It's my birthday so why not?

Rhyme is the last out-moded vestige of imperialist baggage left in poetry, and should be abandoned immediately by anyone serious about poetry as a radical force.

Discuss.

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday Mr Waling
Happy birthday to you

Bump
Spike Milligan

Things that go bump in the night
Should not really give one a fright.
It`s the hole in each ear
That lets in the fear,
That,and the absence of light.
Bum Bum!
Happy Birthday Steve.

How are the hives, Steve?

I didn't say it - it's a quote from Malpoet :;

So: nobody disagrees that rhyme is one of the most reactionery forms of writing at the moment then.

Why do you keep using it then?

What does format definition mean?.....and how does it work?

what seperates the formats inso as they are recognised as definitive examples of what they are,? rhyme, poetry, prose, essay, story, speech, performance

what enables writerA what gifts him the Cutting Edge
what is that leave writerB in the dark knocking out his rhymes?

Gus Jonsson

Lots to say about rhyme
Not today I've no time

It's not my birthday, but I can still be an awkward bastard.

Rhyme was used in poetry long before we had an empire and is still of value. What he hell has it got to do with imperialism?

Poetry is not a force and 'radical' doesn't mean anything other than in surgery.

People can write crap whether it rhymes or not. Those who have sufficient talent and command of language to be able to use rhyme in a way that adds to their poetry should do it when they want to.

People who try to tell others what they should or shouldn't write, or who dismiss whole categories of work on the assertion that it is outmoded or otherwise unworthy simply display their own narrow mindedness and fad ridden inadequacy.

Discuss
so truss me up for being a poet
and Indeed I am every inch a poet just as much as any high brow
book bashin bonce
and rhyme is a great tool
no more the fool to use it
no less the school who don't
no worse the poet who wont
yet why not?
Discuss the man says
so discuss we shall
He who rhymes good rhymes well
all these words
to tell
its not always easy
and takes a skill
to quell the doubt your any good
a confidence of course should follow
all brave enough poets to try
and as the malpoet says
he defends the right
and he's a man to die for
and I agree
for he offers a platform of encouragement
more than the
many bigger wheel
let the penny fall
in the words of rythme
good, bad, all kinds
who cares
its more about those who dare to be themselves
rather than those who delve into
delusions of grandeur
goes over my head most of this
non emotion in poems i have also missed
like music on ears never kissed
I have defenders on for pretence
yet open arms
for poets who constantly commence
in being true to themselves

Surely the point is not rhyme v plain verse or prose it's whether the stuff is any good. There's a lot of pretentious twaddle written without rhyme and a lot of derivative nonsense written in rhyme. There's even more pretentious twaddle talked and written on the subject. Some of it in this thread

Why get so precious about it?

toodle pip

Rhyme was used in poetry long before we had an empire and is still of value. What he hell has it got to do with imperialism?

---

Well, for starters, it was brought in by those proto-imperialists par excellance, the Normans... before that, English poetry used alliterative stress techniques like all Northern European traditions (see Gawain, Beowulf, The Seafarer, The Wanderer etc...

But actually, I suspect that most people use rhyme merely because the poetry they last read (in school, thirty years ago...) rhymed or because some jerk-off hip-hop pop muppet does so, not because they've actually thought about it, or are interested in getting better at it.

Takes guts to get up and share your poetry,whatever type it is.

If people are sharing poetry based on the style they grew up hearing,and it happens to be rhyming,so what?

I've been to Write Out Loud a few times,and have shared my own work,(rhyming mostly!..oops,sorry),and have heard some brilliant stuff that does and doesn't rhyme from various people,but all interesting,and all a learning curve,(for me anyway)

Sadly Steven you talk rubbish about history as well as poetry.

Rhyme has been identified in poetry as far back as the Sumerians. To quote The Modern Language Review:

"Rhyme appeared in English verse in the late seventh century, yet since it first emerged elsewhere around 1000BC, we can safely assume an external source and point of transmission."

Describing the Normans as proto-imperialists is ridiculous. Apart from the fact that there were many empires before them, the French and English thrones were interlinked (as were the countries) before William I. Even if you do not accept William's justification for taking the English crown, that he had been invited to do so by Edward, the conquest was not imperialist (even proto!).

I don't speak Norman French or the varieties of celtic and nordic languages that formed ancient English so I don't know if they used rhyme. I suspect that there is not a great deal of knowledge about this. The English translations of famous works don't tell us much.

Describing, or even suspecting, that most poets who use rhyme are lazily copying some work that you despise is just another of the insults that you seem to enjoy throwing around.

I can't see anything of worth in your poetry, but so far as other people do that is fine. I do not want to deride them or you. There is a great deal of rhyming poetry that I enjoy and admire which has been written over many centuries. Dismissing it all because of the rhyme is not only insulting to those poets and their admirers, but it is a narrow minded rejection of the work of others that diminishes you rather than them.

interesting discussion this...

Even if you do not accept William's justification for taking the English crown, that he had been invited to do so by Edward, the conquest was not imperialist (even proto!).
-----

All kings are imperialist. All lords & ladies are imperialists.

Prejudice is just so much more fun than being fair and just about things. And it's so provoking...

I still think that most people rhyme because they think they ought to rather than because they've actually thought about it. In fact, it's the only thing that makes it look like poetry for most people. Things like rhythm and the sound of vowels and consonents along the line (internal rhyme, melody, harmony) are what make a poem beautiful to hear, not just the mere fact that the end words rhyme.

Now, in someone that's just started out and doesn't know much, that's excusable. When you've been churning out doggeral for twenty years, and say you don't read cause you might be influenced by others (what a lazy argument that is!), then you've no excuse.

Poetry is a craft, and like all craft it requires learning.

Doesn't every schoolboy know it?
The guiding star that steers a poet
isn't liking Larkin or alliteration.
Research has shown from time to time
those least inclined to write in rhyme
are most unsure of their pronunciation.

You may imagine Franz Kafka
to be a swell who'd be seen at a BAFTA,
or you might believe Franz Kafka
to write novels resounding with laughter.
At the end of The Trial when you're close to the close
you'll be feeling morose, or is it morose?
The solution is simple - try writing in prose.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

It really isn't worth discussing anything with you Steven. When you talk nonsense you then pretend that you are being intentionally provocative when the reality is that you were just talking shit, thinking that you might impress. When you suggested that rhyming poetry was somehow related to imperialism you were not being provocative or saying anything of worth, you were just spewing out words.

It is just arrogance to claim that you know what 'most people' are doing when they write their poetry. You do not know.

Be as self satisfied as you want in your craft. Creative writing is an art and a craft and it is largely subjective.

You may be pleased that you feel you have provoked me. I haven't been provoked, but I have been irritated by your stupidity and that is a failing on my part. I would more easily ignore the crap that you write if you were not so obviously trying to humiliate people who write things that you hold in contempt. If we ever meet we can discuss the respective merits of each others opinion, but in the meantime it would be nice if you stopped pouring your bile onto others.

This is a very peculiar argument indeed. I can only speak from my own experience, but the rhyme or lack thereof is of no consequence. When I sit and actually write a poem, that is only happening after one or more days of having it form in my head as a concept. Typically, before I'll write a poem down I'll already know a) its purpose, b) most of its additional meanings and confusers, c) at least two of its reasonably sizeable sections verbatim as they will appear in the poem, and d) several of its more hooky riffs (rarely will all of these be rhyming) and where they will fit into it with regard to achieving its purpose.

When I then fit it together on the page and add in the interstitial bits, if bits of it rhyme they rhyme and that's fine and for the bits that don't that's fine too.

On the odd occasion I'll even find that its coming together with a discernible (if unusual) rhyme scheme, in which case I will try to keep that throughout, but will break it completely at odd intervals if to do otherwise would interfere with the purpose of the poem.

So, I can only conclude that in a poem that's not been self-consciously formulated to the purpose of following a chosen rhyme scheme, rhyme or lack thereof doesn't even matter.

However, I would agree with Steven were he to revise his initial statement to clarify that deliberate attempts at producing a rhyming poem are a little bit childish and usually unimaginative (I'd particularly like to name and shame: 1) Bouncey trochaic couplets, 2) Bouncey trochaic alternates, and 3) any strict form poems (rhyming or otherwise) - other than limericks, which aren't strict form anyway).

The number of times I have sat through (usually in a library) gigs and listened to reader upon reader delivering their readers digest/people's friend style pants poetry I feel that I have a genuine right to join Steven in his campaign to have them all scooped up in to a pile and burned (together with their dreadful poems).

The pile of junk would be considerable including nearly all of Steven's and most of mine, but I wouldn't light it. Book burners are not attractive.

Rhyme is a dead parrot.

If it wasn't nailed to its perch by the arthritic dead hand of nostalgia, it would be pushing up the daisies. It has gone to join the choir invisible along all the other dead rhymesters.

It was briefly resuscitated by hip-hop till that too died in hail of bling.

Now the only people who use it are nostalgics and the already dead.

It cannot speak because the dead can't speak. It can't do anything but repeat long-dead tropes and long-interred cliches long into the night of its own death.

Rhyme is an ex-parrot. It deserves a decent burial.

Who's a pretty boy then?

Pieces of hate!
Pieces of hate!

Seems this discussion has had the desired effect and now no-one can stop adding their opinion!

The snowball effect is in full swing!! Join the party baby!!

Mass grave maybe!

Rhyming parrot, post modern prat, brit art.............

So I guess Oxford University Press can pull their 'Rhyming Dictionary' off the shelves then?

Or maybe that fact thay amazon list it as comprising of 666 pages should tell us something?

Steven Waling:

Hi Steve, good discussion.
Its dead easy not to rhyme but harder to be or
I can see both sides of the argument, DG makes good points on his post. Worthy of further thought.

How about the old cliche everything in small doses Steve?
a bit of rhyme


Have you any thoughts on the ocassional rhyme?
Must I go back and re write my poems? I dont consider the subject,structure, layers or or use of words to be rubbish you see.

I think yes there's a ton of junk out there, forced rhyme etc but don't forget this is THE STARTING point for many new poets.

don't tell me your first poem didn't rhyme. It didn't ? Screw me you done well my son.

What say you?

Pete -

I've no idea if my first poem rhymed or not. It was so long ago, and probably in another universe.

I know it was rubbish. All first poems are rubbish, by anyone. But that's OK. It's when you're still writing rhyming doggeral years later, and your poetry has as much relevance to the modern world as macrame, that you really ought to worry.

Words rhyme, they can't help it. They are also have rhythm, and can be homophonic, homonymic and a whole host of other aural effects. It's when one is used without the rest that the problems start.

Don't revise old poetry, write better new poetry. Challenge yourself.

I think it may have been Ezra Pound who described rhyme as an essentially comic tool in poetry, that its use undermines any serious intent the poet may have had in their work. Some believe its use to be unnecessarily restrictive to the flow of verse, in that it dictates word choice, or renders meaning arbitrary.
I agree with those who have stated that it depends on the writer. A skilled poet can write good verse in rhyming or non-rhyming forms. Larkin's 'This be the Verse', though rhyming, and essentially comic in tone, is about as profound a work as there is, and all the more memorable (and dare I say it, beautiful) for its form.
To characterize all rhyme as simplistic is disingenuous. If a writer can hide rhyme the listener will unconsciously connect with the order in the work and a sense of musical beauty will prevail. The skill of the writer is central.
This goes for open forms of verse too. If the problem with rhyme is the cat/hat scenario, then the problem with Free Verse is that anyone thinks they can write it. Much modern, open form poetry is simply people trying to impart their wisdom in a vaguely connected, aesthetically ugly series of statements. It's still poetry, but it ain't good. I'd rather hear people trying to be clever than trying to be wise.

I thought I might post a poem I wrote today. Not as an indicator of quality because it isn't for me judge my own work, but to show that rhyme does not have to be used in an obvious or simplistic way. I don't know how good this one is, especially because I have just written it and have no critical distance. Any failings this poem may have though, I feel sure are down to my failings as a poet rather than any inherent deficiency in the form....

Ennui

What is this unwarranted weariness?
These eyelids drop and
Colours pass by on a slow carousel,
Vague alien shades
Cast by now-blinkered sight, dull dancing light.

Aches, indeterminate and authorless,
Confound, demand
Attention though I know that I am well,
And as each one fades
Another appears in triumphant spite.

When I close my eyelids tighter and press
An exhausted hand
To an exhausted forehead, I can smell
The metallic blades
Of grass in the stony city’s midnight.

But it is not midnight. Noon’s shadows dress
The day with night and
Bring the cold sun city under their spell.
Dread torpor invades
The spirit, drives all contentment to flight.

My point in this, DG - who I know, and Steve - who I don't (nice to meet you - if only electronically), is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I would welcome any criticism of my poem, but would suggest that the very strict metre and rhyme scheme (alternating 10/5 syllable lines, all stanzas rhyming with each other) does not materially affect the quality. Valid negative criticism would highlight outmoded vocabulary, mawkish Romantic introspection, pre-Modernist naivity, tricksy formalism and woefully jaded subject matter. The form, however, does not disrupt the poem's integrity.

I think Larkin wrote better poems than This Be The Verse, Siren. A better example would be Churchgoing or The Whitsun Weddings; This Be The Verse has always struck me as rather petty, despite the attempt at depth in the "coastal shelf" lines. If he was alive now, he'd be listening to Emo and wearing black a lot, if that poem is anything to go by.

Actually, the poem you posted is a good example of what's wrong with "rhyme" for me. Even if it's hidden, it's essentially a nostalgic thing; I'm reminded rather too much of the 1890's poets. Fine if that's your thing; but it's not exactly a way of approaching the early 21st century, with its speed, its slogans, its glittery surface hiding an empty shell.

I don't see how rhyme, at least not the usual kind of rhyme, can even begin to approach life as it is actually lived, rather than be merely a nostalgic look back at the world of cricket whites and steam trains.

