"rhyme is seen as anachronistic by most poets"

[Leanne]

I know what I think about this statement.  Anyone care to add their opinions?

[NobodyNothing]

I know.  I'm not sure why.  But I too tend to see spiders in rhyme.  It's creepy.

[Leanne]

I must write a poem about that. A rhyming one, of course.

[Leanne]

I see spiders out of time
in anachronistic rhyme
spinning silk from upraised bum
to the meter, dum de dum

[NobodyNothing]

Fun one.

I don't know.  Knowing not much about poetry when I began to pay attention to it (it was pretty much absent from my HS curriculum), I thought poetry was supposed to rhyme. Then I slowly started to get a bit of an historical sense of it, getting acquainted with some of the superstars, the romantics, Willy, TS, Yeats, and the like.  Then I started reading poems in publications, like the New Yorker, and the like, contemporary ones.  The only thing intelligible thing I could say was that they seemed so "talky", so unmusical, or un-rhythmic (though this certainly wasn't always the case with them).  

I just thought that that's the way it was now, an evolutionary thing.  

I had to ask myself the question:  Was the contemporary absence of rhyme the result of poets not wanting their expression to be constrained in this way, or was it that it truly had become passe?  I'm not sure, but it does seem more the latter to me now.  

Bleh.  Just babbling....

[Leanne]

When people say "rhyme" they tend to mean "end rhyme". Like any device, it becomes passe when people keep using it in predictable ways -- but to say that something that's fallen out of favour with a noisy few from a single nation or small group of nations in the last fifty years or so after having permeated culture in myriad ways for thousands of years is just a bit arrogant, in my opinion.

Of course, it depends on your nationality and how closely you adhere to trends rather than going in your own direction. In my accent, "shit" rhymes with "hypocrite".

[Quixilated]

I think it makes me feel like people are trying to take toys out of my sandbox. The sandbox is fine. I want it to have ALL the toys, and I want to be the one to choose how my sandcastle looks. But then I was born in the wrong time and adore many things that are supposedly outdated, so I'd probably build a Victorian sandcastle and all the people that want a Minimalist-Zen,-Hipster sandcastle will tell me I did it wrong. And I'll plug my ears and built another one just to do it ...

[NobodyNothing]

I just don't know enough, to be honest.  I did think TS did a wonderful job of mixing a modern style and sensibility with some more classic rhyme schemes, that is in the few select poems that stuck with me by him.

Sensibility, or a contemporary sensibility...there's something in that word now that strikes me.  I think you definitely can creatively utilize various different rhyme schemes if you/the poem possess a sensibility that speaks to your time and place.  

I don't know, best I can do with the idea now.  

[Todd]

I know what I think about this statement.  Anyone care to add their opinions?

I don't see how we could get most poets to agree on anything. 4 out of 5 poets surveyed thought LSD and lawn sprinklers had a positive impact on their writing.

Anything done well is worth doing. When rhyme, or alliteration, or imagery, or fill in the blank is done poorly then I don't like it.

I think rhyme can make a poem fun to read. I'm still thankful for the first Kyrielle you had me write, Leanne (what a blast). I'm with Quix why should we limit ourselves or speak in broad generalities.

[QDeathstar]

For anyone who was wondering what that big word was....

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=+anachronistic


Actually, that didn't really help.


Im against the statement. Rhyming is fun. I like fun things.

[milo]

that is only half the statement.
"Poets are seen as anachronistic by everyone else"
Who cares, anachronisms are cool.

[aschueler]

I am ashamed to admit that I don't know any poets in real life, so I can't answer that question. However, I personally think that application of rhyme and the structure of that rhyme is dependant on the subject; that end rhyme or rhyme sort of nestled in there is a pretty thing; that there are rules about this sort of thing but they are written at the end of pi, phi, or the sum of the largest primes.

[QDeathstar]

Look in the mirror, aschueler. You write therefore you are! As they say.

[ellajam]

I enjoy reading and writing rhyme, especially the sneaky kind. I have limited experience with how others see it but I can say when I posted a rhymer I had worked on here on another site even the poets who didn't work in rhyme enjoyed it. Is there anyone who doesn't enjoy Leanne's? Does Mercedes not kill in rhyme or not? I will not list the more famous poets who work beautifully with rhyme.

I think it's fine for people to write however they want to, a good poem is a good poem and will find its audience if it is put out there, no more limited than poetry in general. Being rhymeless doesn't give a poem more of a chance of working, in my meager experience.

[RiverNotch]

I do think using an old device, such as rhyme or meter, definitely makes a poem work more, as long as it's in the piece with purpose, whether to highlight its deliberately humorous/'anachronistic' nature, to give it a sense of fridge brilliance (in that the poem, if read aloud and without full consideration, sounds as if it were written in a more 'modern' diction -- see Leanne, I guess), or simply, in giving it a clear structure, to make it sound better. Lob it to a piece for the sake of itself, and it has a good chance of messing things up.

And again, old -- rhyme, meter, alliteration/assonance, etc, are obviously old things, but I think they can never be anachronistic in general, at least to any reader worth his salt: they're just too ingrained into the consciousness of the language. Think, say, cooking with fire, using salt for preservation and flavor: really old things, sure, but they'll never really go out of style -- in fact, they add a good deal of connectivity to a piece of food, tying them to tradition, to the greater continuity of English cuisine or even cuisine in general -- rather, a piece, English poetry, poetry in general. But yeah, never anachronistic -- at least until the poet means them to be, which I think only really works in humorous pieces.

[NobodyNothing]

By the way Leanne, you're so effing good with form it shrinks my pee-pee to the size of ant.  That poem you wrote "War Games" was a perfect example of impeccable formatic control (although I'm still trying to get a handle on exactly who the "we" and the "you" in it are (my bad) ).

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Off topic...I still think the poetry put forth this year here during NPM was exceptional.  In my mind, the best year I've seen here so far, by a good measure (just MO).  I totally dug checking in here and reading them all, and being surprised.  Really appreciated.  There's a part of me that still wants to compile my faves, and say something about them (it's an ego thing).  

And by the way, who's this Todd guy?  How did he keep being so damn human throughout?  

Anyway...just wanted to say...

[billy]

rhyme like any other device works well when used well. have, don't have it does it matter if it's good, is it anachronistic...definitely not, just look ate your xmas and birthday cards, listen to almost any pop song [which could be seen as a form of poetry] and there's nearly always rhyme, our language leads us to rhyme. the sonics add something as they do wit other devices. people often see end rhyme when rhyming poetry is mentioned without noticing good internal rhymes and various other types of rhyme. i think to call rhyming poetry anachronistic is to bury one's head up one's own arse.

[Achebe]

The measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin—rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre; graced indeed since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings—a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming.

http://www.bartleby.com/4/400.html

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My point being that end rhyme was anachronistic even at the time of the Illiad and the Mahabharata. And obviously in Milton's day as well.

[billy]

doesn't this thread also beg the question; "is poetry anachronistic"?

[ellajam]

Yes it does, no it isn't, people love the sound of words and to have their brains nudged. A lot of them prefer it with sound but that doesn't mean there's no room for quiet, it just isn't as common.