Iambic pentameter, abab cdecde rhyme structure are words that mean little to me.

Then again I am not nor ever will be a person to be confined within a box. When I write the rythme comes from the subject matter or develops as words hit white sheet.

I enjoy the imagery ryhming can bring, but I have been guilty of forcing the rhyme.

So I say be dammed conventions of structure
just go with the floe, mo

Cheers

Phil

Hi Soph

I had a go at old Welsh verse forms a while ago. v Diff cos Welsh is like Greek and Latin a qualitative language unlike our stress-based stuff. The nearest we get is syllabic poetry.
You can, of course, sweep all these considerations aside like I did.

Here's part of a cynghannedd sain:

Holyhead

Yale keys of old gold gleam like
nuggets of trust: worsted, worn
down Queen Street's lean, stone hillside;
blank house faces place slipped signs:
'Vancancies', cancelled across
by casements, lent a solace
by dark, dour parlours: the pearls
of Newrey; wealthy Walthew's
snail-silvered tall wall allow
clothes to dry high on grey masts.

And I also had a go at a Scots Gaelic verse form, a work song. Also another 'classical' language which I treated disrespectfully, another part-of:

Oran for Speyside

Dry-stone walling falls of heaped stones
dams pine and the Highland's tree-slopes,
dams back strangling angry feelings....
Why do we try to hide it? These ways?
Public, private lives stall here.

It's all to do with regular sounds occuring at regular intervals, which the rhythm should copy line to line, with variations on the end line. i copied and altered this from notes in a book by Scots Gaelic great Duncan Ban MacIntyre.

It's obvious why I don't show these around. But it's always worth having a go.

Your turn

aw shucks, Sophie. Kind words and I don't think I deserve them.

The last part of 'Holyhead' I think works best:

Poor light, night's muddy smoulder,
the car ferry's serried ranks
of lights cresting the wrestling
night-tide. A trough slides down through
isobars. Where stars were are
lighthouse drift-nets, shifts of notes
from North Stack; the black water's
Guinness tang. Ramps clamp, car-maps
mainline the island. Dry land
drains off eastwards; leastways, roads
twist homewards, comb Snowdon,
pass through. What grew with traffic
died through it: those who toast
enterprise toast, at most, what's
mobile, moves on hooves of honed
callousness: `The Wales for Sale Fair'.

and god the liberties I have taken with it!!! All the local knowledge taken for granted, the broken syntax for the sake of the pattern, in other words all the things you should not do!

Poor LIGHT,/ NIGHT'S/ muddy Smoulder,
the car FERRY's/ SERRIEd/ Ranks
of lights CREST ING/ the wREST/lING
night-tIDE;/ a Trough slIDes/ Down Through
etc etc

mucho patience and a bloody-minded attitude to battle-on through to the messy end.

Good luck!

Here;s another idea for you, Sophie!
John Betjeman came up with this one; he's mad (notice present tense there: do poets ever die?) on churches, and church bells. Well he came up with this note on change-ringing: 'the mathematical pattern of a plain course on the bells.':

1 2 2 4 4 5 5 5 5 1 1
2 1 4 2 5 4 5 5 1 3 2
5 4 1 5 2 3 4 1 6 2 3
4 5 5 1 5 2 1 4 2 5 4
5 5 5 3 1 1 2 2 4 4 5
ok, crazy. Each number a syllable. Craftily he doesn't give an example. Not daft these blokies!
He does another version, though:

On Hearing the Full Peal of Ten Bells from Christ Church, Swindon, Wilts

Your peal of ten ring over then this town,
Ring on my men nor ever ring them down.
This winter chill, let sunset spill cold fire,
On villa'd hill and on Sir Gilbert's spire,
So new, so high, so pure, so broached, so tall.
Long run the thunder of the bells through all!
..........................
Try as I might I cannot get a sense of progressive rhythm or overall pattern from numbering this, though. Crafty old devil has done it again!

Hey Sophie, ow ya doin?

No, not Welsh, though must admit I think Welsh is the most beautiful sounding language I have ever heard. The Celtic element is strong in a Borders kind of way on Scots and Welsh Marches. Whatever all that amounts to, though, is up to us I guess.