I don't really get this thing about poetry having to be particularly relevant to the age in which it is produced. Except for elegy (where the formal elements are a positive advantage in containing grief) poetry has not been of serious use to society or a true reflection of contemporaneity for hundreds of years. Whatever is done with poetry today, 'the kids' or even just the cool people are going to ignore it. They have film, popular music, television and video games to keep them amused. What has happened is that poetry movements (High Modernist, Imagist, Surrealist, Projectivist, Beat etc) throughout the twentieth century have successively looked at modern life, panicked, and tried to latch on, aping other art forms in their abstraction and general grooviness. In doing this they have partially severed the links with what is integral to poetry - beauty.
I am not a dyed in the wool pre-Modernist, some of my favourite poets gradually moved away from formalism during their careers (Lowell, Roethke, Plath etc.). But what these three poets have in common for me is that their best works were produced on the edges of form rather than in a completely different jurisdiction. And rhyme, of course, is just one formal aspect.
All poetry, whether it likes to admit it or not, is an attempt at universality. And this universality is not just international and social, but temporal. This is why one can read Sappho, or Rumi, or Donne in the 21st Century and get much the same message from it as their contemporaries. They don't have to be writing about credit crunches or MP4s to achieve relevance. One of the joys of poetry is that it both enthuses and preserves language. Through the continuum of language a modern student can read Shakespeare's 'Nothing Like The Sun' sonnet and think 'Ok, he's taking the piss out of love poetry while actually writing a really good one - clever.' You won't hear many students rocking out to plainsong, though. Because poetry's reliance on form within the context of evolving language provides it with a time-proof shield, everyone knows the rules and everyone can play along.
I fully understand your reference to the 1890s, Steve, that decade being particularly replete with the heavily rhymed doggerel which precipitated the Modernist reaction. I just don't believe that 120 years is enough time to decide that rhyme is dead, or that forms that have served us for hundreds (in some cases thousands) of years should be binned in the rush towards fashionable aesthetic nihilism.
If any poetry sounds old fashioned and rooted in its time it is the bulk of the Beat poetry of the late fifties and early sixties. By using contemporary speech patterns and focussing on modern life's 'difference' to other epochs, The Beats rapped themselves into a corner. It may be sociologically interesting but its very historical value has quickly undermined its artistic quality. And I would suggest that the (erroneous) assumption that this stuff is easier to write well than formal poetry has done more damage to poetry than ten thousand years of doggerel. Ezra Pound again, on many of those who followed his path into Free Verse...

‘The actual language and phrasing is often as bad as that of our elders without even the excuse that the words are shovelled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound.’

While the word 'shovelled' may support your argument, Steve, I think the gist of the statement supports mine.

Oh, and I used 'This Be The Verse' as an example because it is one of the few modern poems many people can quote some of and because its self-consciously heavy rhyme serves the purpose of masking its bleak message.

I agree with most of what Siren has said, but I do think that 'This Be The Verse' is a very poor poem. It is trivial and there is nothing profound in Larkin saying that we should die quickly. The reason that people remember it is just because he says fuck in it.

To say that the early 21st century is a glitter covered empty shell is also an extraordinarily superficial view. LIfe and the world are extremely complex and diverse as in previous centuries. Poetry too has many forms. The validity and worth of poems takes time to establish and it will always have a large subjective element because we are all different. I am glad of that.

I've just re-read 'This Be The Verse' and have not changed my position on it. At least, Malpoet, we both agree that whatever is wrong with the poem, it is not the inherent form.

The superficiality of modern life is an illusion. All the constants that have made us human over thousands of years are still present if one cares to look. This is why Shakespeare still seems relevant today - he was just a great writer. But less universally one could site Wordsworth's environmentalism, Swift's religious scepticism and satirical sensibility or even Chaucer's scabrous sexual content. All of these are read and enjoyed today, not just because we are told to read them by academia, but because things just haven't changed that much. Every age thinks it is a huge break with the past. And a hundred years later historians link it all back together.
Mass communication, efficient transport and information technology are merely upgrades of the printing press, the horse and cart, and the abacus. What is the difference between the X Factor and the music hall? Between strong cider and gin addiction? Between bad films and penny dreadfuls? There is nothing new under the sun. Only new combinations and synthesis of the old stuff.
That is why poetry continues to be relevant in spite of modern life rather than because of it. Poetry is intimately bound up with the oldest form of mass communication - speech.

Quite right. Nothing wrong with the form. I just think it was one of Larkin's weaker pieces. Never mind. I agree with you on everything else Siren.

Perhaps I was a bit hasty saying modern life is shallow...

but frankly, so are the vast majority of rhyming poems. Not only are they shallow, but they suffer from a pernicious nostalgia for the past that says nothing about the modern world. Except perhaps to wish they weren't living in it...

That includes Larkin. Technically, very good. But dull, very dull. Rhyme is still a dead parrot.

And if poetry is so much about speech, how many of you actually speak in rhyme when you're talking to your friends? In fact, how much of the language you use in speech actually gets into your poems? If not, why not? Most rhyming poetry is not about speech; unless, of course, you're referring to the refined speech of the upper middle classes...

And frankly, to dismiss the Beats as irrelevant shows a shallowness of understanding that goes against most of what you say. To dismiss poets as important as Ginsberg, Snyder, O'Hara, Creeley, Waldman, DiPrima and others really beggers belief. Then, of course, there's poets like George Oppen, Lorinne Neidecker, Charles Reznikoff who knock most petty little rhymsters into the English tearoom of their own tiny minds.

I doubt very much you've read any of these poets with any depth.

I suppose a lot of this depends upon whether we see poetry as a daily record of modern life, a journalistic, political force, or simply an elegant concise use of language. Personally, however deeply a poem may affect me initially, I am aware that one half of my brain feels it has little more worth than a crossword puzzle or a well-told joke, it's all just pockets of meaning wrapped in pretty language. It is possible to hold both the above opinions at the same time.

You are certainly a feisty chap, aren't you, Steven? Your aggression leads your arguments into the personal with very little provocation. Talk of tiny minds, pettiness and a lack of depth sails fairly close to insult in my book. I was actually talking about poetry and don't remember trying to insult you. I've read your poetry and quite like it, but that is not because you avoid rhyme but because you are a good poet.

If I read Frank O'Hara, which I have, and happen to think he is one of the most over-rated poets of the twentieth century, which I do, then that is a subjective opinion which cannot be merely dismissed with claims of a 'shallow' reading. I simply don't like his stuff. I think much of its appeal lies in nostalgia (that word again) for groovy mid-century New York. I also think that much of what the Beats attempted to express was superfluous given the myriad forms of mass communication around them. I don't need a poet to tell me that consumerism is a bit tacky, or that dying in a nuclear explosion would be rather unpleasant. Not unless they are going to tell me this in a particularly interesting and clever way.
When they did strike gold (and I do not 'dismiss' the likes of Ginsberg et al, I just think the quality of their work is affected by the transience of their chosen idiolects) it was in their radicalism, their explorations into the self, and their attempts to democratize poetry through experimental forms. Funnily enough, the exact aims and achievements of the Romantic movement over a century earlier. Nostalgia is not always pointless.

I notice a recurrance of politically loaded phrasing in your posts, Steven. All this talk of English tea-rooms and the upper middle classes. I accept that poetry has often contained political undertones and overtones throughout history (and not just C20th). I just happen to believe that politics is contained WITHIN poetry, rather than the other way round. Poetry also contains love, philosophy, theology and all the other things that make us human. I do not accept that to write rhyming poetry in the 21st century is in some way to ignore the present. Perhaps we are all just trying to create the present in our own images?

I am acutely aware that amongst many modern quality poets (and I include your good self in this) rhyming poetry is seen as anachronistic and outmoded. But when I write a poem I like to create something that pleases me first. And rhyme pleases me. I like the sound of a well-constructed rhyme, and poetry is the literature of sound, even when read on the page.

When you say that Larkin is technically impressive but dull do you mean that the technique is dull? If so, how are you impressed. If the content is dull then that has nothing to do with the technique.

I am happy to hear or read poets use modern speech as the basis for their verse. I believe, however, that poetry also has the unique quality of being able to celebrate the language of the past and to preserve words which cannot be used in everyday speech. Where else can this be done?

I am probably not as opposed to your way of thinking as you might believe. I could not admire the work of Corso, Plath, W. C. Williams and Roethke without appreciating open forms of poetry. I just embrace the other side also. Just because not many people are writing great rhyming verse at the moment does not mean it is not possible. I prefer to take the wider view. I think we both express our opinions forcefully because of our passion for the subject, and that is no bad thing. I look forward to continuing discussion.

There are different kinds of rhyme, in the end we are talking of pattern and shape, either of sound or vision. As with eye rhyme and the linking of images or phrases.

Many poets are concerned with the expression of inner thoughts which do not use speech patterns at all, but images and concepts and spaces.Rather like a painter, I am more concerned with the limited range of some poets palette than rhyme, rhyme treated in a jazzy improvised way can be revolutionary at times.

There are different kinds of rhyme, in the end we are talking of pattern and shape, either of sound or vision. As with eye rhyme and the linking of images or phrases.

See even works in prose! :-)

As to Larkin, he's "technically impressive" rather in the way a steam train is. But only really interesting to those prematurely old who long for the days of steam and spanking magazines...

And I'm afraid I just do not recognise your caricature of Beat writing. It certainly bears no relationship to Corso, Walman, Ginsberg, though it might do to some of the lesser names, now long forgotten.

I can't help you if you find O'Hara over-rated. You're a lost cause.

But here's a few other names: Basil Bunting, Dylan Thomas, Roy Fisher, Geraldine Monk, Denise Riley. Not Beat, but certainly Modernist.

Dylan Thomas's work, and certainly his subject matter and the way he played about with language in a deconstructionist manner such as can be argued to constitute an attempt to question the importance of semantics, doesn't really place him too neatly into modernism. I'd say he's closer to post-modernism, especially in his later poems where semiotics are pretty much gone.

I have no shame in using rhyme, and I do it because I like the sound it makes, especially that bit where it sets gneeth tashing and haises rackles. I like the music of rhyming poetry, though after moving to Bolton I found people rhyming the oddest of things, like 'books' with 'souks', and 'air' with 'fur', it's a whole new genre: post-grammatical.

This wrote itself, so I am not to blame.

This Be Worse

He fucked me up, did Philip Larkin.
May not have meant to, but he did.
He filled me with the faults he had
And added extra, though not just for me, obviously.

And he, in his turn too, did fuck
Though did prefer, for recreation
To bury his head in a book
And turn his hand to master
ly versification

Man hands on misanthropy to man,
It deepens when you're on the shelf,
So get out as often as you can
And don't read Larkin's stuff yourself.

On limericks, even Auden used the 'form', in this one, if I have remembered it correctly:

As the poets have mournfully sung
death takes the innocent young
those rolling in money
those screamingly funny
and those who love very well hung

Steve: keep wailing, I like the way you bring out the best in Malcolm, discursively speaking.

I don't like poets that always try to rhyme, and neither do I like poems where the rhyme is so obvious it's like being hit in the head with an encyclopeadia. That said there are some occasions when rhyme does happen naturally when one is writing. When that happens I think rhyme does have a place, and does work. As for the comments about some of the more modern poets, at least the ones that are recognised, are only a small percentage of the people who are out there writing poetry. So maybe an arguement can be made that it is that small percentage of poets who have steered others away from rhyming in our own works.

....And for those who hate rhyme and don't believe it offers poetry anything consider 'The Raven' (Edgar Allan Poe), whilst it is old, one can quite easily argue that it still works and is an example of a good poem.

It could be argued that the 19th century was the last century was the last time that rhyme actually had any relevance, though, Martin. Walt Whitman showed a new way of doing things, as did the French prose poetry of Rimbaud & co... and I think I see Emily Dickinson and Poe straining at the leash of rhyme.

Rhyme was a powerful tool of poets once; but there are not many Keat's, Donne's and Shakespeare's around any more.

I think Julian's contribution shows what rhyme has been reduced to: essentially, parody.

Piss off Julian, there's no 'best' in me and Steven is not a poet. He can't be, I've applied Dermot's rules to that stuff he writes and it doesn't fit.

QUOTE from John G Hall

"There are different kinds of rhyme, in the end we are talking of pattern and shape, either of sound or vision. As with eye rhyme and the linking of images or phrases.

Many poets are concerned with the expression of inner thoughts which do not use speech patterns at all, but images and concepts and spaces.Rather like a painter, I am more concerned with the limited range of some poets palette than rhyme, rhyme treated in a jazzy improvised way can be revolutionary at times.

There are different kinds of rhyme, in the end we are talking of pattern and shape, either of sound or vision. As with eye rhyme and the linking of images or phrases."


John, this is a really good point, it illustrates the artistic side that seems to be mentioned in only limited bursts on this thread. A rhyme is a form of the brush stroke, rhyme has many uses beyond the phonetic, beyond the apparent simple surface. This all depends how you do it.

Steve W, there is no escaping whatsoever the simple fact that clever, imaginative rhyme has its place in the artistic process and that writing poetry IS an artistic process. Poetry is ART

I will continue to rhyme and fail in equal measures, I will continue to rhyme and enjoy success in a sphere in equal measures, more importantly though I will express myself and enjoy the catharsis through rhyming poetry, its good to see the pleasure it brings. Crowd pleasing ? Yes of course. Smiling faces? You bet. Art brings pleasure in many forms, the most wonderful validation is a sea of smiles for whatever reason. Genuine laughter thru clever rhyme...sometimes. For every argument against rhyme comes its counterpart. I think you know that, I think its important you posted this thread, I suspect you anticipated the response, the thread is on the whole healthy. Its brought together a meeting of the minds.



Like many things its not what you do, its how you do it.

Rethink your opinion on rhyme and then dismiss that thought, its refreshing to question our own writing techniques. I noticed John Hall had a workshop once which dealt with breaking out of our usual creative spaces in order to expand / change direction. This to me shows empathy to the artistic process of writing. I'm not so sure there is any need to refer to, read or hail other past poets in order to justify not rhyming a poem. Just because those poets are out there, published, and you are aware of them, this is meaningless. Nothing is validated thru publishing other than the craving of acceptance or the paying of bills, a true test of success is successful living. I'm not saying don't get published but if you want to quote writers in your defence against rhyme then I could offer lists of poems that do. Who is to say what is flicking the switch.

Does it come down to the flicking of a switch?
I think so.
What is personal, what makes you laugh and cry.
Two sides of the same emotional coin
no extremes of emotion and many in betweens
rhyme has its place
it is needed in poetry
perhaps it will evolve Steve?

its logical concept will remain

language Timothy
its evolving, but you cant breed out rhyme
when done right
when rained in tight its a wonderful thing

new words: I see and hate, but they emanate from mobile phones these days

look:

Gr8 mate

I mean what's this? its text rhyme
If i do a poetry show to an audience of entertainment seekers, say between bands, the rhyme allows them an instant fix to latch onto, they can got lost in too much sophistication at this stage, you can hook people into poetry with clever witty rhyme schemes, take them somewhere else later on, hook em in first, then break them in gently

Poetry is a gentle arts form, brutal too, I need the hammer of rhyme

Thanks for a great discussion thread, to all who posted on here, its eye opening, thought provoking

Hmmm... do you realise that's two avenues of creative expression that you have attempted to place a road block across, Steven. First, we can't rhyme, and now we can't indulge in ribaldry. That still leaves a fair number of things that we can do, which means we can still have a variety of purposes to our poetries and can write things that are different from each other, so let's cross out: poignancy, biography, cut ups (definitely cross out cut ups - tear them up and set fire to them), found poems, "uplifiting", "spiritual", nonsense poetry, assonance, observation, etc.

