[Max Goodman]

Matthew Zapruder's Why Poetry (possibly due to my own ignorance) rocked my world. The most interesting of many things I got out of it is this claim about his free verse. (I have holds on two of his books at the library, but I haven't yet been able to read his poems to see whether his intention comes through for me.)

Originally Posted by Matthew Zapruder

I secretly think my poems actually do rhyme. It's just that the rhyme is "conceptual"; that is, made not of sounds but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn't have expected...

Edit in: Zapruder didn't post that here. I goofed in setting up the quote. I assume that's not the source of Jayne's confusion.

[Jayne Osborn]

Originally Posted by Matthew Zapruder
I secretly think my poems actually do rhyme. It's just that the rhyme is "conceptual"; that is, made not of sounds but of ideas that accomplish what the sounds do in formal poetry: to connect elements that one wouldn't have expected...

Eh?????

Jayne

[Orwn Acra]

Originally Posted by Jayne Osborn

Eh?????

Jayne

The words rhyme in their concept:

There once was a person from Limerick
who wanted to write a sonnet.
The syllable count
he forgot to calculate
and wrote a haiku.

[John Isbell]

Or this:

There was a young man from Paree
Who was stung on the neck by a wasp.
When asked if it hurt
He said no, not a lot
I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet.

Cheers,
John

[Roger Slater]

That's just bullshit, if you ask me. He's recognizing some of what rhyming does, and because some of that, broadly speaking, can also be done without rhyme (making unexpected connections) he is claiming that he actually does rhyme. No, he doesn't. It strikes me as defensive, words spoken by a man who feels a bit inferior perhaps at his inability to rhyme and so he is trying to compensate by claiming that he really is rhyming, in a way.

[Simon Hunt]

Max--I had my mind blown in a similar way a long time ago when, in an introductory class on American Sign Language, a student gave a report on poetry in ASL and said that poetry in sign languages often does have a concept of rhyme but, since it can't be based in sound, pursues it in similarity of "movement, handshape, location, palm orientation, or other components of signs" (here I quote the work of an ASL writer who expresses this better than I could...). This seems to me more precise an analogue to sonic rhyme than "conceptual rhyme," which could mean almost anything, but I'm keeping an open mind...

[RCL]

Here's an older thread on conceptual rhyming.

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showt...nceptual+rhyme

[marly youmans]

The sign language parallel is intriguing...

I can't say that this description of connecting elements the reader wouldn't expect is convincing to me as a form of rhyme. It seems more like a structural tool that people have been using in poems for a very long time, and that we could find described in something like Puttenham's Art of English Poesy. Perhaps we could even say that the metaphysicals provide some very specific examples through metaphors that pull together odd tenor and vehicle pairs.

But maybe I don't see what he means clearly. An example of his work might help...