I don't do readings or anysuch, 'fraid. Leave that for my betters.

Nor do I do real names (though one or two WOLs know by now that I am such a such). Other names let you be more than just a such an such - as many suches as you like... so many you could end up screaming lordy such and such!

These are my own musings, rather than anything considered.

I suspect that rhyme as a means of conveying the reality of the world around us is pretty much extinct as the dinosaurs. The last hurray of rhyme was probably hi-hop, but it's a long way down from Grandmaster Flash to some of the dullards doing it nowadays...

If you want to writer rural idylls or nostalgic things-were-better-in-the-past poems, rhyme is fine. But how do you convey the world of laptops and extreme rendition in a form more suited to talking about sheep husbandry? Most rhyming political poetry is ranting doggeral with no attempt at analysis, always the way, I'm afraid.

There's something head in the sand, hope the modern world will go away about full rhymes at the end of lines. Even bringing back old Welsh forms like englyn doesn't really seem to work much. Not for me. It seems to go with old-fashioned subject matter. How do I talk about the modern world in a dead language?

A paradox Steven.

How do we talk about the world in a dead language?

A challenging question.

The question of rhyme appears as a debate quite often on this site and, i'm sure, on every other poetry site.

What do I want from a poem?
What do I want from a language?
What can thee things offer me?

A catharsis? A way to express emotion?

Perhaps to communicate ideas.
Perhaps light entertainment with words.

these question and the points you raise in your last post raise some questions I had not previously thought about, ones I think are important in order to make the things I write and maybe all of us, mean something special.

You are talking about evolution Steven. If a language dies it cannot leave a vacuum for long.

The thing that concerns me is that as I wish to express emotion in order to provoke or induce a feeling in anyone who reads my work, I fear for any radical change in that it may not be a natural progression. History shows we resist change initially but how can we change language.

Are you talking of a fashion in words and language?
One which rotates?

Is there really nothing new under the sun.

What can we do to break through to a special place

Or are we already there Steve?

Again, these are personal thoughts.

The Marxist critic Adorno once said, "there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz."

I think what he was saying was that any artform that wants to take itself seriously as having something to say to the world, can no longer be pretty and decorative, because all that does is uphold the status quo which is what caused the problem in the first place.

Rhyme is often seen as decoration, often "mere" decoration, something pleasing to the ear that seduces the reader into a soporific acceptance of what's being said. It's a form of persuasion, like an advertising jingle. Or it's a form of verbal macrame, perfectly formed but ultimately irrelevant to the modern world.

I'm not sure that poetry can change the world anyway; but I don't think it can do through rhyme or going back to old ways of writing. At least not without a great deal of thought about why you're going back.

If for you, poetry is about light entertainment, then I'm sure it doesn't matter whether you use rhyme or not. If people enjoy it, fine. I don't think I can personally be like that, which is why I don't tend to use rhyme myself.

Still more personal comments -

with regard to alienating the audience - I don't think "not rhyming" alienates any audience, unless your audience really is the kind of audience that thinks that all poetry "has to rhyme." And I don't think that applies to anyone under the age of 65, and not many over that age either.

As for learning the rules in order to break them - I'm not even sure of that anymore. Does a video artist need to learn how to draw?

Thirdly, not everyone sees performance in front of an audience as the be-all and end-all of poetry, and even if we do do performances, there's more than one way of performing. I don't do Slams because my poetry is quieter and more reflecive that Slam poetry.

A note about "alienating" the audience, too: There's putting off people totally by being totally obscure, there's challenging the audience; and there's entertaining the audience, and there's pandering to the audience. I aim to challenge and hopefully to entertain, not to put off or to pander. If you make things too easy for an audience, it's as bad as making it too difficult. On the one hand, it's swimming through mud, on the other it's swimming through syrup. Giving the audience what they don't know they want yet at least gives them a choice of whether to come back or not.

"I also use humour as spoken word poetry is all about entertainment, in my humble opinion."

Just a brief aside on this -

I see nothing wrong with spoken word poetry as being all about entertainment, if that's all you wish it to be. I think, though, it can be more than that. It has the potential to be as moving as a drama, and as thought provoking. A lot of Shakespeare is essentially "spoken word poetry."

"I contradict myself? So I contradict myself. I contain multitudes." Walt Whitman.