In fact, let's make the blanket statement that if its not non-rhyming, non-humorous horror of precisely seventeen lines, then its no longer of any consequence in poetry. Arbitrary, I know, but I can quote in my defence a poem by Glennon, who is arguably the only important poet of the 21st century so far. Getting to the point, you dismiss whole areas of poetry technique and subject matter on the basis (as far as I can see) that you believe yourself to be the supreme arbiter of good taste. I know that in this case you are sneering at parody (I personally believe there is (limited) room for it), but I sense from other statements that you have a tendency to consider humour in general to be a debased and less intelligent devise. Well judged humour (even appropriate use of parody) and (high quality) rhyming poetry are not of lower importance in the scheme of things than the poetry that you have quoted.

It's true to say that a lot of people who write "humorous" poems and rhyming poetry write unadulterated drivel that has no saving grace whatsoever. However, that is not the fault of either humour, nor is it a failing of rhyme, it just validates the idea that most people would be better off taking the time to discover their idiom in advance and letting the basis of their poem form in their head (and clarify itself). A lot of people rhyme and throw in ill-conceived attempts at humour as the whole purpose of their poem rather than as textural devices within it, simply because they've approached the task from the standpoint of "I'm going to write a poem" rather than "I have a poem and I'm going to write it down". By the way, your dismissals of any and all of the devices that you look down on would carry some weight if you were to prove that you have the skill to write a humorous poem that genuinely has an audience in stitches (humour is about the only emotional response that can easily be gauged solely from observation of audience reaction) and that also has depth. This would give credence to the idea that you look down on it from a position of considering it a less important and less-cereberal art form, and dispel my impression that you are just unaware of how creative it is and how difficult it is to do it well.

Your early poems (I'm not partial to your cut ups, or your attempts at postmodernism) show that you are quite good at the types of poetry that you used to do, but I don't really see how you can rate those types (or the types of poetry practised by the poets you have listed here) as being of greater relevance to our times or of being of higher importance than the forms that you have shown disdain for - you have given no intellectual justification for your elevation of the one and none for your demotion of the other. Rather, it seems that you believe that your own personal taste in poetry is the only worthwhile opinion (and in the absence of any clear breakdown of supporting arguments, it IS just opinion and nothing more).

Coming back to Larkin, admittedly TBTV is not one that I'd stick into my live set too often if it was one of mine but it is above the average of what you'd hear in any one night at an event, it has a high energy rock and roll feel to it if you belt it out, it's reasonably entertaining, it's quite revealing and it's proto-punk. I think all of you people who have decried it are doing so from a consideration of whether it merits its repute rather than a consideration of the poem itself. If it was fairly unknown and you suddenly came across it in a book of poems, I figure you would say "that's not bad; I like that one". Not sure of the title of it but I once came across the one in which his narrator is sheltering from the rain in a church and I thought it was a fantastic poem - better than most poems I've ever read by anyone else, very well crafted and characterful (that, however, is just a matter of personal taste). I also love the way, on reading his poems I immediately feel a sense of uniform, boring, red-brick, town-planned northern England on a dreary saturday afternoon - and that takes some doing. In summary, I'd rate him pretty highly.

*******
Pete, you have an interesting point and I must make a counter point.

Whilst rhyme can be used for effect,and to hook people in, there are many poets that don't use rhyme when performing and are still fantastic and engaging to listen to. There are many other ways to draw an audience in and to aurally interest them. I often think they are much better than those who do use rhyme.

That said I think your approach is very much an 'In moderation' approach that I agree with.
*******
Steven, yes it can be argued that the last time rhyme had any relevance to a poet is the 19th century, but I can tell you after just having reviewed 6 (newly published) poetry collections, that there is still a fair amount of rhyme being used and it does work.

Okay, I will conceed that I can look around my (fairly extensive) library and pull out at least 6 more examples that don't work.

My point here is that it may not be relevant but it is engaging when natural. That said it is not a substitute for other methods that a poet can deploy.
**********

Good to agree with DG. Glennon is undoubtedly one of the greatest poets of our time and I think he is alive. Not sure though.

On Larkin, yes he was a very considerable poet capable of conveying a great deal in well delivered words. It is true that if I came across 'This Be The Verse' without knowing its author I would think "that's not bad" and be amused by it. The title is crass and I think that the title, coming from Larkin, is telling us that he knew he was writing a piece of verse that was not to be considered on a level with his other poetry. It seems probable to me that he was taking the piss. He may have been proving to himself, and maybe some close to him, that a contrived rhyme with some shock value would be better regarded by the public than other work which was much more carefully constructed.

right, having lit the blue touchpaper and set off a good discussion, i can retire...

actually, I don't really think that rhyme is as bad as I've painted it. It can be sometimes useful, and I don't really believe what I've said throughout this...

but it got you to think.

I still don't like Larkin much, but that's not because he rhymes. It's the little Englandism evident in his verse i don't like. He's good at what he does but i don't like what he does much.

rhyme is a technique among others and it's possible to use it well, though i don't often see it being used well. there's still a lot of rather dull, restrained poetry that tries to consciously avoid feelings and ideas about (eg the phenomenally dull Andrew Motion) , in fact most of the poetry that's published is like that...

as for txt speak, don't get me started, pete...

Sorry, DG, had to comment on this...

(I'm not partial to your cut ups, or your attempts at postmodernism)

I'm not a postmodernist, nor have I ever been one.

Late modernist possibly, but i wouldn't know po-mo from a hole in the wall...

otherwise you're entitled to your opinion (but i'm not going to stop)

Bravo everyone.
I think we all handled this beautifully.
Rather like a gentleman's sword fight
all very sporting.

This is an example of good discussion, liberal, intelligent, balanced

People preparing to accept others views, whilst have a fresh look at their own. It certainly made me think harder about my work. Theres me with a poem of the month and prob the least rhyme one Ive ever done, in fact I better go re-read my poem as I cant recall a rhyme in there..hang on...........

I would like to thank everyone whos taken part (and may continue to if Steve dont close thread)

I know its not my thread but I have enjoyed watching it and most importantly the way we have handled the issues that arise.

Just shows what you can do if you stay cool, calm, accepting, open minded.

At times the thread almost went over the edge but it just pulled itself back.

This gives me faith in the human ability, there are so so so many threads that end up slanging matches and I am guilty sometimes of letting my emotion go overboard too much. The odd swearword on here was fine and added spice, I especially enjoyed Malpoets and DGs posts

brilliant, and thanks Steve for throwing this one out there

a curious little thing I noted:

I have a mental block on spelling the word ryme

I just cant do it. Serious. Keep getting spell-check underline it in red every time I post.(if you use Mozilla firefox anyway)

I don't believe what you say either Steven and I don't believe that you don't believe what you say.

I do believe that you don't understand some of what you say and I don't believe your pretence of irony when the nonsense of what you say is pointed out.

I do believe you write poetry and I don't believe it is very good.

I do believe that you believe that your preferences are right and good and I do believe that you believe that your judgements are superior to those who don't believe that your view is right.

I don't believe for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows.

I don't believe in belief, evidence is better.

WOW!
Malpoet for President.....You socked it to him .....well done!!

I was giving up all hope.... losing the will to live

He said there shall be light..........

Wow
Well impressed
Gus

I agree with Pete that this has been a great thread and that it has generally been written in good spirit while sailing excitingly close to roughhouse. I agree with Dermot in his dissection of the mechanics of Steve's argument. I agree with Malpoet on everything he has said bar his assessment of Steve's poetry. I agree with Steve on very little but thank him for starting a fascinating thread and for provoking me to deliciously pointless anger.

I must go now. I have to take the doggerel for a walk.

While doing so I shall cogitate on on the revelation that there is no hope for me since I am unmoved by Frank O'Hara's lunchtime diary entries. One learns something every day...

Love and Rhyme,

Si

ps O'Hara was not a Beat poet, he was of the New York School.

The Doggerel Catalogue

Walking with my doggerel,
Cataclysmic with delight.
Down every other catacomb
The doggone rhymes run right.
The dogged, drafts developing
Are catalysts for more.
Catastrophe looms close at times,
When dogma bogs me down.
So, doggo I lie quietly,
Til a catafalque is made.
But catalepsy leaves me now,
Down dogleg drives I dodge.
Round the dogwood. Out of sight,
I caterwaul with glee.
Catatonia shaken off,
Dogmatic, deadlock downed.
My catechism now is found
And doggerel walks proud on.

I don't give a toss what you think of my motives, mal(evolent?)poet.

As long as it stirs up a hornet's nest and makes people think.

Oh - and Cayn - rhyme isn't anything to do with rhythm. You can have rhythm without rhyme and rhyme without rhythm (hence doggeral).

ps O'Hara was not a Beat poet, he was of the New York School.


You think everything was quite so cut-and-dried? Ashbery himself has said that "the New York School" was nothing more than a publicity label by the Tibor d'Nagy Gallery who were promoting them at the time. Ginsberg wrote an elegy for Frank O'Hara and was a good friend of him.

He was Beat, he was New York, he was himself. Labels like "Beat", "New York", "San Francisco Renaisance", "Black Mountain" belong more to the history of publicity than anything else. (The same, I suspect, as "The Romantics" or "The Metaphysicals")

And you don't really believe him when he said he wrote his poems at lunchtime, do you? (Apart from there being rather more to him than Lunch Poems - try his Odes or "In Memory of My Feelings" sometime.)

I agree about the label thing to a large extent, Steve. The Romantics never termed themselves as such and neither did 'the New York School', but these labels are useful if only for the way that they make groups of poets memorable. And then there is the question of whose poetry influenced who. Ashbery is stylistically so different from O'Hara that it seems strange to site them in the same camp, but Ted Berrigan's debt to O'Hara is both plain and plainly stated (cf 'Sonnet XXVI).
The label which irritates me the most in poetry is that of 'Confessional'. Not only are those who are included under this umbrella term dissimilar in styles (Lowell, Roethke, Plath, Sexton, Berryman) but I simply do not agree with grouping poets by content rather than style, form or association. By the twentieth century poetry had become so diverse that all sorts of poets were tackling all sorts of issues in all sorts of ways. To arbitrarily choose the element of content for categorization seems reductive to me. At least form is a structural, measurable aspect of poetry.
Also, 'confessional' always has negative connotations for me. With its religious undertones applied to a secular activity it sounds slightly seedy.
As for Ashbery, he sometimes loses me with his opacity (although I accept that this is intentional on his part, with his poetics of indeterminacy). Interestingly, of all modern experimental poets, Ashbery is the one most associated with ancient forms. He wrote sestinas, phantoums and villanelles and adapted them for modern American life. Precisely the sort of neo-formalism that I favour. His Popeye sestina ( 'Farm Implements and Rutebagas in a Landscape) is very clever and hilarious but his intention was not always comic. He was certainly no enemy of rhyme (to bring the thread subject back in).

Hi Cayn,

Of course you are entitled to your opinion as are the others.....



Just so long as you have obtained the appropriate licence. Although the standard poetic ones will sometimes suffice all opinion holders are strongly advised to obtain the All Purpose Performing Arts and Literature Licence - International Non Generic (APPALLING) which you can obtain quite simply.

Just send a cheque, or postal order, to the value of £11.99 for each opinion that you hold, or expect to hold within the next 12 months, and I will arrange the appropriate paperless work.


Seamus Kelly
APPALLING Director

Doggerel Steven not doggeral.

Sorry - but standards have to be maintained...

Steven, apologies if I misunderstood your intentions, but I remember you once telling me over a pint that these days you were trying to get rid of all meaning from your poems and I figured you probably meant all meaning outside of the poem itself and labelled you as someone trying to be postmodernist and on subsequently hearing some of your later stuff, I figured that must be what you were looking to achieve.

Simon, even labelling by technique can be fraught (sticking with the postmodernists theme) - the postmodernists used the same techniques (I'm excluding the complete loonies of postmodernism from this and only including the moderately bonkers ones) that the modernists popularised and differed only in their concerns and their subject matter. The only innovation in technique that postmodernism delivered (if we exclude idiotic experimental stuff in which everyone except the experimenters could see that the experiments were failing miserably) was Thomas's idea of placing words where they sounded most pleasing to most listeners as opposed to where they made grammatical sense. And that was idiosyncratic to Thomas - nobody else does it to any worthwhile degree.

Some would say that this debate skirts around the ongoing debate that pointed to two tendencies in poetry,one exemplified by Don Patterson who regards poets as a priesthood of specially skilled people who have attained a higher level of poetic understanding, needing to be guarded from pollution by lesser poets, usually by the University Lit Departments and their minions.

Or the grassroots tendency, performance poets that inhabit Slams and performance nights, predominantly hooked on obvious rhyme and predictable puns. Much of this debate hinges on this dichotomy, but I think it is a false argument.

I take more of a ad hoc, jazz type response.Where there is structure,which includes rhyme and non rhyme,discipline and free expression in the form of a poetic dialectic, an interpenitration of opposites is more representative of speech and imagination and thought.

This way of writing enables everyone to develop and move forward. Now we have to remember some writers are satisfied with where they are , others feel obliged to seek new ways to write throughout their life. Still others just dont take it that seriously.

Me, I will use any means to my poems end.Enough said for me there.

I agree John. There should be no division in poetry based on populist, demotic 'performance'-type work versus 'serious', elitist page poetry. This is an illusion, similar to the percieved chasm between poetry that uses end-rhymes and poetry that doesn't. Both perceptions are coloured by the worst excesses of both camps. Some people find opaque, intellectual poetry actually offensive in its assumptions of a certain amount of intelligence, and indeed education, in its readers, and no doubt some of this poetry plays to this. On the other side, some performance poetry would be rejected by Hallmark for the obviousness of the rhyme - if you can hear the rhyme in your head before it is uttered, something is going wrong.
Neither of these excesses should be taken as typical or wholly representative of these two camps. But it serves the purpose of those who wish to perpetuate divisions to highlight the worst case scenarios. As I said earlier, poetry is a broad church, possibly the broadest of all the arts. There is no right way or wrong way to write poetry, there is only good poetry and bad poetry (to paraphrase Wilde). And the great beauty of this is that the true arbiter of quality, whether we like it or not, is every single individual one of us. It is as simple and as complex as that.
So, Dermot, even totally Radio Rental experimental gobbledegook (love that word) has worth if even just one person likes it. And we just have to lump it.
As for post-Modernism. Nobody has yet written a definition of it that has satisfied everyone. Even the 'post' bit isn't accurate - Sterne wrote a post-Modern novel pretty much before the novel had been invented and Modernism contains post-Modernism apparently. The only thing we can say about post-Modernism is that involves disintegration, self-reflexivity and the relationship between things rather than the things themselves. Or maybe it doesn't.

