🚀 go-pugleaf

W.Dockery wrote:

> 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


That is correct....