Like many poets (especially as a teenager), I started writing strictly in rhyme, or at least in rigid meter, and I struggled intensely to make my thoughts fit (ultimately failing; most my stuff from before age 26 or so is neatly organized garbage). For me, it was liberating myself from stanza structure that helped me find my voice. I didn’t abandon all the tools (I still deliberately impose iambic patterns and line length consistency within poems, for example), but skillful use of rhyme and form escapes me largely to this day.

But after thinking for a month about what Mr. Hall said, I start to get what he meant: When you decide on a form (traditional or otherwise), you automatically define that the end of your poem will fall at a particular point. There’s no extending it a line, or adding a few more words for “clarity”, or any of those excuses we have for thinking a poem’s not “done”. You have to decide: Is there another complete stanza to say here, or am I done?

This insight aside, most well known poets today mostly ignore (or actively avoid!) rhyme and form, with Paul Muldoon and Dana Gioia the exceptions that prove the rule. Why? Read Poet’s Market, and you find publishers that specifically disclaim any interest in rhymed verse, or worse “greeting card verse”. Rhyme has a huge stigma. Is that because “it’s easier”?

Or does rhyme really have that stigma? Ed Skoog discusses rhyme and form in a recent article (thanks for the link, Poetry Daily!). It’s prompted by the publication by Felix Dennis (publisher of Maxim) of a book of rhymed ditties with titles like “How to Get Rich”. Dennis says he wrote in rhyme because “that’s what people want”. As Skoog points out, Dennis is no slouch on figuring out what people want.

So why is rhyme so out of favor with publishers? Skoog’s hypothesis is that American literati do not celebrate “technical virtuosity”, that a neat and musical surface is taken as a handicap to overcome, not a sign of talent. But go read Hall’s “Her Garden” or Gioia’s “The Next Poem” and see if you agree with that.

Back to this concept of “being done”, I think that the rhyme and meter are unfairly dismissed in the whole because they are so often used in bad poems. But then, I’ve read just as many bad free verse, just as many bad stream-of-consciousness poems as I’ve read rhymed ones. I’m working on a poem now that hasn’t felt “done” to me – the idea’s complete, I’m happy with the opening, but the ending feels flat. In figuring out what I like about the opening, I realized that, I’ve written the first 6 lines as slant-rhymed couplets. I don’t know if that’s why they’re better to me than the rest of the poem, but they do seem more complete somehow. More done.

Whatever your opinion, think twice the next time you find yourself leaning away from rhyme on purpose. It’s like throwing away a woodworking tool because you don’t like the way it looks, regardless of the element of style that it – in the right hands – can impart to your work.


David Vincenti
Advisor, Center for the Performing Arts at DeBaun Auditorium
www.debaun.org; www.davidvincenti.com