Hope you're all coming to Inn Verse!

DG -

TS Eliot said once that meaning was what you use to distract the reader while the poem gets on and does its work. You should never trust what a person says over a pint. Especially not me.

I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I contain multipacks.

All my poems contain meanings, probably several at the same time. Some of them are banal, some of them deep. Pick your favourites.

Actually, if I take anything from po-mo at all, it's their use of parody, comedy, pop-culture-equivalent-to-high-culture, the way they can sometimes throw the commodification of everyday life into the face of late capitalism.

But for cut-ups, juxtapositions, collage, etc., see Eliot, Pound, Carlos Williams etc...

PS Who are the Complete Loonies of Postmodernism and where are they playing next? Do they have space for a kazoo player?

I have inadvertantly stumbled across the actual definition of post-Modernism! Or at least a superb example which will enhance understanding of this difficult concept. I was attempting to copy and paste a table into this thread devised by the venerable Ihab Hassan which purports to explain the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism. For some technical reason the format went all tits-up and the definitions got mixed up with each other, rendering the table a Postmodern projectivist masterpiece which Charles Olson would have been proud of. Imagine the headline in PN Review - 'IT formatting interface incompatibility creates weird poem!'

I don't know about anyone else, but I thought parataxis refered to troop carriers. Disappointingly, it refers to the use of the word 'and' instead of subordinate clauses.

Anyway, sit back and relax and let the beauty of this authorless work fill your soul.....

Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism Pataphysics/Dadaism
Form (conjunctive, closed) Antiform (disjunctive, open)
Purpose Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Mastery/Logos Exhaustion/Silence
Art Object / Finished Work Process/Performance/Happening
Distance Participation
Creation/Totalization Decreation/Deconstruction
Synthesis Antithesis
Presence Absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre/Boundary Text/Intertext
Semantics Rhetoric
Paradigm Syntagm
Hypotaxis Parataxis
Metaphor Metonymy
Selection Combination
Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface
Interpretation/Reading Against Interpretation / Misreading
Signified Signifier
Lisible (Readerly) Scriptable (Writerly)
Narrative / Grande Histoire Anti-narrative / Petit Histoire
Master Code Idiolect
Symptom Desire
Type Mutant
Genital/Phallic Polymorphous/Androgynous
Paranoia Schizophrenia
Origin / Cause Difference-Differance / Trace
God the Father The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics Irony
Determinacy Indeterminacy
Transcendence Immanence

Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus:Towards a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., p.269)

Goddamn! Once I pressed the 'post' button the whole thing has changed back to almost its original form, rendering this post meaningless, but not in a good way. I am afraid you'll just have to imagine the stately beauty of the poem I had before me in my pre-post field. It really was something to behold. And now it is gone forever.

Steve, no worries mate.

Simon, if you are trying to impress me with that post then I can tell you that you're impressing no one, young man, and all this "oh it did a brilliant post modern poem... but it's conveniently disappeared all of a sudden, but believe me - it was there, honestly" won't convince me otherwise.

Anyway, to lay this argument to rest and to show that rhyme can be a truly wonderful thing, I have just found the following poem by Glennon at the end of my keyboard:

Victoria sponge for the walking wounded

In a lightly wooded field
Open but secluded
I ran, a child of six years old
And felt the howling wind
Batter the tear streaks on my cheeks
Like icicles of cold
The twisted trees had lost their leaves –
Deciduous, denuded.
And, up the field there ran this tike
Towards the smell of fresh made cake.
“Mum! I’ve fallen off my bike!”
Nothing beats a cuddle and a
“Have some of the sponge I baked”.
these days I take refuge in a bottle
and in doing stuff I like

Okay, so the last line lets it down a bit, but the rest shows why Malcolm hails him as the greatest poet of our age.

Dermot,

Your self absorption knows no bounds. Why do you assume that I was trying to impress you, particularly? Anyone would think you were the great Glennon. I am studying Postmodernism in two different courses at the moment, both in fiction and poetry, so its all jumbled up in my head like kitten-attacked wool ball. I can assure you that at the moment I pressed that 'post' button, I was convinced I was about to change the world of poetry forever. But it was more a discovery than a creation. A 'found' poem, if you like. And you know how much I admire that particular genre.

Anyway that's a lovely poem from the great Glennon. Moving, meaningful and replete with unforced rhymes which enhance the effect without drawing attention to themselves overly. You might be right about that saddle, though. Sorry, I mean that last line. You got me all misty-eyed and nostalgic then.

Anyway, what's all this 'young man' business? I may well be older than you.

That reminds me. I have found a poem that some scholars have attributed to the great Glennon but which I am convinced was produced by one of his acolytes. The reason I am of this opinion is that the rhymes are much heavier than Glennon would ever use and it is in an almost traditional sonnet form. But you can see that its thematic similarities may have led others to think it was an early work of the Big G himself.

Listening at the Statue to the Fallen

Do you remember how the bronze bouquet
Would sway in the wind on Angel Hill?
Those blue-green leaves against the grey
Skies are held aloft to this day still -
Though never still - the city’s thrum
Plays a chord on them for its own ear
Enticing those alive to come
Embrace the dead remembered here.

And here our grass-stained jeans would kneel,
Our bark-rough hands would press the stone.
Braving the wind we would hear the words
Sung aloud for all who ever feel
Or ever felt - you are not alone
We wished or thought we heard.

---------------------------------


Nostalgia! Nostalgia! Pardon me while I weep or vomit!

No surely not Glennon himself, McGlennongal possibly.

I'm off for a sponge cake.

DG? Glennon? The mind boggles. Having said that, and having given this much thought, you never see Jimmy Krankee and Jeanette Krankee in the same room at the same time. I wonder..?

Wot! Glennon is Janette Krankee!

I am really surprised about that. The poetry seemed so much taller.

I've noticed that this thread keeps trying to end and then picks up again. Maybe a thread about rhyme on a poetry website should never end...

No-one seems to have mentioned enjambment yet. If lines that rhyme run on to each other (or at least one of the couplets do) this hides the rhyme when the piece is read out.

eg.
Rapidly melting, yesterday’s
Unseasonable snowfall glints
Through birch and pine trees. There are hints
Of other, magic worlds as rays....

Poetry, being an essentially oral form, should be read as though it were being read out loud even when read on the page. You could ask, Why use rhyme at all then, if you're going to hide it? Because it clicks in the head of the listener, it provides an aural hook. This effect can be achieved unconsciously.

I was an invited reader at an event once and when I sat down after my spot a friend of mine who was an editor and a published short story writer and poet said 'Those two nature poems were the best things I've heard tonight. I see you've gotten away from rhyme at last.' He had published some of my rhyming poetry but even he had become exasperated by my attachment to rhyme. When I showed him the two poems I had just read he could see that they were actually strictly metred and rhymed, to the last syllable (the above example is a small section). I had avoided Ezra Pound's dreaded metronome effect by using enjambment. I am convinced that at least part of the reason he (my friend, not Pound) enjoyed my poems was because his brain had unconsciously picked out the rhyme. Human beings are drawn to order, pattern and repetition. Rhyme is echo and reflection.

The reason for the above anecdote is not merely to blow much-needed smoke up my own arse (I am drowning under rejections - no-one publishes rhyme) but to belie the impression that even strict rhyme patterns need to be obvious and predictable. It's all down to craft.

Of course, the rumours have been circulating for years that Glennon was not averse to plagiarising his contemporaries, and even the occasional spectacularly audacious wholesale theft of their poems. However, this is the first time I have ever heard anyone suggest that "Listening at the statue of the fallen" is anything other than authentic Glennon. I even know two people who claim to have been with him when he wrote it. Also, I can't think of any other poets writing at that time who would have used the word "thrum" in such a poem - it's almost a signature piece. However, I will bow to your superior knowledge - they glossed over him on my course.

Siren - watch out for those enjambments - they're just the slippery slope to free verse, don'cha'know!

All poems have structure, by the way. Even the wildest free verse/open form poem.

As for "order": Jawohl, mein Generalle!

Sometimes giving the audience what they expect is just pandering to them.

DG,
I possibly do have more knowledge of this work given that you misquoted the title. It is 'to' the fallen, not 'of' the fallen. This gives the title a possible double meaning in that the listening could be generally 'at' the statue, or 'to' the fallen commemorated at said statue. It is of little consequence. This is a minor work, whether it is Glennon or not. The word 'thrum' suggests the writer was of a musical bent. Was Glennon musical? I know he initiated radical innovations in the use of musical rhythms in verse but did he actually play an instrument? I shall have to read Andrew Motion's reportedly rather fawning biography and find out.

Steve,
There seems to be no real danger of me ever reaching the bottom of that slippery slope. I have deliberately greased underfoot many times but every time I try to open out my forms they close up like pine cones in a thunderstorm. I am probably just very anal. I do get a little thrill when I read a well constructed rhyming work that is possibly unhealthy. I enjoy 'free' verse as well, and greatly admire some of its proponents, |I just can't seem to write the stuff myself. Thank you for your concern, though.

I agree that all poems have structure. The very act of linestopping creates rhythmic breaks or indicates an inherent form. But all prose has structure too, usually enforced by standard punctuation.

I know a novelist who hates poetry and calls poets 'page-wasters'. He believes that most poetry's concision places undue emphasis on words or phrases which allow the poet to believe that they are creating something particularly special. There is a self-regard involved in writing poetry which gives a distorted inflation of poets' merit. The idea that one can say something of worth in such a short space is, to this novelist, an arrogant presumption.
I think all writers have an element of arrogance. You are pouring out the workings of your mind and expecting other people to be impressed with them. Maybe the aforementioned novelist resents the fact that skilled poets can do this with relatively little work. But the emphasis thing is what I love about poetry. In speech or prose there is less time to appreciate the beauty of language, whether it be the relation between the meanings of words or just the sounds of the words themselves. Poetry celebrates the possibilities of language in a unique way.

As for pandering, I'm trying to give all that business up. I've heard they are endangered.

I'd be interested in reading people's views on my new comment, about having or not having something to say. It's also on my blog at www.stevenwaling.blogspot.com

That is an interesting and timely explanation of your comments that you made over a pint that time. You have already heard some of my views on the me-ness of me and how thoughts happen and the whole mind-brain thing, because you were there the first time I ever read a poem of mine called "What you looking at?" and this topic features as a subordinate theme in that poem.

Summarising my views in relation to your blog post:

You do that anyway, whether you think you are trying to make a point or whether you think a point from outside is being interpreted into written English by your mind.

You are a combination, are you not, of your physical body and your internal narrative/consciousness/thoughts and feelings. Your physical body (which includes all of your internal organs such as your brain) appears to be just a bunch of quarks and leptons held reasonably close to each other but kept far enough apart from each other to prevent them collapsing into an infinitely dense singularity by the absorption and re-emission of gamma ray frequency photons, and operated upon as a thermodynamic system in various ways by photons from other parts of the EM spectrum. So we will ignore it for now.

What really is you in any sense of considering itself to be you (and having your personality, thoughts and feelings) is your mind. However, this "mind" is just the "mental product" of electrical events in the intricate circuitry of your brain (memorys are stored as logic circuits, thoughts are processed by electricity passing through neurones and relative quantities of neurotransmitters and their analogues (hormones) determine its route and therefore your feelings). Consequently, while your mind is an abstract concept, it arises as a result of physical stuff (mass and energy) obeying the dictates of physics. So you and everything you think you have ever come up with have all happened purely by "chance methods" anyway. Free will is an illusion.

To quote the relevant bit from "What you looking at":

"... create a thing that's called the mindthat is the thing that claims it's me and I'm the thing that thinks it thought up all the clever things it thinks, and thinks it made it's own decisions to lay them down in ink, when it's the thing that's called the brain that is a mass of chemicals combined with..."

Bloody Hell, D! Lighten up, man. What do you think of all this Strictly Come Dancing palaver?

In defence of my last post, I can only say that it was Friday evening and therefore the start of the weekend so I was letting my hair down.

Contraversially, I'm voting for Rachel Stevens.. Although, I believe you have already heard my hard-core in-depth reasoning on this one in my 3000 line poem called "Ballard on the ontology and ethics of the democratic process in relation to competitions". In it, I stated that...

Okay, I have a question based on this discussion.

Is Villanelle a useless and dead form for poetry?

If it is should it still be taught (It is being taught btw)?

It is useless, but not dead. There is no more validity in trying to force poets into specific structures than there is in ridiculing rhyme. Teaching villanelle, haiku, ode, sonnet or whatever is just leading people into restricting their creativity and suggesting that particular rules need to be understood and used.

It is good to know about as much poetry as you want and that obviously involves knowing why poets have produced work in the structure that they have used. However, that does not mean that it should be 'taught' in the sense that it is a structure that should be followed. There is no value in itself in any poetic structure.

Some people will want to write villanelles. If it is good stuff that's good, but it will not be because they have managed to fit good work into a villanelle. The obvious converse is that drivel is drivel irrespective of whether you have presented your drivel perfectly in a classic poetic format.

What is considered worthwhile in poetry will be subject to fashions in the same way as all other human interests. You will find it difficult to be published or accepted if you don't follow with these trends, but their most vociferous advocates will usually be pretentious bullshitters and it is better to try to express yourself in the way that you want than to take any notice of what is claimed to be 'valid', 'outdated' or whatever else.

If people want to write villanelles that's fine. Learning about poetry is great. Trying to fix what it should be is stupid.

Is the villanelle a dead form? Well, the last good one I read was Elizabeth Bishop's One Art, which is about 30 years old at least now... And she had to do odd things to it to kick it alive...

Is the sonnet dead? Get hold of a copy of The Reality Street Book of Sonnets - amd you'll see what avant garde poets have done with it - but if you look at most anthologies of the sonnet, it's been dead for years.*

Is the haiku dead?
when the sun swallows the sky
it will breathe its last

* Except, of course, for the ones I've been writing for the last three years....

If you write and perform those kind of formalised poems, I would advise you not to state beforehand that it is a vilanelle or rondeau or limerick. Worse still is to tell the audience that such a poem involves you repeating each third line three times and then repeating that before jogging to the second traffic cone and back and doing anywhere between 1 and 2 press ups between the seventh and eighth stanzas whilst spinning a plate on your nose and whistling dixie. That really is the height of bad manners and conceit.

Also, try not to use archaic language or rubbishly rejigged sentence structure in order to fit the pattern, and one of my other bugbears is the growing trend towards characterless stripped bare sentences without any prepositions in them. All of these things usually result a lack of care and attention to detail because it really isn't that difficult to replace such things with naturalistic everyday speech that still fits the pattern and the purpose - even in form poems.

Not sure the host was too impressed with your shopping list sonnet on Friday night, Steve.

