Time for Rhyme

The All-Rhyme June issue of Snakeskin is just about ready to go online – and I’m very proud of it, because it demonstrates how versatile rhyme can be.

In it you’ll find funny rhymes and serious ones, flamboyant rhymes and subtle ones, wise rhymes and witty ones, profound rhymes and nonsensical ones.

Often these days, rhyme is seen by the more po-faced poetical cliques as belonging to the ghetto of light verse and the deliberately unserious. And old-fashioned. As Tom Vaughan puts it in his poem in June Snakeskin, for many it’s a ‘generational/ sign your stuff’s just/ recreational’. Snakeskin is a champion of light verse, and there are sparky examples of it (double dactyls!) in the present issue. But we are also solid believers in the proposition that rhyme can do more. Rhyme is is not just for fun; it has work to do. It is a way of structuring poems; it is a way of ensuring that the right words receive emphasis. It is one of the best tools we have for giving words life. Working together, metre and rhyme can get words dancing.

But here’s something that matters even more : Rhyme is a constraint, and so using it can make you a better poet. In an excellent piece (worth reading in its entirety) A.E. Stallings pointed out:

Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say.

In other words, it means we don’t just unthinkingly splurge what we sort-of-vaguely-intended onto the paper. Rhyming forces us to think about our language, It makes us search our vocabularies for the word that both exactly fits the pattern and exactly tells the truth. Manage that twofold task, and you’ve got a poem.

For centuries rhyme and regular metre were seen as the basis of the English poetical tradition. Not so these days, apparently.

Take that increasingly peculiar magazine Poetry Review. Its Summer 2024 issue is an almost entirely rhyme-free zone. The one exception is in a tribute to veteran poet Michael Donaghy, which quotes some good quatrains of his from the (though one contributor points out that his ‘full rhymes and “classical” metrical schemes’ feel like ‘a bygone way of doing things.) But then, the Review is the product of the Poetry Society, which this year gave its top competition prize to a prose rant about an unpleasant taxi driver. If the piece had been written as a statement to the police, I would have no problem with it – but as a poem? There was no life in the language, no ambiguity, no digging deep into the resources of the sayable. It was the personal statement of a sad lady who had had a bad experience, and perhaps the competition judges felt appalled by what had happened to her. Call it a poem if you really must, but can you claim that as a poem it is anything but one-note and ?

I am not saying that all the poems in that issue of Poetry Review are bad. (There is one by Imtiaz Dharkar that I think is very good.) but I do think that the Poetry Society would be spending its hefty Arts Council grant more wisely if it encouraged poets who were attempting something difficult.

Because rhyme is not easy. It requires a large vocabulary. It requires an apprenticeship. (Have you ever looked at the juvenilia of Larkin or of Auden, to see how long and how steadfastly they worked at rhyming before they found the facility in which they could express themselves freely in their own poetic voices?)

If you want to see what rhyme can do, take a look at Snakeskin’s June issue (coming online on June 1^st). It contains poems written in a huge variety of moods, united only by the pleasure the poets take in this apparently unfashionable poetic resource. To our young readers, if any, I say this: Don’t believe your kindly teachers who reassure you that it doesn’t have to rhyme, and who praise your clunking lines of prosy clichés. Read poets of the past. See how rhyming has helped them to give full expression to what they say. Feel the joy of discovery that comes from finding that one perfect rhyme that says everying that – before you began writing – you didn’t know that you wanted to say.