Clive: Thank you for the invitation to join this thread. I've been preoccupied and laid up for a while, so I have been a very intermittent participant lately and hadn't noticed this interesting discussion.
Once working in rhyme and meter stopped feeling so strange, I felt an almost mystical feeling about the shape a poem wanted to be. You hear sculptors talk about that with their materials, and I often feel that way about a whole poem once I have a marginal first line and a general sense of what I want to do. With only one or two exceptions that I can think of have I ever written a poem in one form and that rewritten it in a different form. Stupidly persistent, perhaps, but that's me.
I don't worry too much about rhyme with the first drafts--sometimes you luck into fitting ones, but I work hardest at trying first to say what I want to say in good imagery and meter, and then keep banging at good alternatives for rhymes until the poem falls more into place. It means you have to be willing to throw overboard individual lines that are pretty good, but I've learned to do that and many poets would be better served if they could do that. It's a pretty slow process, which is why I have a pretty sparse output. In a comic poem I will sometimes write it differently, and try to see where the rhymes take me, but I think it's hard to write a serious poem that way. If you call a cloud "as pale as lard" just beause you need a rhyme for a line you love that ends with hard, well, you ain't gonna make it.
I do like the guideline of trying to rhyme verbs with words other than verbs, and so forth, but I don't think you can rigidly adhere to that and do everything else you're supposed to do. I write a bit on the "plain" side a lot of the time, but I think you have to be careful with common rhymes. If the overall lines are striking enough though, an ordinary rhyme can put an intereting tension into a line--I did a night/light couplet recently that I think works, although I understand why I took some flak for it.
Except in humorous poems, I'm wary of the too-acrobatic rhyme--it runs the risk of showing off and creating distracting attention to itself. Common, but "nonpoetical" rhyming words are my favorites: from my own stuff I like sites/Trotskyites from "Moscow Zoo" relatives/sedatives from "Cancer Prayer" and dive/I-95/drive in "Sunshine State".
I try to stay away from the rhyming dictionaries for as long as I can, but I have two different ones and think judicious checking when you're really close but not quite there can sometimes open up good choices that you would otherwise overlook. I must confess, though, that I felt dirty about it for a while after I heard Richard Wilbur scorn them in 1995 at the first West Chester.
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