Of course, Thomas's 'Do Not Go Gentle...' is a villanelle, which is probably the sole reason it is still taught now. As a song-based form based on both rhyme and repetition I see no reason why a skilled pop lyricist might not have a go at writing villanelles. Maybe they have.

Some of the more obscure forms were not invented for the English language (the villanelle is French via Spanish) and were only picked up by anglophone poets in order to prove they could write in different structures. Sort of a poetic pissing competition. Sometimes we give too much relevance to forms which are actually alien to our tongue. These things can be interesting without being relevant.

Nice girl
Went Henley
There met
Guy, DG

He said, 'I've got a preposition for you.'

Sorry. That should have been Fiji, not Henley.

What about acrostic Rhyme....Thats got cause some the elitists to be brought out in boils!

W aiting for the right words to come
R igor mortis numbs the brain
I’ m waiting for that sugar plum
T o ease my mind, release the pain
E nrich me with a poet’s wit
R eward this empty page
S end me endless amounts of it
B low away my tedious rage
U nfetter the chains that bind today
L ay me down so that I might sleep
L ost for ever in endless night I lay
S hifting sands and counting sheep
H appy now the crisp morning calls
I seek my rhyme and look beneath
T o be told its crap and total balls

regards
Gus

The whole reason I brought up the Villanelle was because someone has recently submitted on on my site (writers-forum.co.uk) and has said they were taught/assigned to do a villanelle as part of her degree course.

It strikes me as being odd that the villanelle is still taught when it doesn't have a huge amount of influence on the majority of poetry. I mean Villanelle is more for the happy bouncy subjects, also add that to the fact you are backed into a corner by the form and it seems villanelle is a stupid form.

As for sonnets, I think it has use in getting poets used to writing a rhythm and flow. Of course I don't think it is of huge use other than a training medium but I dare say the sonnet is not extinct....yet.

And finally the acrostic. Every time I see one it just makes me thing it's been written by a four year old. I mean they are no good for performance poetry (the listener can't see the first letters), and even in print they just can't help but look awful. I mean seriously, who writes acrostic poems anymore outside of an educational or PR environment. (Of course the PR/Advertising environment does provide a practical use for acrostic but it's still an awful medium)

Surely the double reverse acrostic using only the acrostic letters is an essential part of the repertoire of every real poet.

Delivery

Deliver live evil verily.
Eery eel, veiled elver.
Livery, ride eider eyrie.
Ire led revel Rev.
Veiled devilry eyed dei.
Eye dry, reviled drivel.
Red eyelid drily dire.
Yield vile devil, yield.

If ever you are in the mood to write a longish comic narrative, have a look at the ottava rima form. cf Byron or Burgess.

Rhyme scheme: ABABABCC

It's a difficult form. Three rhymes for each phoneme at the start and an end couplet like in an English sonnet. But that end couplet rounds off the stanza like a punchline if it is done properly.

As clever as that is Mal, it's just a load of random and useless words strung together.....of course the same could be said about many poems I suppose.

This is one of the first poems I ever wrote. It was published in the Ugly Tree a couple of years ago. Looking back on it now I can see all the things wrong with it but can't be bothered revising it; either for sentimental reasons or because it's not worth it or because the damage is done - it's out there now.

Anyway, if rhyme brings Steve out in hives then this will this will occasion dermatological Armageddon for the poor chap, if he dares to look at it. The rhymes are heavy, strained and deliberately forced. He may appreciate its misanthropy, though. The multiple (feminine) rhymes were inspired by Byron's Don Juan. It is, of course, an example of ottava rima.

Not A People Person

This town would be fine if it weren’t for the people
Their presence is visible everywhere
From deep in the sewer to highest church steeple
They all leave their mark, you can see they’ve been there
The laughter they laugh and the tears that they weep’ll
Impinge on my mind as I’m taking the air
I can’t stay imprisoned within these four walls
Now Rentokil won’t even answer my calls

I might live among them if they weren’t so noisy
And smelly and ugly and downright unclean
Their girls are so girly and boys are so boysy
They wear their libidos to show what they mean
I’ve come to the point where I want to destroy - see
I’ve sickened myself with the things that I’ve seen
They’re so damn repulsive I’m sure they deserve a
Solution from my post-Malthusian fervour

But how to achieve this selective dispersal
This place for myself in a township of one
The preachers who pray and the yobbo’s who curse’ll
Defend to the death ‘til the last of them’s gone
My lone heart is set on this massive reversal
I’ve got my feet wet in my own Rubicon
The warmth that I feel is the last of my summers
My sleeves are rolled up now - I'll take on all comers

Siren -

you should look out for Ron Padgett's Nothing in that Drawer, or his equally outrageous Homage to Andy Warhol sonnet, if you think mine was all wrong. I'm just following in the grand old modernist tradition of the literary blague.

And don't you just love it when someone in the audience is fulminating about "But that's not poetry?"

If you think the villanelle is difficult, you should try the sestina, by the way. Or have a go at oulipean techniques and try the monovocal lipogram (which is where you're only allowed to use one vowel in the whole piece.)

And just to remind you, it wasn't me that said that "rhyme brings me out in hives." That's why it's in quotes.

Yes Martin, Delivery is rubbish. It has no more to do with poetry than a crossword has to do with essay writing. It was whiling away a bit of time while waiting for a delivery.

Siren's 'Not A People Person' is a good poem. It does have faults, but it shows a very accomplished handling of language and it is pleasurable to read. It shows that you can make some attractive words fit a rigid structure and it can be nice to read. It is enjoyable. What would be a shame is for anybody to think that there is inherent value in prescribed structures and confine their wirting to those forms.

The fashion of the last few years for haiku is a case in point. English is a non-tonal, letter based language written from left to right. Japanese is a tonal, character based language which is normally written downward. To imagine that you can transfer this Japanese form with origins in the 16th century to 21st century English is idiotic. People drone on about its economy its pared down beauty and all sorts of other nonsense, but they are just jumping on to another fashion which makes them feel superior.

It reminds me of E F Benson's 'Mapp & Lucia' where Mapp and Georgie learn about three words of Italian and then prance around averywhere saying 'bella, bella' to show that they are grand tour type aristocrats with all the refinement of Italian high society.

If you want to do acrostics as a mental exercise that's fine and it will make a change from sudoku (another way of showing you're clever by apeing the Japanese.) :-)

On the other hand if you want to write poetry do it without worrying about what anybody else considers to be the right way to do it.

Malpoet-
Thanks for the compliment on the poem but I think it would have been impossible to write without the form pre-existing it. By that I don't just mean in the sense of what the poem looks like but in that the form INSPIRED the work, even down to the subject matter. I do believe that certain forms give a certain tone to a work which then inspire the writer. Many modernist poets try to undermine this by deliberately choosing inappropriate subject matter for particular forms (cf 'Farm Implements and Rutebagas in a Landscape', a Sestina by John Ashbery) but these poems are always heavily ironic.
'Delivery' is clever and interesting. I think a lot of poets enjoy cryptic crosswords because of not just the verbal element but the lateral thinking. Good poetry is often a bribnging together between two things which one would not expect to see juxtaposed. Of course, 'Delivery''s 'meaning' is completely arbitrary given the formal strictures placed on the work, but this is one end of a spectrum. The other end is completely open forms which purport to display philosophical depth.
Anne Sexton wrote poems which displayed similar verbal trickery.

Well it has to be a good thing if a poetic form provides the inspiration to write a good poem. I am not going to complain about that. What I don't want is for anybody to think that they must write in particular structures.

As many people will be aware, my own style is late Rupert Bear with some Beano influences. That works for me although the pinnacles of creativity are usually only reached 'en vin' and with the right muse present.

Sorry Steve, I misquoted you there, not being in on the start of this discussion. But 'touche!' because you have misquoted me right back; I didn't think your sonnet was all wrong, I just noted that Copland implied that it was. He was only joking anyway. I think.
My definition of poetry is probably wider than most people's. Certainly wider than DG's, who bases his on rhythm. The person in the audience can think what the hell they like and like what the hell they like but it doesn't really matter. Poetry is not just about entertainment. Some people have criticized my work as lacking emotion but my response is, so what? Poetry is as much an intellectual exercise as anything else; emotion, form, rhythm are all optional extras.
I thought your sonnet's point (and correct me if I am wrong here) was to highlight the arbitrariness of form in a poetic context. If you can write a meaningless list which conforms to the sonnet structure then the structure must be inherently unsound. I might not agree with your inference but I applaud it as an intellectual exercise. (If that was, in fact, a deeply personal work about how you were discovered as a feral child living in the back of a Tesco warehouse then I apologise profusely!)
As for the sestina, well. I've tried and failed and at some point in the future I will try again. Bishop's sestina is good (can't remember what it's called, something about a grandmother and granddaughter) and my mate Joe wrote a cracker about his childhood in Spain. I have great respect for anyone who can make those repetitions seem natural without too many tricksy double meanings throwing the whole thing to cock.
As for the other forms you've mentioned, I'll give 'em a go...

Is there anyone left who believes we MUST write in pre-existing structures? I am a neo-formalist but it is by choice and I still appreciate less formal verse. I think even formal poets are now influenced by the liberty that was bestowed on verse by the early twentieth century's modernist movement. It was a Pandora's box situation.
The baby and bathwater analogy still applies, though. Or, if you like, just because Rock 'n' Roll is great it doesn't mean that Blues,Country and Folk are all worthless. Well, maybe Country....

Another thing that gets that goat I've got is classical allusion. It's anachronistic and pathetic - ancient mythologies are really quite rubbish as stories go. They are nearly as childish and moronic as the plot of an opera or a ballet (because primitive people were a right bunch of eegits), but there are still people out there who think that having heard those stories in some way makes them part of the academic elite; a) it bloody doesn't (any more than not having heard them means the battery has run out on your ears), and b) being part of an academic elite is geeky - trust me, I know.

However, that said...

Icarus was foolish, he flew too near the sun
Daedalus flew lower, but I got him with my gun
I’ve shot ostrich, bats and insects, and flappy things with beaks
But nothing beats the time I bagged a brace of ancient Greeks

DG, as well trod as ancient mythologies are, I don't think they are childish or moronic. I will conceed that many people allud to the classical tales in order to make themselves seem more respectable. I even know those who use greek writing and comments on writing as an example of the best, which let's face it is just a little mad. With that said let's look at two 'classical' societies, the greeks and the romans. The greeks were fairly technologically and politically minded and from what is known were rather spiritual to boot. The romans of course stood on the shoulders of the greeks, assimilating technology and even the pantheon of greek gods to boot. My point here is that until 250 odd years ago they were among the most technologically advanced societies and were anything but primitive. Hell the egyptians knew what lightning was a couple of thousand years ago. Ancient peoples were not primitive, they just had less history and understanding to build upon. Anything but 'eegits'.

Given all that I can understand classical allusion, it makes sense...there were these great civilisations that had a good grasp of the use of belief systems and their usefullness. By some they are even seen as having lived in a golden age. So we may not like it but it is understandable why people think of classical myths and societies as something good to allude to or even emulate.

And what's wrong with Country, Siren? Without Country there'd be no Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash.

Erm... err... ah...

I quite like rhyme, actually.

I'm late to the party again, aren't I? Damn it.

By the way, Siren, interesting interpretation of my shopping list poem. I never thought of that. Can I use it?

(Actually, I wrote it initially as a kind of response to an exercise: "write a poem about a memory. I was so bored with that as a subject that I took the piss...)

Aw shucks! Have I been over-intellectualizing again, Steve, or were you referring to the Tesco wildboy? Tesco wildboy? There's got to be a poem in there somewhere. Possibly a Gordonzola-type one.

I'm always having a dig at country and I'm not sure why. I love Slim Whitman and Chet Atkins is one of the best guitarists the world has produced. I think it's because when it's bad, it's bloody awful, in a way that makes me more nauseous than any other bad music. It might have something to do with rightwing, downhome, redneck racists. Country is one of the more politically loaded musical genres.

Anyway, what in the Sam Hill has this got to do with rhyme?

Yo! Steve-O! Better late than never, mate. A definite and gifted rhymster if ever I heard one. Inn Verse on the 18th Dec, by the way (he plugs, subliminally).

DG, I know exactly what you mean about classical allusions but I forsee my poetry being swamped with them in about a year's time. I'm doing Myth at uni next term so no doubt I'll be boring the arse off everyone with Sisyphus-this and Herodotus-that.
Have you ever tried to read 'The Waste Land' or Pound's 'Cantos'? Bloody Hell, you need access to a mythological library and a big bag of amphetamines! I think Eliot and Pound were trying to outdo each other in who could be the biggest arse in poetry. Either that or they were taking the piss.

Ezra Pound found
Round vowel sounds*
In tales of ancient Italy
His mate, T. S., said
'They do impress'
But said it rather bitterly

What I hate is not so much classical allusion per se (and I don't think you really believe the ancients were 'eegits') but when it is done to excess. But more, I hate people who say 'The Waste Land? I don't know what everyone complains about, it's quite an easy read.' There is a hell of a lot of intellectual cock-swinging goes on when men (and it's nearly always men) read classically allusive poetry. Personally, mine shrivels to mid-winter proportions at the mere sight of Pound's name. I find some of his work wonderful, but with some I just wonder what the f....


* Is this bit monovocally lipogrammatic, Steve?

Martin,
I agree broadly with what you say but would add this; The reason myths (or just stories, if you like) survive and persist for thousands of years is because they contain universal truths. They may be constantly absorbed and re-interpreted but the core of their message remains pertinent to the human condition. We should not be surprised at this or be in any particular awe at 'the wisdom of the ancients'. What else did people have to do before Strictly Come Dancing, but sit around and solve the mysteries of existence?

By the way, DG. You were dead on the money with Rachel Stevens. She played a blinder last Saturday!

No, you weren't intellectualising too much - it's quite a fun interpretation. But, as I try to explain to everybody, and nobody seems to listen, when I write a poem, I really do hate to know what I'm writing about beforehand. So if I'm making a comment on the "impossibility" of the sonnet, then I only find out afterwards.

I quite like the Wasteland myself, though I prefer Prufrock. Some of the Canto's are full of beautiful fragments. But if you read it to get some sense out of it, be aware that Pound himself said that he couldn't make it cohere. Enjoy them for what you can pick out of the ruins ("fragments I have shor'd" etc), the sound of the words, and the glimpses of something they can't quite get at. Don't try and make something logical out of them. (Stop making sense, as Talking Heads once said...)

"But, as I try to explain to everybody, and nobody seems to listen, when I write a poem, I really do hate to know what I'm writing about beforehand"

It does show Steven. Not possible to know what you were writing about afterhand either. Why should anybody listen?