Shakespeare used the whole panoply of effects and was one of the most innovative writers of his own day. He was very fond of "blank verse" - read his solliloques, you won't find an end rhyme till the closing couplet. He ran on his lines (enjambment) in ways that at the time must have seemed startlingly original. Yes, he was a rollicking good storyteller, but his use of humour in tragedy was again pretty innovative, and his depth of characterisation (in particular of women) left even Christopher Marlowe standing.

And I think his audiences loved him because he didn't pander to them. He gave them lots of rude jokes & ultra-violence, but he also gave them intrigue and intellectual depth, often simultaneously, so they could laugh and think and scream at the same time. I'll never be as good as that, but it's something to aim at, isn't it?

I'm probably exagerating when I say I find end rhyme a big no-no for me. There are good modern poets who use it very well and subtly (George Szirtes, for instance.) But I think they do so because they're aware of the sound of the whole poem, not just the end of the line. They're also aware of the problem of sounding old-fashioned or merely decorative.

And I have to say that these are my personal thoughts and they might not apply at all to a lot of people here. I still think a poet should at least attempt to "make it new" though.

On the whole, I probably agree with your partner Andy, Sophie. It is certainly good to know the history of the artform you're practising. But I don't think you have to be an expert versifier before you branch out into free verse, or open form; just, perhaps, to have an awareness of where you're coming from.

And I think as well there's a lot too much concentration on a narrow line of Western poetic forms. Ezra Pound's investigation of Chinese poetry, the influence of ethnopoetics, Japanese haiku and even Hebrew paralellism on 20th century modernism probably would take several books to describe. There's also lots of "fringe" writings in the West, from Abiezer Coppe, to Blake, to forgotten poets from the '40's. Or almost forgotten women poets like Mathilde Blind, Edith Sitwell or Mina Loy.

That's the great thing about poetry: there's so much more to it than you expect. It gets gloriously confusing if you let it, and out of that whirlwind of influences you get your contemporary poetry.

This talk of needing to know rules before you break them seems to me to be complete nonsense. There is no hard and fast distinction between poetry and non poetic uses of language.

There are couuntless poetic forms. Names have been given to many of the structures used by poets in the creation of their work, but that does not make them rules. Rules are duties and obligations which one must follow and a failure to comply with rules involves sanction of some type. Otherwise the rule does not have meaning.

Of course, if you apply the name of a poetic form to a poem that is not of that form, you are not using language effectively or you are showing a lack of knowledge of the use of the words you employ. That is probably best avoided if you can. However, there are no real rules of poetry so you cannot break them and there is no obligation to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of poets and poetry before you start to create work of your own.

I do not discourage knowledge. It is undoubtedly beneficial to read and listen to poetry extensively and to learn about different poetic disciplines. It is particularly informative to discover why some poems have endured when others have not and why some people were briefly very fashionable only to be lost to memory shortly after.

In my view, there is not much worth in pontificating about the superiority of one approach over another or engaging in dabates about depth and richness and purity and truth, etc. that may or may not be in the work or its author.

If you accidentally kick over some paint and it produces something pleasing it may not be art, but there is no obligation to destroy it because of the lack of purpose in its creation.

I doubt that words can really be just thrown at a page and result in 'poetry' that please many people very much. So yes, it is a good thing to think hard about what you want to say and how you should say it, but please do not be frightened away from creating work that you value by the possibility that you may break some non existent poetic rule or you may be ridiculed for a 'coarse' rhyme or some other pretentious nonsense.

I agree very largely, Malcolm, though with one slight quibble: I've written poems I call sonnets that follow very few if any of the rules of the sonnet (well, they're 14 lines long...) but in the spirit of the New York poet Ted Berrigan.

I think if you know the rules and choose to ignore them (I'm also thinking of Carol Batton's somewhat unorthodox "villanelles") then that's rather different from not knowing the rules.

But you're right, you don't have to have an extensive knowledge of the artform to create something. It helps but it can sometimes even get restrictive if it prevents you from saying things you might want to say.

