from material form, and the thoughts uttered or suggested by the text of a poem are by no means]the unique and chief objects of its discourse – but means which combine equally with sounds, cadences, meter, and ornaments to produce and sustain a particular tension or exaltation….If I am questioned, if anyone wonders…'what I wanted to say' in a certain poem, I reply that I did not want to say but wanted to make, and that it was the intention of making which wanted what I said…” – “Concerning ‘Le cimitière marin’” (ibid. 147).

Clive Watkins

Amen.

Nemo

I'm not sure it relates, ... [delete]

Re Nemo's post #28 -- Or as Alicia succinctly put it: "Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say."

You're right, Dean - it doesn't relate. This was an interesting thread about writing poetry. Why do you want to turn it into one more "favorite poem" thread.

The Chinese have a saying, "Wen wu ding fa" (文无定法), which means: "In writing, there's no sure rule."

Fair enough, Michael.

Bad idea.

Oh my goodness I love rhyming dictionaries, and thesauri, and concordances, and even just regular dictionaries. But I will never, ever again touch one made out of pulped dead trees. Too much wasted time flipping, too many bad memories of dusty stacks. If it's not on the web, I ain't touching it.

So please take a moment and list your favorite electronic sources for these things, as we're in need of discovery. I would be most grateful!

Best,

Bill