Siren, quite true. I agree with you. I mean I'd never use the words 'wisdom of the ancients' but I suppose that may be the view of those that are 'in awe'. I must say I was trying to explain the reason I felt many people emulate the classical literature. I personally feel that there are no better words than Eistien's 'standing on the shoulders of giants'.

On a slight change of point, it is my personal opinion that we as writers will often emulate our favourites for many reasons but in this way the best of us also stand on the shoulders of giants.

I prefer to stand on the shoulders of dwarves. There is less far to fall.

Speaking of intellectual giants, I noticed a few of you referring to Glennon earlier in this thread, and I have heard a rumour (and it is just a rumour) that he might be doing an unadvertised gig at the Bluecoat in Liverpool on Thursday 4th December of this year. Can anyone confirm or deny it, or better still get me some tickets?

Ah, very true Siren, but with great risks comes great rewards.

Rachel Steven’s dancing is uneven
Toilets – an anagram of T S Eliot
Glennon and Rennie – wittier than many
Steven Waling is a fine, upstanding gentleman whose views on contemporary poetry, which some might say are deliberately contentious, stand up to scrutiny and are definitely worth considering. Sometimes.

Hmmm... Nah!... It doesn't scan. I might give it time and then redraft it (when Satan buttons up his cardigan).

It was Newton wot stood on the shoulders of giants (a somewhat barbed, ironic comment about some of his colleagues at the Royal Society, in fact) not Einstein.

By the way, mal, have you thought of moving on from those Janet & John books? Maybe try Enid Blyton?

Jus to befuddle malpoet even further, my latest sonnet:

RAIN CROW, ARRAN


wet dripping frock coat gentleman
with a wicked sense of timing impossible

enterprise the sloping café window
hill face streaming down the glass

enters the frame hands behind back
sometimes it’s clear sometimes blurred

like the TV’s digital flicker back
at St. Columba’s it’s difficult

to talk about art in English
meanwhile swallows dogfight evening

black basalt starts to melt
in the rain chip off the old block

lifts jump jet off the lawn into an
evening tot of croft stone whisky

Hello Mr Waling

Found this in your poetry. Do you want it back?

Found poem (of sorts)

THE ALL-PURPOSE GEOCENTRIC HAROLD

The largest toilet wall in Europe
Happiness locked out daily
Pockets full of coins for the slots
Then who’s that stepping off his plinth
Will passengers have their boarding cards ready
Someone’s behaviour is bothering

Wet dripping frock coat gentleman
Enters the frame hands behind back
To talk about art in English

EDIT - Incidentally, if you fancy cheating I recommend -
http://languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine.html

That's not befuddling me it is your usual senseless jumble of words.

Never did Janet & John and not planning to move onto Enid Blyton. The plots may be too complicated for me.

Rupert & the Beano are challenging enough.

'RAIN CROW, ARRAN


wet dripping frock coat gentleman
with a wicked sense of timing impossible

enterprise the sloping café window
hill face streaming down the glass

enters the frame hands behind back
sometimes it’s clear sometimes blurred

like the TV’s digital flicker back
at St. Columba’s it’s difficult

to talk about art in English
meanwhile swallows dogfight evening

black basalt starts to melt
in the rain chip off the old block

lifts jump jet off the lawn into an
evening tot of croft stone whisky

copyright, Steven Waling


UP REVIEW CUT

When reading poetry of this type one's first thought should be to separate the poet's intentions from one's own. Rooks cry havoc. That is, to avoid searching for meaning but to allow the poem's flavour to wash around the palate, like the croft stone whiskey referred to in the last line. My achey, breaky heart. Works such as these, which employ Burrovian cut up methods to achieve startling verbal effects, ask two questions of the reader which are both layered and intertwined. Busy old fool! Firstly, what is poetry? Young and sweet, only seventeen. Secondly, and more profoundly, what is thought? I'm in Paris with you. Human thought, which rarely follows a direct linear path, resembles poetic cut up techniques, arguably. Those blue-green leaves against the grey skies. And poetry, constrained within the strictures of formal patterns for thousands of years (for the most part), now finds itself unbounded, free to explore the universe with whatever tools it may have at its disposal. If I were a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning.
Mr Waling's piece conveys, for this reviewer, a relatively cogent flavour, compared to some similar poems' apparently more disparate sources of verbal material. I am waiting for someone to discover America. The Scottish setting, indicated in the title, permeates the whole work, even down to Scotland's proliferation of RAF bases which the jump jet in the penultimate line could be seen as referring to. Wrap me in designer sheets, I'll never get enough. Certain lines, as is appropriate in works of this nature, jump out at the reader and demand attention by their very decontextualization. For I will consider my cat Jeoffry. '...It's difficult / to talk about art in English' tantalises the reader with the hint of a cultural truth which can never be fully recovered or explained. I'm horny; horny, horny, horny. Epistomologically, this raises several important questions. I eat men like air. Is knowledge really attainable, to any complete degree? Like a virgin, touched for the very first time. Or is consciousness more analogous to Sisyphus's task of forever rolling the stone uphill? It is 5.15am Hello Chris. Perhaps we should take the advice of Albert Camus, and just accept that the stone will roll back to the bottom, and that we must begin to roll it back up again. De do do do, De da da da.

Steven, thanks for pointing out my error. Though the quote is attributed to many different people down the years eistien did once use those words to refer to newton to whon the quote is most often attributed. It actually goes back (I think) to the 12th century.

As for your 'sonnet', apart from being completely without purpose, it doesn't fall within the paramiters or established guidelines of what is a sonnet. The system is wrong. Go back to the books and learn how a sonnet should be written!

Martin, I think Steve's sonnet is a sonnet in the Ted Berrigan sense, rather than the Elizabethan sense. Modern sonnets often conform to the genre merely by consisting of fourteen lines of approximately equal length. There is a well established magazine called 'Fourteen' which publishes many 'sonnets' such as this. Well, possibly not quite like this....

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘formalism’ as: ‘ (in art, music, literature etc.) concern or excessive concern with rules and outward form rather than the content of something.’

There you go, Steve W. You're a Neo-Formalist! It could be argued that your disregard of meaning (content) and your embrace of methods such as the cut-up technique (rules) emphasise outward form excessively. I know it's all semantics but interesting, eh?

I'm sorry but 14 lines of absolute rubbish does not constitute a sonnet. Whilst some ill-informed people choose to believe that a 14 line poem is a sonnet, there are other criteria: metre, rhyme, the couplet, the number of syllables per line and the 'turn' or volta.

I sorry but it is UNFORGIVABLE to call something with 14 lines a sonnet just because it has 14 lines. If you are gonna say you've written a sonnet at least put some damn effort into it!

I'm with Martin. What Steven calls a sonnet is drivel and the review is drivel.

No, Siren, it's not interesting.

Martin, if you are basing your sonnet definition on a good textbook, I would suggest that you read all the way to the bottom of the page, where you may find reference to the 12-line sonnets written by some Elizabethan poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins's curtal sonnets which consisted of 10-and-a-half lines, or even George Meredith's 16-line sonnet sequence Modern Love (1862).
Your reference to the couplet indicates that you are heavily informed by the Shakespearean variation. The original Italian sonnet form consisted of an octave and a sestet - 8/6. No couplet to be found.
Sonnet definition is what they call a moot point.

Malpoet. Unlike most of my poetry, that review was meant as a piece of entertainment and was written in the spirit of the piece. If you think Steve's sonnet is drivel, then it is entirely fitting that you should hold the same opinion about the review.

Siren, again either I have not been eloquent enough or I'm not being understood (same thing really). I was trying to say that there is more to a sonnet than just 14 lines. Then I proceeded to give examples. There are many different types of sonnets but regardless there is a form and structure to all of them that should be adhered to.

Given your point I cannot see how you would call steven's drivel a sonnet either, as you were (simply) saying that sonnets are not defined by the number of lines.

I was referring to academia's definition of a sonnet (and the modern literary world, for that matter). I would not deign to offer a definition.

I'm just not sure about getting all het up if Steve wants to call his piece a sonnet. The definition is just the frame, the intrinsic worth of the piece does not depend on it. It is closer to what we think of as a sonnet than some of Ted Berrigan's which I'm studying now in my third year of an English degree, and which are anthologised and classified as such by the literary establishment. In that light, Rain Crow, Arran is definitely a sonnet. Until I become an absolute expert in versification (which I have no intention of doing) I will resist the urge to correct people's classifications of their own works.

I'm also not sure about calling another poet's work 'drivel'. Personally, I am not so confident about my own ability or knowledge to say such a thing unless I said it privately. I certainly wouldn't do it on the net. Having read Steve's piece a few times, I like it. It can be refreshing not to have to try and get some great truth out of a poem but to just sit back and let the imagery flow over you. I got more from that piece than I do from a hundred cod-philosophers attempting profundity in bland, cliched metaphors. You will notice that I am not naming these cod-philosophers. This is partly out of respect, and partly because I am one.

Poetry is a multi-faceted thing, and Steve's work is an aspect that I find slightly more interesting than many others. It's as simple as that.

If I wanted to let rip on some of the poetry I don't like which is featured on this site, we would be here all night and well into December.

Maybe it is true that a person doesn't have the right to re-classify someone's work but frankly neither does the poet. Labels and names are given meaning by those groups who encounter them, so maybe you have a good point there.

As for calling steve's work drivel, I'm sorry I can't pull any punches on that because there is no excuse or skill involved in cut-ups. His poetry is just something that I see as having no purpose, reason or place in the literary world.

Of course, I'm willing to admit that after purchasing one of his collections I regretted it because I didn't enjoy it or for that matter even want to finish it. Complete waste of money. I'm sorry but if you think I'm intentionally having a dig, I am.

Feel free to say the same about my stuff. (And that goes for anyone) I'd rather know the truth than inflate my ego because I've got my stuff out there into an audience.

'As for calling steve's work drivel, I'm sorry I can't pull any punches on that because there is no excuse or skill involved in cut-ups. His poetry is just something that I see as having no purpose, reason or place in the literary world.'

That is a strong statement, Martin. If you imagine that Steve has merely tossed a bag of statements into the air and re-arranged them arbitrarily, I would look again. There are hints of narratives interspersed with imagery and humour in the work which require skill to achieve. It is called the poetics of indeterminacy and is concerned with beauty in the language. Every time a poet makes a word choice there are factors at work which are down to both chance and intent. No mind is the same mind from one moment to the next. And poets who use rhyme take the biggest chances of all. The cut-up method apes rhyme's roll of the dice, that sweet moment when everything comes together, the double six.
I challenge you to produce something of equal poetic worth by the same method. Merely denigrating a particular poetic method or calling something 'drivel' does not constitute 'criticism' in the literary sense. To say that such work has no place in the literary world is such an absolutist statement that you expose your own work to the closest scrutiny. I will not critique your work other than to suggest you learn where apostrophes should be placed. There aren't many words in a poem. They should at least be properly punctuated if the style of the poem calls for it.

You hint at grinding axes with your statement about an unwisely bought book. I do not know Steve personally, I met him briefly last week. He has slagged off one of my poems earlier in this thread but I read his poetry for what it is rather than what I think poetry should be. Every blank page is a wealth of possibilities. Let's stop trying to tie each other down with pointless definitions.

Thanks for pointing out the typo in Power, I honestly hadn't seen it. I would add to this, yes, opening my work up to great scrutiny is what happens when I criticise others. As I have said to many people, I like this. Comments from other people help me to understand what works and what doesn't.

As for the cut-up method there is a reason that a good deal of people call it spamoetry. I would never try to create anything this way because it is not my own. I accept that some may find some worth in cut-ups, I just can't. I just feel that those who claim that they are searching for meaning in other people's work is just pretending.

With regard to the 'drivel' statement, in fairness I just nicked Malpoet's word. I do agree with the sentiment.

Maybe I've missed something in Steven's poems, and for that matter all cut-ups. What worth do you see in the method Siren?


Getting back to an earlier point though, I have been looking at many other poems which are labelled 'sonnets' and in all the modern stuff I've been able to lay my hands on today I can say that they at least conform to some of the criteria, as fluid as it is.

And back to the subject of rhyme given that a good number of people I've run into who don't write consider poetry as something that should rhyme, is it the poets who are incorrect? Should we be rhyming to please those type of people?

Yes it was me who called Steven's poem drivel. That is what it is:

- silly talk: silly and irrelevant or inaccurate talk

Throwing together a load of words in a particular pattern does not give them any worth. Steven can call it a sonnet if he wants, but whatever skill there may be in assembling language in this way does not convey any value to me.

I actually think that the review is rather worse than that.

Just like Tracy Emin's bed or her tent, and the piles of literal shit that are presented to us as sculpture, the people who do this are sticking their fingers up to those who accept it as art. The review, which purports to derive meaning from something that apparently doesn't have any, and gives a light hearted credibility to a beauty in the use of words that I do not see, serves to reinforce the fashions that have no inherent worth and which really serve only to diminish the art forms of which they claim to be part.

Steven is happy to poke fun at many performance poets and to imply that he is a person of much greater discernment and knowledge than most of those with whom he chooses to associate online. No doubt he has read a lot. Many people have. It is a very worthwhile thing to do, but it does not have merit in itself. What Steven produces is poetry that seems to me to be of very little worth combined with a great deal of pretentiousness and comtempt for those who write work that is different from his. Siren is much more polite and circumspect. He writes good poetry himself and doesn't want to be unpleasant to others. I think that the world is better for having nice people in it, but I would prefer it if that did not extend so far as to give value to the valueless.

For my own part, I write primarily for my own pleasure. I perform because I like it, I am a show off. Sometimes I know that others get some pleasure from what I do and that pleases me too. Sometimes I am trying to say things through poetry which I think are worthwhile, but I do not make any claims for artistic merit in those works. By criticising others and responding to the opinions with which I disagree I certainly leave myself open to criticism. I am very happy to receive such criticism.

Thanks, Siren, for your excellent review. It's actually not strictly a cut-up (no actual cutting was involved). It just came out that way, along with a bit of insertion of found and overheard material.

Actually, I was probably a bit unfair on your poem by the way. I was put off by the title (too "poetic" for me: "Ennui" rather than "Boredom") but it's not a bad poem. A lot better than most poems I read.

I take your point about "formalism"; though I wouldn't classify myself a "neo-formalist" as most of that particular lot seem to be the kind of anal-fixated obsessives that that think "liberalism" is a dirty word.

Ted Berrigan's Sonnets are among my favourites. I find it ironic that 90 or more years since the first modernist collage poem was written, there are still some blowhards who foam at the mouth when they see it.

Still, in the words of my favourite favourite poet:

Anarchy for the UK,
It's coming some time, maybe...

