To Rhyme Or Not To Rhyme

To rhyme or not to rhyme that is the question… to suffer poetic arrows of lines too narrow… ok,… I’ll stop!

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am an ardent addict of anything that has to do with assonance or internal rhyme. If I could feed bleeds of rhyme intravenously I’d have an English lit drip right here on my desk!

However… Steve Wheeler put it best in his last blog to refine, define, and stretch your skills as a poet by stepping out of your box into that big wide world of what for and try something new. He illustrated a sweet timeline of historic writing styles to draw from. Howeever, this article is not about semantics. I’ll leave that to the experts! This is about the “world of what for”…

Too much rhyming can get rather absurd, obtuse, and downright annoying. Just like Dr Suess or a crazy tongue twister…. not many people enjoy poems about silly Sammy slurping down slushies by the seashore… are flavored ice drinks called slushies outside of the United States?! Just curious…

Anyway, I’ve fell prey to this so many times I’ve made paper airplanes out of my supposed masterpieces just to see how far they would go! Usually, they would nose dive before they even made the open window… they were SO HEAVY with rhymes.

I’ve come to find that rhyming is much like cooking… you tend to pepper your dish to taste, not just douse it on there! Many simple quatrains or octave stanzas are of the ABAB or AABB or ABBA variety, which is conservative enough. 

Yet when you mix those forms with internal rhyming, or setting words that rhyme continuously next to each other… that’s a whole different beast.

It can slap you out a beautiful word salad,, with nothing but limp lettuce. No crunchies in there to provide zest, no veggie messages, nothing nutritious… just a blubbering politician on a same old stump speech bobbling right down the middle of the road. Boringsville. Nothing burger.

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However… with a proper method, incorporating little clever wordplay and a calculated flow, internal rhymes can be incredible…! Consider these zingers by our very own Steve Wheeler in an exert of his poem entitled “I Poet”…

I wright fiction 

I write suction 

I kick up a ruction 

I cause friction 

with my diction 

it's poetic abduction. 

I create propaganda 

proper scandal and banter

like a candid backhander 

to the casual bystander. 

I'll write ya more slander 

than you'll care to handle 

so just take a gander

at the verses I land ya.

You can't hold a candle 

to the substantial anvil 

of my written write-angle

I'm a pen wielding vandal. 

Steve Wheeler © 21 June, 2023

Clever wordplay, eh?! An inspiration to rhymes everywhere, Steve can really kick out the jams when it comes to internal rhyming, making it enjoyable, smooth, and cognitively assessable all the the same time.

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On the flip side of this confederate coin, dissonance in poems works as well, making the words work against themselves to create a feeling of disorder and anarchy. This can really  sculpt themes relating to madness, war, confusion or even death. I offer a few lines from one of my own as an example here entitled “Evocative Dissonance”..

innocents bombed without remorse dissonant explosions! 

political analytical meat for a course; collateral damage to the eyes

of buildings once filled with laughter and cheer insidious incredulous explosions!

now desolation mutilated tombs of fear-castigated with impunity 

trespassing outlasting suppression of loss for fumigant transference of misery

pushing on for survival no matter the cost… oh, maleficent malignancy 

missiles like thistles ripping into the air those sequentially random aneurisms 

bemoaning homes in hopes of someone is there creating fractures inequitable 

©️Matthew Elmore 

Ok… so I threw a few of my trademark rhymes in there! I told you,… it’s an addiction!! So this is not a true example of dissonance. However, notice how some words work against each other… “remorse/dissonant explosions” “fractures/inequitable”… nothing fits here … except they compliment each other in a strange way. Funny… there were NO RHYMES in this originally… I had to sprinkle a few bits of assonance and rhymes the piece was so corse. Too corse! Yet that, of course, is just a matter of taste. I prefer a spoonful of sugar with such a bitter subject.

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Some poems do not use rhymes at all to get a point across. Take this piece of a poem out of my recently published book Constellation Road called “Rumors Of Wars”…

snarling fires burn wicked tounges unclean

such miscommunications lead to world wars

launch enervating embers in unknowing eyes

destitute of delight to negotiate indignation

situated in instability floating on despair 

©️ Matthew Elmore

Nothing about that rhymes. But it works somehow.

 

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Whether or not rhyming works for you is really just a matter of style. I love it! Rhyming sings to me like music. Yet music is known to have its random crescendos, blurps and bleeps as well. That is what makes this world interesting… because if it were all the same,… how boring would that be? Try it sometime! Vive la difference! 

Please feel free to leave your comments below. I always appreciate hearing from you! Write on poet…

Matt Elmore