Poems that we write in childhood follow the most boiled-down ideas of the traditional hallmarks of poetry, going something like, “I got out of bed / And bumped my head / And now it’s red.” Rhyme is something that we see as the shining star of poetry, especially end-rhyme. We grow older and are let in on new knowledge: poetry doesn’t have to rhyme. In fact, it begins to seem, rhyme is chintzy. When I reached college, I stopped rhyming all together–it seemed to sound like a cheap gimmick, like a poem trying to dress itself up as A Poem, I thought. But in Advanced Poetry this past Monday, a new idea was brought to my attention: that writers use rhyme to generate a word that we wouldn’t normally use. I was very much intrigued by this idea. I often find the same language cropping up in my writing, acting as satellites to again more of the same, and try as I might in revision, I seem to always get swept up in the same vortex of words. In the coming weeks, I am interested in experimenting more with rhyme: slant rhyme, perfect rhyme, internal rhyme… bring it on! While I don’t believe that rhyme matches all content–and as an extension, form–it certainly seems to be a useful tool to keep in our belts.
Poetry and the Poetic @ SUNY Geneseo English