As a new poet (actually I ain't a poet, just a bloke that reads some stuff at the Tudor for a laugh), I have difficulties with this argument in that if I do a humourous poem it tends to rhyme. However I am fully aware that some of my rhymes are outrageously forced, yet to me that adds to the humour.
If I do a serious poem I don't tend to think it has to rhyme (though I cannot justify my logic here), but then I don't have to think as hard, and wonder if I am simply writing a story.
So both forms are an irritant to me, but there is a happy ending. I don't really care!

My main concern in discussions of this kind is Stephen's point that some people can become so concerned about whether they are complying with 'rules' and whether what they do is poetry, that they never raise the confidence to publish or perform their work.

I disagree with you Baz when you say you are not a poet. You definitely are a poet. All poets are ordinary people and the ones who think they are not have other problems.

Of course it is true that apparently frivolous wordplay can distract from a serious subject, but so what. Some of your audience may just enjoy the laugh they had at your rhymes and not notice the content. Is that a problem?

Satire usually deals with very serious issues in a humorous way. There is a history of thousands of years of simple, sometimes funny, stories being used to convey complex and serious messages. You do not need to know the whole history of the Soviet revolution and its characters to enjoy Animal Farm, but when you do know those things the story takes on a different meaning.

I like to play with language and I write poetry that is sometimes considered to be doggerel. I do not feel the need to confine my use of silly rhymes or dreadful puns to trivial work. Just as many songs handle questions of tragedy and great emotion with a primary concentration on how the piece sounds, there is no reason why poets shouldn't be interested in rhyme, rhythm and humour in all of their work, however serious.

Mostly poets are telling stories. It is our choice how we tell those stories and whether we have rhymes in them or not. We should be judged only on whether anybody wants to read or listen to our work. Critics will put us into this or that category or dismiss or praise the work. That's up to them. I am not interested and I am glad that you do not care either Baz.

You make an interesting point Malcolm that hadn't really occurred to me, of sticking humour into a serious piece.
I don't just mean in a satirical way, that is always an excellent way of getting serious points across, but more that there is no reason whatsover I cannot use forced, tongue in cheek rhyme to get a cheap laugh in an otherwise serious poem.
This obviously broadens my, or other poets' horizons on what they would consider writing.
Cheers for the point.
Glad someone else isn't overly concerned re rhyme or not.

It would probably put me off if there were too obvious rhymes in a poem; probably because they cause me to squirm rather than laugh. But that's me, it's almost a physical thing; I don't actually see anything wrong with it; or wrong with including a joke in a serious poem. In fact, some of my favourite poets do just that.

(What constitutes a "serious" as opposed to a "frivolous" poem might be a good question to ask...)

I think it's interesting to see that a lot of the more interesting younger poets (like Zoe Brigley, Luke Kennard and Eleanor Rees) are much more open to mixing up techniques, with previously avant garde techniques mixing with more traditional ways of writing. Long may this continue.

<quote>It is to my mind a fallacious argument to suggest that nothing new, relevant, challenging etc etc can be said in such forms.</quote>

Then it's up to you to say something new in it.

Not something that's been said a million times before, which is what most rhyming poems do (including the performance ones who think they're being so radical and end up sounding like Rick from The Young Ones).

But something new.

Go on, I dare you...

Did you say or infer Welsh is a dead language?

No Chris, it wasn't to you - it was to Steve - he seemed to be saying as such when there was some discussion on the Cynghanedd.... of course, I completely dispute his remark, in terms of the language and welsh poetry - I'm assuming he made it in ignorance...

Some observations:

1) There's more than one way to be musical. End rhyme is just one of them. It's not even the most effective. Basil Bunting is the most musical poet in the 20th Century in England, but he rarely used end rhyme. The musicality of poetry is infused in the whole poem, not just the ends of the line. I went to see the poet Micheal Haslam recently, whose stated aim is to bring rhyme back to modernist poetry. What he means by rhyme though is rather more interesting than moon/June Tin Pan Alley rhyming.

2) As far back as Milton, poets have been complaining about rhyme's ability to "pretty up" serious poetry, Milton compared it to a "tinkling bell," and said it wasn't for serious poetry. Shakespeare used blank verses in the great sollilquies, and only used rhyme in privately circulated poems such as the Sonnets.

