🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2022-05-04 1:53 a.m., W.Dockery wrote:
> George J. Dance wrote:
>
>> On 2022-05-02 6:56 p.m., W.Dockery wrote:
>>> General-Zod wrote:
>>>> George J. Dance wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
>>>
>>>>> Always Marry an April Girl, by Ogden Nash
>>>>> [...]
>>>>> April golden, April cloudy,
>>>>> Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
>>>>> [...]
>>>>> https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2022/04/always-marry-april-girl-ogden-nash.html
>>>>>
>>>
>>>> Cool, second read
>>>
>>>
>>> Nash definitely was the master of his niche in poetry.
>
>> Oh, yeah. As an example:I remember one textbook I picked up in the
>> last half of the last century. It was very modern in its approach to
>> verse. First, it ignored rhythm / meter completely. Second, it
>> pontificated that rhyme was good only for humorous effect; and the one
>> example of rhyme it cited was Ogden Nash.
>
>> Be that as it may, I'm glad to have his poetry on the blog. This debut
>> is a bit out of the ordinary -- it reads like a love poem he dashed
>> off to his wife, whether he did or whether he designed it that way
>> (probably the latter, since his wife was born in March).
>
>
> As you know, much of my early years of poetry writing and study I was
> taught to shun rhymes, in popular culture and personal school studies
>
>
> My teacher and mentor Dan Barfield, as you know, famously told our class:
>
> "Rhyme is a crutch."

That would be late 70s, in high school back when and where rhyme was
most out of fashion. I encountered the same prejudice in my friends who
wrote poetry; all of them shunned rhyme, and only liked the poems in
which I did the same.

But regardless of Dan's views on rhyme, I'd interpret his maxim more
charitably, not as saying "Don't use rhyme", but as Don't rely on rhyme;
don't try to use it to support work that isn't supported otherwise.

If I were teaching poetics, I'd advise new students to start by writing
open form, until they'd learned how to write poems - how to arrange the
words to tell a story, or present a scene, or even construct an
argument, to give the reader an epiphany.

Then I'd instruct them on meter, rhyme, and finally forms. But I'd make
it clear that in their poems they'd have to use those in addition to all
that other stuff they learned earlier, not as a substitute (or "crutch)
for them.

>
> I learned to begin to embrace rhyme, meter and form, et cetera, in these
> later years.

I won't claim any credit, since you were using rhymes before I got on
the group. But I do think that being on aapc was probably a big
influence on your doing that.