Steve,

As I stated, the review was intended as a piece of entertainment, not as serious critical work. I can't quite understand why Malpoet is so offended by it. If anything, read in isolation, the review looks like a piss-take of your style of poetry. I don't really understand all this poetic sniping. Even if I accepted the idea that montage poetry (or whatever) was not what I would call poetry, I don't see how it could actually harm poetry. Or how rhyme could harm poetry, for that matter. Poetry is a tough old bird and can look after herself.

I chose 'ennui' rather than 'boredom' because of its existential, frenchified connotations. Poetic? Absolutely. I am of the opinion that there are some things you can only say in poetry so you might as well say them. If I'd have gone on like I do now in the place I come from (Moston, North Manchester) I'd have had my head kicked in several times over by now. I now celebrate my freedom to be a complete ponce.

I believe that to try to ignore form is disingenuous. Much experimental poetry draws attention to its form to the detriment of its content (this is often only because these new forms are unfamiliar). It may wish to do this but if subject matter is to be expressed then the form must suit the content. Pre-existing forms provide a sort of default setting within which poets can express themselves with relative freedom from formal distraction.
The reasons for tensions within the poetic community, as evinced by the 'anthology wars' of the late fifties, revolve entirely around which forms are acceptable, and which are pointless experimentalism. The truth is, it only takes one person to appreciate a form for it to be acceptable. We are not talking association football here. There is no international arbiter and there are no rules. People will either buy the books or not, listen or not, emulate or not. Has anybody noticed that, in the last thirty years or so, amateur elegies (the real interface between poetry and real life) have begun to sound like copies of Auden rather than copies of Keats? It's a slow filter, but it is still a filter. If poetry retains old structures and accepts new ones, it will be all the richer.

I'd disagree with you on two points, Siren, firstly on the "poetry is a tough old bird" - I think it's something of a dodo these days.

Almost one half of the general public think poetry is "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and pay lip service to it being "beautiful" because that's what they're programmed to say and they're also programmed to try to feel their "souls" (souls are non-existent, and the term - at best - refers to a mixed endocrine and nervous response) because they've been given the idea that they're somehow less romantic/emotionally intelligent than the one or two snot-nosed individuals who actually are drippy enough to have that happen to their psyches whilst reading such tosh.

The other almost half have heard that there is no definition of what poetry is and that it can be literally anything so it isn't anything and therefore there's no point having a noun for it. because we have the perfecly good noun "ooji-me-whatsit" to mean literally anything, so you can instead of same pass me the poem to mean pass me the axe/hairdryer/gibbon, you can say pass me the ooji-me-whatsit to mean whichever; and that half of the population wouldn't be bothered with poetry or they do depending on whether it means crisps. This idea is perpetuated to this latter population by disingenuous (not quite sure whether it also fits the definition of hypocritical) eegits who argue black and blue in threads like this that things that are very clearly prose are poems, but who in real life if their spouse asked them "What are you reading, dear?" would reply "Newspaper" rather than "poem" if they happened to be reading a newspaper. However, those same people would defend to the death the notion that the newspaper article could be considered a poem if asked about it on here.

So in short, poetry is ignored by most people these days because they don't want to listen to bollocks about stirring souls or bollocks about Yoko Ono's "poem" entitled "Water" being a poem.

Point two is that experimentalism is great so long as you experiment to answer a question rather than predetermine your outcome by saying eg. I'm experimenting to see that a valid poem will result if I do such-and-such. And, further, if you reasonably objectively analyse your results against a sensible success criterion as to what a valid poem would be. If your experiment comes up with something crap, you should then be big enough to acknowledge that doing such-and-such doesn't doesn't generate a valid poem, if it comes up with something that fits a reasonable definition of prose and you still like it, you shouldn't feel any snobbish idea that it has to be poetry and therefore go around lying about it and saying it's poetry with no sensible reasoning for it being poetry - you should call it prose, and enjoy it for what it is. Too many of the fifties (and other recent) "poets" weren't big enough to admit that they were writing prose, and were too snobbish to lose the classical idea that poetry was somehow more refined and fitted to the/an elite. This part of point two has help lead us to the second half of point one and left us with the situation that most of the public don't want to know about poetry and will block out their minds to it as soon as they see that word in a bookshop.

"Point two is that experimentalism is great so long as you experiment to answer a question rather than predetermine your outcome by saying eg. I'm experimenting to see that a valid poem will result if I do such-and-such. "

Why is "will I get a valid poem from doing such-and-such?" not a valid question? I'd love to know who these '50's poets are/were, by the way; though I suspect they were mostly following in the footsteps of poets from the '20's (Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists and others) (see Poems of the Millenium, Vol. 1, ed. Jerome Rothenburg & Pierre Joris.)

As for the definition of a poem, I rather think it's a bit like defining the edge of the universe: it's finite but unbounded. There are some things that challenge what we think of as poetry (is Edwin Morgan's Loch Ness Monster Song a poem, for instance?) while still somehow retaining that mysterious otherness that makes them poems, whilst others just don't work as poems. And when we come to ask why one works and the other doesn't, we get ourselves tied in knots about what is and isn't poetry.

But most poetry doesn't live at the far edges of what poetry is, and we can usually recognise it. Some of us are further toward the edge than others, though; but if we fall off the edge sometimes, all we'll end up with is a paper cut, so why not?

Will I get a valid poem by doing such and such IS a valid question - that was my point. What isn't valid is to tailor your experiment and success criteria to wards "proving" a predetermined outcome for your hypothesis (that you will indeed get a valid poem by doing that), rather than to do the experiment with criteria that allow the result to be evaluated to find out it is valid or invalid and to shrug at either conclusion rather than fudge it and to try to claim that it has worked when it hasn't by redefining what a valid poem is, simply because you desperately want your untrue guess at the outcome to be true.

Now, I know I will be shouted down for saying this, but the dictionaries market themselves as reference books for people to find out what a word means. And they do a hell of a lot of research and they question respected authorities and the laiety alike to find out what these words are being used to mean. The definition of poetry has not changed from rhythmically structured text (people quoted lots of dictionaries in a previous thread and they all had "rhythm" and its stemmed words in their definitions (and these were people who disagreed with me!) Anyway, the definition of poetry has not changed from the above despite some very influential and revered (never ever revere anyone btw, I can pick holes in ANY poet and their quoted opinions are (most definitely) very often full of shit) people claiming that a carelessly discarded crisp bag/golf ball/hacked-off face are valid poems, because there is no point having a noun that means everything and anything to mean any one specified set of things. And people who have claimed such things have done so largely to try and pretend to themselves and to anyone daft enough to listen that their failed experiments have worked and that their shite prose or random text is good poetry.

I've never been very keen on using dictionary definitions in arguments, cause dictionaries are essentially historical texts, They don't say neccessarily what a word means now, and in every context (words only mean something in context.)

Rubbish poetry is still poetry, though we're probably all reluctant to admit that. And "rubbish" is a subjective judgement, more often than not: what you find rubbish might be highly significant for me, and vice versa. Also, there's context and form to think about. A discarded crisp packet might not be art, but a photograph of a discarded crisp packet in an art gallery, suitably framed, might well be. Tracey Emin's Bed is art precisely because it has been carefully placed and arranged in an art gallery. Whether it's "good" is another matter. If it had been placed behind glass in the Victoria & Albert Museum, it might well be "ethnography".

I personally don't really like the term "experimental" to describe linguistically innovative writing, because it implies that there is some kind of expected outcome. x + y = poem, that kind of thing. Poets don't work that way. What "works" or doesn't "work" is such a subjective thing in the arts. John Cage wrote some beautiful pieces for prepared piano, but others think they're ugly. Who decides what works or doesn't work? Is a fan of trad jazz able to judge a solo by John Coltrane? If one person other than the writer likes what they do, does that constitute an audience? How many mickles make a muckle? What is the square root of minus one?

I find DG's literalism both envigorating and frustrating. To apply scientific standards to poetic experimentation misses the point. But as a materialist atheist I applaud the attempt.

Poetry a Dodo? Are you kidding? It's the new rock 'n'roll! It's the democratic art. It's the one genre everyone thinks they can do at some point in their lives (usually adolescence) but so few people actually can. This is because we live in a literate society. 90-odd% of people can actually write. We have to, to get by. We carry pens in our pockets, not paintbrushes or plectrums or fold-out pianos. If we communicated with whistles everyone would think they were a musician.
So your dictionary defines poetry as 'rhythmic text'. Does this mean that ancient oral epics only became poetry once some clever sod learned to write them down? What is rhythmic? Sprung rhythm? Try tapping your foot to that and see how far you get. Just because dictionaries have to settle for a standardized, lowest common denominator definition of poetry doesn't mean that we should. In the same way you could pick holes in any poet in a salvo against reverence I could pick holes in any definition of poetry in a salvo against absolutism, and probably with a lot more ease.
Poetry always contained work that was challenging, opaque and difficult. And this was long before Modernism brought so-called 'non-poetry' into being. But poetry has also always had its 'low' culture. The limerick, the popular (often vulgar) song lyric, the nursery rhyme. The only thing that has changed is that poetry has had more time for self-reflection because it has been usurped as a main mode of expression by other media. Hence the formal innovations and conceptual experimentation. This does not harm poetry. No-one buys poetry anyway. The only mass market for poetry was in the early nineteenth century before the novel got off the ground and cinema flashed its frilly drawers to a gaping public. And who was the all-time best seller? Byron. Lord 'shagger' Byron with tales of exoticism and sexual excess. Poetic soap operas dressed as high culture for the new reading public. Poetry has always been elitist in economic terms because despite its ubiquity, very little of it is actually any good, and the stuff that is good is often difficult to read.

"So in short, poetry is ignored by most people these days because they don't want to listen to bollocks about stirring souls or bollocks about Yoko Ono's "poem" entitled "Water" being a poem."

If poetry is ignored by most people these days (and I would question that both in terms of definition and the fact that more people claim to be poets now than the earth's pre-1950 population) it has nothing to do with the relative merits of either of the wings of poetry you reference in the above quote. Let's think of an analogy: Most Hollywood films are sentimental tosh; most French films are conceptually contrived tosh. Does this mean that no-one goes to the cinema? No. Because people have the right to choose what they watch or read, and will often choose the middle ground. Poetry is economically unpopular (which is different from not being culturally influential) because it requires a certain level of thought to engage with. There was no golden age of poetry before those nasty experimenters came in and buggered it up for everyone else. I should imagine that, Byron excepted (blood, tits, and foreigners, remember), poetry sales have remained in a statically chronic state for centuries.
As for the 'soul', I am in complete agreement. And as you read that sentence, DG, I can feel you bridling with indignation as you remember the interminable mystic bullshit you have to sit through every time I read my stuff out. But I am a sort of secular mystic. I am in search of the secular sublime. I'm an atheist who is in awe of the universe. I believe poetry can explore these gaps between the material world and our imaginations. That's why I love it. Oh, and limericks are great, too.

Recipe for an Experimental Poem

Ingredients
1 hypothesis, preferably fresh but frozen if not. NEVER dried!
Several years of extensive reading
1 metaphor. 2 if you like your poems spicy
1 poetic voice, suitably jaded
3 fluid ounces of chutzpah. (If you can’t get hold of the original Hebrew stuff the American variant will suffice.)
1 word processor or if you are feeling old school, a pen and paper
2 fingers

This is a simple recipe and it can be followed by anyone with a basic knowledge of rudimentary poetic principles. If you are unsure of yourself try reading Delia Coleridge Smith’s ‘How to Boil a Poem’ or Gordon Shelley Ramsay’s ‘Word Soup: The Basics’
First of all, take the several years of extensive reading and throw it out of the bedroom window. For those living in bungalows, the toilet bowl may suffice but take care to flush thoroughly. Next, take the raw hypothesis and mix in the liquid chutzpah. You will need to do this for at least ten minutes to ensure that the chutzpah is thoroughly absorbed into the hypothesis. Nobody wants to see lumps of chutzpah floating around their poem, it is very off-putting. Before placing the mixture into the word processor (or onto the paper) do not forget to add a metaphor or two. Never use three, too many metaphors will render the poem too spicy for human consumption. Using your poetic voice (remember, if it isn’t suitably jaded you won’t get the full flavour), give the whole thing a last whisk before putting in to cook for about seven minutes at Word 2007 mark 5, which equates to Foolscap 17 in old money. Finally, remove poem when only half-baked and garnish with two fingers raised to the literary establishment. Voila! Enjoy.

Steven, may I point out that you 'what is the square root of -1' off the cuff remark is actually a serious question in some fields of maths and programming (as are the attempts to prove 1+1=2). Please don't use that as an example of a silly (or irrelevent) question.

I'd like to pick up your comment about dictionaries. Whilst you may say dictionaries are historical texts, and there may be a kernel of truth in that, given that they are updated yearly they are 'recent history' and therefore dictionary definitions are not as irrelevent as you seem to want to make out. As for not being any use in arguements, I'm sorry but you're way off the mark there. Dictionary definitions are often necessary; when using a dictionary definition, everyone starts off with the same set of rules (understanding what is meant by terms and words). they help set boundries.

However, I must take issue with the definition of 'poem'. The definition, which is in most dictionaries (and the OED, which let's face it is the standard(...I wonder which dictionary DG is using?)) is: 'a piece of imaginitive writing in verse.' Which I'm sure people would agree is far more accurate a definition. (Definition from 'Poem' OED 2008)

I must question at this point in the discussion who we each consider our audience to be? After all most forms of writing have a demographic to which they are aimed. Why should poetry be any different? Personally, I aim my poetry at different people depending on the style and my mood at time of writing.

Looking at examples of other people's work I can see demographics as wide ranging as the opinions on this boards. With this in mind maybe the rhyming and rhythmic poem is aimed at a more 'unenlightened' or even 'I don't want to have to think' demographic?

I'm not sure serious poetry can be written with an audience in mind. Comic, performance stuff, maybe, but the heavy gear is always written purely for the writer. The reader should always be an afterthought.

I disagree there. I don't always write with an audience in mind but I have more than a couple of 'serious' poems that I could aim at particular demographics. I know that the same can be said of other people's work too.

As I am writing now I have just thought, I feel that writing for a demographic often aids in the process. An example would be that if I were writing for the 'Average Joe' on the street, I'd certainly lean more toward a more formalised poem with some more 'traditional mechanisms.

In fact the more I think as I'm writing, I don't believe it can be said that something that is being written (that is intended to be presented, orally or visually) doesn't have a key demographic. By the very act of writing and intending the piece to be presented you must have an idea of who will see it. Likewise you'd know who you want to enjoy it more than others.

Given that trail of (unedited thought) I think that the audience being an afterthought is just bad writing technique.

I think it's dangerous territory to write with any particular audience in mind unless you've done some bloody thorough research. Even then, look to get at least some of it wrong because you almost certainly will be off the mark.