3) The basic problem with rhyme is not its history, but its present. Nowadays, it's the thing people go for because they think, "it's poetry, it's got to rhyme." Often, it's not musical at all, it's ugly, it's obvious, it's out of place. It's badly abused, mainly because it's the first and last thing people think of. Rhythm (so much more than just "meter"), vowel and consonant sound within and across the lines, whether the words you use and the sense you make is actually beautiful, or mysterious, or convey whatever message you're trying to get across to the reader, or whether in writing it you've crossed any bridges of meaning yourself, are all more important than whether the poem end rhymes or not.

4) The challenge is still to write a poem that actually has some kind of resonance with the present. Too much rhyming poetry still sounds like Kipling on Mogadon.

5) The Welsh language is not a dead language. Poetry that uses rhyme as its only means of "musicality" is a dead language.

6) The challenge is still there - for you, though. I wouldn't judge it - but it is up to you to ask yourself: am I actually treading on well-trodden ground or am I actually moving things forward? Tradition - the whole history of poetry - is a moving stream, not a weight that you have to drag behind you every time you write.

These are observations on a debate that was interesting a couple of years ago. Of course they're subjective.

And blank verse is not free verse. It's unrhymed metered verse.

I still can't think of any rhyming poet who has any relevance to the modern world. Not that many poets full stop are. Most of us are pissing in the wind, a sideshow to the main event, which is the rapacious greed of global capitalism.

Music is not poetry. Most lyrics don't stand up as poetry, nor are they meant to. But sometimes they can make glorious nonsense and move us to feel something.

I would no more wish to escape the musicality of poetry than I would wish to escape the musicality of the wind in the trees.

You see Chris there are two ways of doing discussions. One is to say "yes but there's also this..." Then, there's the deliberate putting on of an opposite point of view. The second has the advantage of making people actually justify what they're doing. I'm sure there's plenty of good rhyme out there (though I don't see much that inspires me), but it certainly makes for a lively discussion and stops that old "it's not poetree if it don't rhyme" brigade from hogging the discussions.

Like I said, this discussion was interesting to me about two years ago. Frankly. now I don't care.

The problem is that I can't think of a poet with any kind of literary reputation who I would say uses end-rhyme effectively and interestingly at the moment.

Except possibly Paul Muldoon, who stretches the idea of rhyme so far it almost becomes something else - he'd rhyme "cat" and "dog", for instance.

And the kind of poetry I'm interested in is usually experimental, modernist, genre-busting, out-there. I'm not interested in most mainstream poetry, and the vast majority of "performance poets" just seem as interesting as your average end-of-pier comedian. Of course I'm terribly prejudiced. But so is your average jazz fan when faced with Britney Spears clones and X-Factor wannabees.

I think you should go back to Eliot and let the words roll over you. Prufrock is what got me into poetry as a mysterious force, that plays on your imagination even when you don't "understand it." He once said that poetry communicates before it's understood, and I agree. I can't stand the English obsession with empirical "meanings", like everything has to be summed up into a neat little paraphrase: "This poem is about the death of my dog, and comments on how short life is, and how it's the government's fault." Ugh!

I find myself quoting bits of Prufrock at odd moments: "I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled," "Do I dare to eat a peach?" and the devastingly sad couplet, "I heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that shall sing for me."

Never mind what it "means": it's what a poem does to you that matters.

SW- Never mind what it "means": it's what a poem does to you that matters.


Then what matter if whatever utilises rhyming words?

My Rain Dancer living becomes a railway bridge
orange jaffa cake takes northampton's ridge
Dick Barton book on the floor of Duncan

Gus... as ever wafflin

Sorry, that does nothing to me. :)

You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows

I've long ago ceased to care about rhyme or not rhyme. As I've already said. Except to get annoyed by the nonsense of "it's not poetry, it doesn't rhyme."

I ought to say, however, that it's not that I think a poem ought to be meaningless. A poem will have a meaning, because it's made of words and (usually) usually sentences.

But I never personally approach writing a poem with "something to say" as in a message, or an insight that I'm passing on to the reader. I hope to gain an insight, to discover a meaning, as I'm writing; and hopefully the reader will do the same. It may not be the same discovery that I make though.

I really do want to finish this thread; it is absorbing. Best material in ages. But I also have to eat and sleep.

what thread?