[Mike Slippkauskas]

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

[Maryann Corbett]

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.

[Mike Todd]

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.

[David Landrum]

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.

[Maryann Corbett]

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?

[Wintaka]

David:

Read it yourself if you haven't already.

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

This illustrates the kind of knee-jerk reaction to rhyme that is a deep-structure in modern critical attitude.

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

[Mark Allinson]

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.

[Michael Cantor]

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.

[Brian Watson]

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).]

[Roger Slater]

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.