🚀 go-pugleaf

George J. Dance wrote:

> On 2022-05-04 1:53 a.m., Will Dockery wrote:
>> George J. Dance wrote:
>>
>>> On 2022-05-02 6:56 p.m., Will 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.


I once credited Tupac Shakur with bringing me around to rhyming poetry, and the stand up delivery at poetry readings, which I began performing at weekly, sometimes daily, in 1995.

I rode around town one night with my friend Terry Nell, listening to a cassette tape of Tupac Shakur, studying his rhyme and delivery, which was state of the art at the time:

https://allpoetry.com/Tupac-Shakur