Playing the Indian Card

Friday, January 10, 2025

Why Nothing Rhymes Anymore

 

Newman's "Voice of Fire," in the National Gallery of Canada: your tax dollars at work.

 Bought for $1.76 million in 1990.

At a recent meeting of a poetry group, the moderator warned a new participant against using rhyme. She had warned me too some time ago, although I ignored it. She did not give any reason why rhyme is bad; she just knew you weren’t supposed to do it. She explained that rhyme is frowned upon by those who have been through any MFA programme, and by journal editors. So you won’t get published. 

I believe this is why Leonard Cohen left poetry for songwriting. He had been publicly pilloried by fellow poet Louisa Dudek on the grounds that his poetry was not experimental enough; it was too conventional. He figured he had no future in poetry then. Writing song lyrics permitted him to rhyme.

Joni Mitchell’s path to songwriting was eerily similar. She had started out wanting to be a painter. She dropped out of art school because they would not tolerate representational painting; everything had to be abstract.

The key to understanding poetry is that its proper medium is memory, just as the proper medium for prose is the printed page, and of plays the human voice. Rhyme, as a mnemonic, is therefore of value; a rhymed poem is in principle better than an unrhymed poem. It gives another hook to the memory, and another reason for that word to be there.

The lack of rhyme in modern poetry, and the lack of representation in modern art, probably explains why both have lost their popular audience. Nobody buys or reads poetry anymore; it used to be the most popular form of writing. And nobody really appreciates abstract art; people buy it as an investment, and praise it because they think it makes them sophisticated.

Representation is also rejected now in poetry: narrative poetry is discouraged. I had a poem rejected as an entry in one poetry contest, on the grounds that it was not really a poem, but a story, because it had a narrative line. The same poem later won the Mensa World Poetry Prize.

So why are rhyme and representation rejected? The obvious reason is because they are hard to do. It is always easier to write an unrhymed poem than a rhymed poem; to paint an abstraction than to paint a representation. So long as the element of needing to appeal to an audience is removed, it is in the self-interest of artists to discourage both. Even those who are capable of decent rhyme or representation: take away that requirement, and they can crank out product. It works best or artists who are in it as a career, instead of a vocation.

And that is what academics and credentialism does: it removes market forces, removes the customer, and frees practitioners to pursue pure self-interest.

And this seems to have destroyed not just contemporary art, but many other fields. The quality of teaching has collapsed since the emergence of schools of education. The quality of journalism has collapsed since the emergence of schools of journalism. 

Academic departments generally develop a contempt for whatever subject they are supposedly there to advance. It looks like work. Nothing compels them to work. They will find a way to toss it off, and do something else instead. Often politics.

And they will try to ruin anyone who wants to do a good job. They are scabs.

For the sake of civilization, it may be necessary to shut down the universities. Kill credentialism. Now that we have infinite access to information through the internet, there is no justification for them.


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