Experimental Poetry 7: Unexpected End Rhymes

For me, poetry is the art of constructing sentences and stanzas in a novel and entirely unexpected way. That means surprising readers with strange confections of words, and avoiding the predictable. One of the most predictable facets of sub-par poetry is the end rhyme. Badly thought-out, lazy or forced rhymes in poetry detract from the message, musicality or aesthetics of the piece. And there are so many bad rhyming poems! If you're intent on using end rhymes, then at least make them unusual, unpredictable, comic or perhaps even shocking. 

Method 12: Unexpected End Rhymes. One of the stanzas in a comic poem I wrote many years ago goes like this:

Got to write a poem and I got to write it soon
They've given me from now until the end of September

Yes, it's jarring, but it always raises a laugh from my audiences when I perform it live, because everyone expects me to say June. Comedy is often about the unexpected. And comedy has its place in poetry, especially the performance genre.

Even more absurd is another stanza toward the end of the poem:

I wandered lonely as a cloud amongst the forest glades and jungles
And all at once I came upon a host of golden ... daffodungles

I'm depicting the struggles of the poet as he tries to force an end rhyme. Poetry shouldn't be about forcing end rhymes and in the process losing the meaning or the message of the poem. Too many poets seem to think (especially when they are new to the scene) that all poetry must rhyme. It doesn't, and the worst kind of poetry is poetry where the rhyme has been forced or contrived. In the above poem I'm making fun of this approach, and saying - look, if you're going to rhyme, make it meaningful, and if you can't achieve that, make it shocking, unexpected, comic instead. 

Steve Wheeler

Previous posts in this series

Experimental Poetry 1: Found Poetry
Experimental Poetry 2: Stream of Consciousness
Experimental Poetry 3: Fake Translations
Experimental Poetry 4: Overlapping Voices
Experimental Poetry 5: Random Prompts
Experimental Poetry 6: The Movie Method

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