[Maryann Corbett]

I'm trying something new for me: couplets that are rhymed but not metered. My model for this exercise is an A.E. Stallings poem, "Written on the eve of my 20th high school reunion, which I was not able to attend. I remember another such piece by Jehanne Dubrow, in Subtropics I think, but I haven't hunted it up this morning.

I'm finding that the exercise raises all sorts of questions. The first is, Can we do this sort of thing and get a serious result, or does the echo of Ogden Nash doom the poem to lightweightness? Or will feminine rhymes be the death of its seriousness?

Another question is how one ensures that the unmatched couplets don't merely look like failed meter. I think I know the answer to this one: the elements of the pairs have to be very different in length.

It looks as though the looseness of the structure makes it possible for the poem to tolerate more prosey language than other poems might take. Do you agree?

What other examples of rhymed but unmetered work have you found and enjoyed?

[Gregory Dowling]

Interesting topic. Don Paterson has some poems in couplets without discernible metrical patterns and very loose off-rhymes or para-rhymes. Here's a link to a poem entitled "11:00: Baldovan". As you can see the couplets are of varying length but the lines within the individual couplets tend to be of similar length. The effect is very different from Ogden Nash, if only because the rhymes are so faint, and because he doesn't play with the comic alternation of long and short lines within the couplet. However, one has the sense of a ghost of formal control over the material, which is quite effective. It certainly allows for a natural colloquiality, which is appropriate to the poem, as we are supposed to hear a small boy talking.

[Susan McLean]

Obviously, Plath's "Daddy" has rhyme without meter, but she does it unpredictably, not in couplets. I love that effect when it is well done, and when I started writing poetry again, I wrote a number of poems that used it. But I quickly realized that it is an effect that tends to be scorned by both camps, the formalist and the free verse. So I stopped using it. Part of the problem, I think, is that beginning writers are often attracted to it and handle it very poorly, which gives it a bad name.

Susan

[W.F. Lantry]

Maryann,

I wonder if the solution to the problem Susan raises isn't a kind of variable foot? Two poems have been exampled, Daddy and Alicia's. But at first glance, neither one is truly unmetered. Instead, the meter is varied, using a kind of loose accentuals. Take this:

But they pulled / me out / of the sack,
And they stuck/ me together / with glue.
And then / I knew / what to do.
I made / a model / of you,

or this:

Just when / I understood / I was / no longer / among
Those ephemeral / immortals, / the gauche / and pitiable / young,

I'm not sure either one qualifies as vers libre at all. The meter may be irregular and extremely variable, but it still helps move the poem forward.

Just a thought...

Thanks,

Bill

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, everyone. Will it seem churlish of me to say that your examples help me see what I'm not after? Ack. It will, but let me try to explain.

The veiled and buried rhymes in the Paterson don't stand up and yell RHYME! the way the full rhymes in the Stallings poem do. The combination of full rhymes with their organization into very clear couplets brings the rhyme absolutely to the fore. That foregrounding of rhyme--at least for me--calls my attention forcefully to the absence of a clear metrical pattern. That's not to say, Bill, that I can't hear feet and a motivating rhythm in the lines. But there isn't a repeated number of feet, or number of beats per line, from couplet to couplet, so I would call this rhythmical rather than metrical. By contrast, the Dubrow poem I had in mind keeps much more clearly to trimeter and pentameter throughout and seems to me fully metrical.

(Full disclosure: I'm resisting really getting into the question of what is and isn't a metrical poem because it's been a vexed question in the history of the board, given the long-standing decision to bifurcate met and non so absolutely.)

Might we classify this as a "ghost of meter" poem, in the way Annie Finch uses the term to talk about the Modernists? There's a great deal of rhyme and meter, for example, in Prufrock.

The relaxedness and the loosening of metrical control go along with a relaxed and colloquial diction that shifts very gradually to a more elevated one. For example, "Just what I needed" is a very plain-spoken opener, but "the high hubris of our hair" is something other.

Let me try phrasing the question this way: What does full rhyme do to the reader's expectation of meter?

[Petra Norr]

Stallings' poem - I love it. But I loathe the sound of it. To me it's a very good example of how tricky it is to use rhyme without meter. It sounds ridiculous. No?

[Quincy Lehr]

Originally Posted by Susan McLean

But I quickly realized that it is an effect that tends to be scorned by both camps, the formalist and the free verse.

This is rather the nub of it, I think. Techniques that do not clearly align with a particular school in the U.S. tend to get scorned--not so much openly (I've managed to get a few rhymed, un-metered things into print)--but as a matter of perception. It's a real problem with the way the po-biz gets sliced and diced.

Quincy

[Maryann Corbett]

Susan, I did understand. I take your point, and Quincy's, that the result of rhyme-without-meter tends not to fit the assigned categories--largely because I see that there's no right place to post what I've come up with. Nor can I think of an editor who wouldn't scratch his head over it. I'll probably be working now to nudge it closer to meter.

Further examples welcome, however, with thanks.

[Kate Benedict]

[quote=Maryann Corbett;148751Nor can I think of an editor who wouldn't scratch his head over it. [/quote]

Oh, I bet you can think of such an editor if you really tried . . .