[A. E. Stallings]

What a wealth of info and discussion! I particularly like the advice, "Rhyme on the obscenity." (Could we get that on Able Muse t-shirts?) And I believe, Carol, that Susan means you don't add a concept not in the original wording. It might well take two words, or a whole phrase, to carry across a single Latin word into English, of course. Or a whole line might get condensed into a two-word phrase. But you don't want to pad with an adjective where the original has none.

My notion of my own riming, not very well thought out, mind you, is that I tend to rime phrases rather than words. (Frost may also have said this--if so, am not meaning to plagiarize.) It is rare that I get to the second of a riming pair and am down to the word itself. This is why I do not believe it is really that valid to talk about "tired" rimes. The "tiredness" of them comes from context--a whole tired metaphor, a tired way of using them--rather than the words themselves. I can point out plenty of good uses of breath/death, for example--say in Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz." Talking about tired rimes to me is like saying that the letter "e" is trite, since it is used all the time.

I don't use riming dictionaries, but this is not an ethical decision. I just don't find them terribly useful. I find them limiting. There are plenty of rimes not in riming dictionaries. But then, possibly, haven't looked into the right ones. Again, though, I am rarely searching for one word.

I also have a theory that if you are stuck on a rime, the problem is the line you set up the rime with. Rethink the pair, as a unit. This is a corollary to my theory that a poem tends to have a technical hitch at the precise point it has a bigger more problematic weakness (flaws come in groups).

Am also a big fan of (consonantal) slant rime, which has a completely different flavor. But that belongs to another discussion.

Rime comes pretty easily to me, and I have to make myself abstain from time to time--not easy. On the other hand, am not interested in intricate rimed forms. For me, a very intricately rimed stanza becomes too much like a crossword puzzle--intellectually stimulating as a game, but stultifying to other faculties.

I have learned a heck of a lot by working on a rimed translation of Lucretius--7,000 odd lines, of which have done about 5,500--getting better, I hope, as I go along. A bit like working a crossword puzzle (that image again) for which one is not sure there is a solution. As Susan points out, the content is a given, which is naturally limiting. And one does want to rime on the important words, give them that punch. In the odd moment of despair I have turned to riming dictionaries in this project. And they have never offered me a solution. In the end, again, it was a matter of rethinking the entire couplet. Well, hey, there are only so many rimes for "void." And believe me, I know them all.

What I love about rime, though, is its ability to surprise--particularly the poet!

[Roger Slater]

Alicia, that's the most useful discussion of "rime" I have ever seen. I love what you said about rhyming phrases, not words, and about the letter "e" (funny and to the point). Your insight about problems coming in clusters is also on the money. Thanks so much!

I sometimes use riming dictionaries, particularly if I take on a form like a villanelle, but I agree with you that most riming dictionaries do not list all rhymes (and they certainly don't help out with slant rhymes or inventive multi-word rhymes). Glimpsing at the riming dictionary, however, (a) reassures me that I've already thought of all the rhymes that could be useful (as is usually the case), and (b) somehow stimulates me to think of rhymes that aren't in the rhyming dictionary.

Now that I write on a computer that's always connected to the internet, I sometimes switch between my word processor window and the window for rhymezone.com. I suspect that rhymezone.com is far from the best rhyming dictionary around, but it's the one I've fallen in the habit of using and it's good enough for my very limited purposes.

Thanks again for your wonderful insights!

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

I like what's been said about "tiredness" and I'd agree that rhyme pairs can't exactly get tired, but a context can certainly get trite, and worse yet, predictable.

There was a game I played as a kid, and still do occasionally, called "Predict the country music lyrics." Country music tends to be characterized by constant use of couplets, long drawling pronounciation, and confining itself to the simple emotionally-charged but limited level 1 vocabulary. Not only can you predict the rhyme, but very often the whole line leading up to it, just by turning on the radio and listening:

"Oh I was standing in the rain"

will be followed by either "waiting for the train" or being in some kind of "pain."

In country music, hearts are always torn apart, people say that they're going away and so on.

Trouble is, there's power in simplicity, and a lot of these clicheed contexts are clicheed because someone is always hearing them for the first time, and for them, it will pack a greater punch.

Kevin

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Excellent insight from everyone already--Alicia, you're absolutely right about "rhyming phrases;" Roger, good points, especially about the way the rhyming process can lead to unexpected territory; KAM, nice categorization, although I suppose it's not absolute.

I never use a rhyming dictionary, but I don't often write fully end-rhymed verse. I more often use full rhymes internally (if I'm using them at all) and slant rhymes--consonantal and assonantal--at the ends of lines, but rarely in a predetermined pattern (unless I'm working on a specific metrical form, of course.) When I write free verse, I often use rhymes as a kind of "background music," or as recurring threads which appear on significant words; occasionally I stress an idea or image by bringing full rhyming to the foreground by placing it at the end of a line. When I "sense" that a specific sound should reappear, I often have a word in mind before I've reached that point (phrase-building in advance.) When I think that two ideas or images should be connected in some way, I might use rhyme (or, alliteration) to show this. Some sounds seem opposed to one another, so I might use alternating pairs of sounds to show contrast between groups of ideas or images. I might use "rising" or "falling" sounds to correlate with the context of a line or image.

When I am working with a predefined form--nonce or traditional--but am having trouble finding a rhyme, I use one of two methods:

<dir>

1. I use a thesaurus to look up words based on the phrasing/idea I am needing. A good thesaurus like Roget's International Thesaurus--the best I have found--will have long entries for that idea, divided by noun, verb, adjective, and adverb forms. I often find exact rhymes which will express the idea I want to express, although I might need to change the phrasing to allow for different grammar.
   
2. I have an electronic dictionary which allows searching for words while utilizing "wildcards" for the spelling. E.g., if I'm wanting something that rhymes with "night," I can search "*ite" to find all words that end in "ite." Or, I can search "*ight," "*yte," etc. Each search will result in a long list of words, some of which won't actually rhyme ("suite," for instance). The dictionary also allows a search using the wildcard "?" which substitutes for one specific letter; if I need a word that rhymes with "night" but is only one syllable, I might search for "??ight" which will only deliver a six-letter word, or "?ite" which will deliver a four-letter word; if I need more syllables, I can add more question marks. I suppose I've made this dictionary into a "rhyming" dictionary...but the wildcard "?" could also make the search for slant rhymes easier: for "birth," I could search "b?th," "b??th," and "b???th," and get these results:
   <dir>Bath
   bath
   beth
   both
   Barth
   berth
   birth
   Blyth
   Booth
   booth
   broth
   breath</dir>

</dir>

Curtis.

[Michael Juster]

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.

[Deborah Warren]

What an interesting topic!

Lately I've tried to RESIST rhyming; after a five-year marriage to rhyme, I often think I'm ready for a dirty weekend with some blank verse. But no sooner do we check into the motel than rhyme breaks the door down.

I agree with Jan and Alicia; rhyme dictates what phrases we use, and whole lines, and (with me at least) often changes the course, or the entire point, of the poem.

We may want to rhyme the important words, but that doesn't mean all the rhymed words are important ones. In fact, I think we all try to vary the weight borne by the rhymes in a poem. So often when I look for a rhyme I'm looking for a way to downplay it; find a feeble word, enjamb it. . .

As for rhyming dictionaries, I don't see how it's cheating to use them. Why set up artificial challenges? Mine is four decaying pages at the back of an old Webster without a cover. I look in it, but I can't recall a time when it gave me a rhyme I used.