Second guessing what an audience will go for strikes me as ill-informed and patronising. I also think that authorial intent went the way of this thread's already mentioned Dodo, and we all should be very grateful for that. Who cares about what the poet wants us to feel? Who cares about meaning in poetry? I certainly don't. Like any artwork, it's what it (a poem) DOES that has more significant an impact upon me, rather than some prescribed sense of meaning that's supposed to enable me to understand the poet.

And there's nothing that'll kill the playfullness and fluidity of language quicker than a dictionary definition...

... Except for a nuclear holocaust, plague, the universe winking out of existence, people no longer being arsed, etc.

Sorry. Threads gone a little off track.

Just to say... I still like rhyme.

That is all.

Steven, I think you need to buy a new edition. Dictionaries are continuously updated by researchers who check the most common current usage of words. If an archaic meaning is still sometimes used, they will put that in as a subsidiary definition denoted: (Arch.). And, as I say, regardless how many "experts" say poetry is a big fish/little fish/cardboard box/anything you want it to be, the dictionary compilers haven't changed the definition to that because they are talking gibberish. Dictionary compilers are more up to date and on the money with their definitions - more so than charlatans who've made their money claiming they are poets and that anything they write is a poem without making any kind of a case for such claims.

People often quote a famous "poet" who once said that he couldn't tell you what poetry was. Personally, if I'd been interviewing him, I have just sat there staring blankly at him running through the options with him: "that cos you're stupid? mouth glued together? mob threatened you to keep quiet?" and if he'd walked off at that point I'd have followed him home and stood outside his house with a megaphone until he answered yes to one of the options.

"And there's nothing that'll kill the playfullness and fluidity of language quicker than a dictionary definition..."

Quite. Who cares what a bunch of anally-fixated dictionaryfascists think poetry is? If I want to call a cardboard box a poem, I'll call it a poem. If I want to call a glass of water on a glass shelf a tree, I'll call it a tree.

A poem is what I say it is. Or you. Or anyone else.

Then why did you just call it a cardboard box?
Probably because it's a cardboard box.
It's clearly therefore not a poem,
whether you say it is or not.
You standing there on a street corner in your stained peculiarly stained clothing, pointing at a cardboard box and repeatedly shouting "poem", will not transmogrify it into a poem, it will only make you a gibbering loony.
And as to who cares what dictionary compilers say a word means - most people. Weird, I know, but most people get their concept of the meanings of words ultimately from dictionaries. In think that's probably part of the reason why they buy such lexicons in the first place - to look up the meanings of words, the better to use them in the way that they are commonly used such that what they say makes sense rather sounding idiotic. I really think you should buy a recent edition of a dictionary Steven. I will confess that I don't own a dictionary but, being an eloquent individual, my language usage is the broadly correct and in line with modern English.

"Then why did you just call it a cardboard box?
Probably because it's a cardboard box.
It's clearly therefore not a poem,"

Why can't it be both a cardboard box and a poem? Are things only ever one thing at a time? Ain't that what a metaphor is, something that's more than one thing at a time?

A metaphor is not an actual thing. A cardboard box is not a poem.

Collecting words from walls or somewhere else and arranging them is not composition. It may be a poem, but it is not likely to be of any worth.

Saying that you do not know the meaning of a poem when you write it (assemble it, or whatever) causes it to have no meaning. It is bullshit to say that you may only discover the meaning at a later date.

Emin's bed and tent are not worthwhile art. They are a con trick like the poetry of a late modernist, avant garde, or post avant poet who puts rubbish together and calls it poetry. There is no beauty, skill or artistry in the names of Emin's past lovers stuck on a tent. The poetry of chucking words into a form that you call sonnet or haiku or anything else is also a con.

The people doing this stuff are either cynically extracting money and attention from the gullible, as is the case with the Mickey Mouse Turner Prize, or so far up their own arse that they have no idea of reality beyond their tiny group of self perpetuating jerks.

Language is a living thing and the uses of words change. That is necessary for communication by language to evolve with those who use it and the world in which they live.

However, calling something by an intentionally incorrect name (e.g. a cardboard box being called a poem) is just stupid. An insistence on misdescribing things is obviously damaging to the efficiency of communication by language.

Ah, I see, so art has to be "good" to be art. Shame that most galleries in this country are full of such awful Victorian non-art as bad portraits, bad landscapes, bad still-lives, bad historical and genre pictures and sculpture. The world is full of bad art

I never said I liked Emin's bed, by the way; just that I'd defend her right to call it art. I prefer her scratchy drawings and her sewn pieces.

God, you poetry fascists are so literal. You're like the Tory party doing verse. Do you also believe the world was created in 6 days 'cause it says so in the Bible?

Being unable to tell a poem from a cardboard box, is daft, but not knowing what a fascist is seems to be a real inadequacy.

"An insistence on misdescribing things is obviously damaging to the efficiency of communication by language."

If somebody decides, for the purpose of, say, an art event, to call a carboard box a poem, in what way are they damaging the efficiency of communication by language? It's not as if anybody at the event isn't aware that it's not a poem, but a cardboard box. For the moment, however, they suspend their disbelief and decide temporarily that it's a poem. Once the event is over, it becomes a cardboard box again.

Everybody at the event has enjoyed the conceit of a cardboard box being a poem, probably had a couple of glasses of cheap red wine, and the balance of civilisation hasn't shifted one bit. The world has not collapsed into chaos, the military can go on calling the first world war a sacrifice for freedom rather than a wholesale slaughter of the working classes, we can carry on caring more for the doings of some Z-list celebrity in the jungle than for the thousands slaughtered in wars using guns we supply them with, and the government can carry on lying about its motives in Iraq, and we can get on with abusing language pretty much as we've always done.

There are far worse abuses of language than calling a carboard box a poem. Just pick up any newspaper.

A conceit, in this context, is a comparison that is extreme or far fetched. There is no comparison between a cardboard box and a poem by calling the box a poem. Yet again you appear to not understand what you are saying.

Your comparison with what you consider to be misleading information is invalid. You are not comparing like with like.

Of course you are right that it is of no real consequence. I think that could be said of everything of yours that I have seen Steven. There have been some good contributions in this thread, but you are insistently ridiculous and manage to combine that with being even more offensive than me. I must spend more time writing rhymes rather than wasting it responding to your silliness.

Au contraire, it is exactly the same thing. An artist who decides to use language in a non-rational way is at the very least drawing attention to the malleability of language, and isn't causing any harm to anyone who doesn't like what they do, or to those that like it. They are simply creating a work of art that some people like and some people don't.

As the mock turtle (or was it the caterpillar? I can't remember) says, "A word means what I say it means."

And the conceit is perfectly justifiable. A box is a container. A poem is also a container (of words, of meanings.) A poem is a box of words (among many other things.) (metaphorically speaking.)

And no-one gets hurt.

Bullshit. And it was Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty Dumpty it was...

So who is being harmed then?

Picking the 'demographic thing back up for a moment, some of you have said it's a bad idea and I must point out that I didn't mean second guessing. Let's say I write a poem for presentaion (visually or orally) for average Joes, the reaction is okay but not what I want, I then find out what was wrong/good with it and that will help me improve in the next poem I create to be presented to that audience.

Steven I am beginning to wonder if you are an example of the type of poor quality art that is displayed in 'victorian' galleries. You quite clearly have a view, I respect that. What I don't respect is the utter rubbish that seems to come out. I mean may I ask who is your audience (regardless of if you wrote your stuff for an audience), because that may help me understand your position.

As wide ranging as this topic has got it's interesting that this can all be traced back to poeple's view on rhyme. Long live the debate!

Your crimes against language and poetry may be of little consequence Steven, but it is not a victimless crime.

A little while ago you wanted to think that I would be bemused by some of your drivel. To the extent that anybody is bemused by all this stupidity it is harmful. Harmful to poetry and harmful to the people who are misled.

Don't get too excited though. You are of very little consequence.

"I mean may I ask who is your audience (regardless of if you wrote your stuff for an audience), because that may help me understand your position."

The kind of people who like the kind of things I like. Salt Publishing, who published my last book, various non-mainstream magazines and editors, various readers who have enjoyed my poetry, etc etc... People who like the poets of the New York School, Black Mountain, British linguistically innovative writing

That some people obviously don't like it is neither here nor there. I don't write for everybody; and I doubt anybody does. Anymore than a jazz musician plays for fans of Kylie Minogue.

As for "crimes against language", I've never read anything so ridiculous in my life. Take a chill pill, for goodness sake. Who appointed you to the job of language policeman, mal? If you want to complain about the abuse of language, read a few government reports and complain about them. You're increasingly sounding like some old Tory pontificating about the youth of today.

On behalf of Tories everywhere HEY!

Of course I'm only 22, so does that make me young and a Tory? Is that a dichotomy?

No, that isn't a dichotomy, that's an organization called the Young Conservatives. The only justification for carpet bombing I can think of during conference season.

The size of an audience is aesthetically immaterial. Whether it is one person or one million. Otherwise how could one explain Chris de Burgh?
If someone writes a good poem and nobody ever reads it, it is still a good poem. It doesn't suddenly gain quality when discovered, only status.

I really don't know how 'serious' poetry can be written with anything other than the poem itself in mind. Martin raised a good point there and I would be interested to hear what others think (I heard Steve O and agree with him). 'Performance' poetry, with its links to stand-up more obviously caters to the crowd.

Anyway, I'm off to The Hole in the Wall WOL gig. Hebden is my home town. If anybody wants to come down and attack me for what I've said on this site I'm the very tall, bushy-haired bloke wearing a purple Teddy Boy suit and an orange cravat.

Will someone close this thread and let them all get back to masturbating on all that free porn. This stuff was not what the internet was invented for; get to the lesbian-ball-in-the-mouth porn and stop trying to catch each other out on here...

Lesbians don;t have balls John....

There's an eight hour gap between John Togher's post and this one. What that suggests is anyone's guess...

"Rhyme brings me out in hives"
(dedicated to everyone who has posted on this thread)

Rhyme brings me out in hives
I'm bringing out the chives
Chime and sing out with wives
Climb and sling out the knives

Mime swinging doubt deprives
Crime springs about in fives
Time stings - a scout arrives
Mine's a pint of orange

See, and now the thread is back on track like nothing ever happened!

(John - post a link, would you?)

Steven sounds like Tony Blair. 'Tough on rhyme, tough on the causes of rhyme'

And if rhyme brings him out in hives, that means he's probably got enough homes for all the bees in his bonnet he's got about it.

Me? Don't care. Some so, some don't.

Please, admin people. put some new faces up. These are NAFF.

Seems to me there's several things going on here:

1) There's the "don't understand it, don't want to, therefore it must be crap" argument. Not dissimilar to that of the Nazis who set fire to "decadant art" in the '30's.*

2) There's the deliberate/not so deliberate misunderstanding of the main point. Which is not that rhyme brings me out in hives (has everybody missed the quote marks? I was quoting mal, in fact.)

3) Then there's a few that actually engage with the argument and respectfully disagree. Hail to thee, blithe spirits!

4) There seems among some people to be this strange idea that cut-ups and nonmainstream writing is almost immoral. What else are we to make of statements like the following:

"To the extent that anybody is bemused by all this stupidity it is harmful. Harmful to poetry and harmful to the people who are misled."

Anybody would think I was corrupting youth! Should I drink hemlock like Sophocles for the crime of making people think? Or for saying that there are alternative ways of writing to those you've been brought up with?

5) Then of course, there's the "my head hurts with all this thinking, I think I'll dismiss it with a witty comment", isn't there, Atilla?

All in all, a most amusingly revelatory discussion.

* I have now officially Godwinned myself. This discussion is now over. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_Law)

Now that Steven has ended the topic, here is a wiki entry that people might be interested in - I was looking for references to accentual poetry in order to get the rhythmic point across. Look at the bit on modern English Metres some way down the page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_metre

Siren may feel he can find some justification in there for calling one of his pieces a poem, that I had said wasn't a poem.

It was Socrates who drank hemlock. Sophocles was a dramatist. Don't worry though Steven you get most things wrong.

It is not for you to shut down a thread even if you start it.

Your categories are not complete or accurate. What you write is not immoral, but a lot of it is crap. Not because I don't understand it. There is little to understand. When you claim that you don't know the meaning when you write a poem you are not putting anything there to be 'understood' except that you have put the words in a form that you consider to have significance.

Your arrogance about poetry is enough, don't add to it the delusion that you are the arbiter of when a discussion may start and stop.

"Personally, the rhyme brings me out in hives, so I can't even get past the first verse to make a decent comment."

The above is a quote from Steven Waling made Friday 17 August 2007 at 09.49hours.

Told you, DG. Syllabic verse. And the mighty Wiki backs me up.

Siren, 'Wiki' is anything but mighty. Please engage brain before using it as a resource. Most, if not all, wikis are a disallowed source in universities and other educational institutions because of their inherent uselessness as a reference source.

Martin, please engage sense of humour before trying to put me down. The 'mighty' in that sentence was ironic, and the comment was aimed at DG, who I know, and who would have known it was ironic. And don't tell me about what universities do and don't accept. How many times have you been top of the year in a university English course of 300 students? If I fail to get a first class honours degree next May, you are welcome to come round to my house and piss all over the shattered remains of my ego. Until then, try and outwit me, by all means, but never try and insult me.

I apologise in that case, but it is amazing how many supposedly 'intellegent' people I've come across who do think that wikipedia is the be all and end all.

Apology accepted, mate.
Interestingly, the entry that DG linked us to looks like it might have been cribbed wholesale from a pretty advanced book on versification. It might be a decent source. But I would never cite Wiki in an essay, that's what we have books for.
Having said that, there are some good academic websites out there but they tend to be available only to students. The universities pay a blanket fee for access and they contain peer-reviewed essays and articles. I try to keep any citations of even them down to a minimum though, so it doesn't look like I've spent my study time surfing.

I don't know, I have found a good number of websites that are free and contain good and accurate information...you just have to look REALLY hard...and double check with 'trusted' reference sources.

Weary sighs all round and a Yes, I am aware of the unreliability of Wiki - and have spotted mistakes in it in various subjects. There aren't any in that article - I read it before recommending it (I wasn't looking to learn something from it when I found it out, I was looking for interesting ways of explaining to enquiring minds something I already knew myself). That said on the unreliability, I do occasionally use it in my professional life, but then I'm pretty good at evaluating whether something is likely to be bullshit in my chosen subject area given that I have a Ph.D in it (in my chosen subject area that is, not a Ph.D in bullshit).

Rhyme brings me out in hives too... Everytime I use it is sounds so bad, so I avoid it like the plague! I have nothing against people use it, I have one pal who writes in nothing but Rhyme and it suits me well, but everytime I use it - it sounds forced!

Well, personally, I think rhymes bring me out in hymes.