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.

On Rhyme in Poetry

Minnesinger

As you no doubt have noticed, I am featuring a new poem here about every day. A reader writes that he prefers the ones that rhyme, on the grounds that “that is the challenge on poetry.”

Not really. A poem is not a word puzzle, not a test of technical virtuosity with the language. Nor do good poems need to rhyme. Yeats, Eliot, Donne, and Shakespeare have written some of the best poems in the English language without rhyme.

What then is the point of rhyme? Why has it been so dominant in poetry, if less so these days?

Poetry is sometimes called “spoken word.” This is wrong. If you want the art of the spoken word, you want the play. Prose, on the other hand, is the art of the written word. What about poetry? The proper medium of poetry is not writing, and not speech. It is memory. A good poem is written to be memorized, and reveals itself fully only when memorized.

This is why every word must count: because they are going to be endlessly repeated in memory.

Poetry is originally a pre-literate form. The ancient bards and original minnesingers were memory artists. Homer and those who performed his Iliad and Odyssey, or Valmiki's Ramayana or the Mahabharata, had to go on reciting word-for-word for days. Their audiences would hear it, word-for-word, at regular intervals. The epics and lyrics lived first in memory.

Troubador

There is, it is true, an aesthetic aspect to rhyme. It is semi-musical. But rhyme primarily gives a reason for each word to be exactly where it is, and so provides hooks that help the memory. The repetition with variation also helps memorize. But there is no essential need for rhyme; it is secondary to the primary task of making the passage memorable. In “The Second Coming,” Yeats does as well by linking vivid images. Repetition of the same words can accomplish the job, as Donne does in “No Man Is an Island.” Shakespeare can do it with meter alone.

The memory is magical and is closely allied with the imagination. The imagination is the window on the spirit world. We currently seriously undervalue the memory. Aristotle, Aquinas, Plato, and Augustine did not. They considered it the essence of the human spirit. Without it, we would know nothing. To remember nothing is to know nothing; essentially, all of our experience beyond a Euclidian point is mediated by memory.

This is why poetry is, with music, the highest of the arts.