imperfect effect

The best line in a rhymed poem is always one with an imperfect rhyme.

heard them coming

I could hear your rhymes coming, and by the time they landed, I had already found several preferable alternatives.

viewed through crystal

The surprise in the rhyme is not just a question of sound: Montale is one of the few poets who knows the secret of using rhyme to lower the tone, not to raise it, with unmistakable repercussions on meaning. Here the word ‘miracolo’ (miracle) which closes the second line is attenuated by rhyming with ‘ubriaco’ (drunk), and the whole quatrain seems to stay teetering on the edge, vibrating eerily.

[…]

My reading of “Forse un mattino’ could now be considered to have reached its conclusion. But it has sparked off inside me a series of reflections on visual perception and the appropriation of space. A poem lives on, then, also through its power to emanate hypotheses, digressions, associations of ideas in different areas, or rather to recall and hook on to itself ideas from different sources, organizing them in a mobile network of cross-references and refractions, as though viewed through a crystal.

—Italo Calvino, “Eugenio Montale, ‘Forse un mattino andando’,” Why Read the Classics? (Vintage Books, Random House, 2000).

Montale’s short poem translated by Jonathan Galassi appears in this essay by Huck Gutman.

rhyme made me do it

Another insipid turn of phrase brought forth by making a rhyme.

horrid words

The most horrid words are those deployed in poems only to make a rhyme.

prose all along

Whether or not cast in meter and/or rhyme, if the lines are readable, then they’re prose.

not de-prosed

Adding a metrical lilt to your lines and hanging some rhymes at the line endings, doesn’t de-prose your poetry. The prose remains despite the meter and rhyme.

nothing worse

Couplet: Is there anything worse / than a novel in verse?

condition of poetry

Interestingly, three of the major writerly features of the pieces in Tender Buttons are alliteration, rhyme, and repetition, mainstays of poetry. Are these the fixed points around which the apparent chaos of those separate words attempt to dance? Indeed, much of Stein’s difficult work inclines toward the condition of poetry…

[…]

Finally it was impossible: the meaning, the associated emotion, could not be destroyed. It could be baffled but no annihilated. Unlike the paint [re Cezanne] that became apples and mountains, or within both simply shapes on the flat inflexible surface of a canvas, words cling to their meanings. And the mind of the listener also clings to meaning. She told [interviewer Robert Bartlett] Haas:

   I took individual words and thought about them
   until I got their shape and volume complete and
   put them next to another word and at the same
   time I found out very soon that there is no such
   thing as putting them together without sense. I
   made innumerable efforts to make words write
   without sense and found it impossible. Any human
   being putting down words had to make sense
   out of them.

—Lawrence Raab, “Remarks as Literature: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein,” Why Don’t We Say What We Mean? (Tupelo Press, 2018)

mental link

Metaphor as mind-rhyme.

on time rime

Those expected rhymes that arrived on time.

ring wrong

His rhymes were unexpected, but in that bad way of being right by sound but off in tone or out of sorts with the diction.

shadow metaphor

Each rhyme pair was a shadow metaphor in the poem.

good for too

When a good couplet comes together it’s the simultaneous orgasm of language.

sound bound

Chained to those word echoes.

high-five rimes

Let’s just say his rhymes were so predictable and ringing that I thought of them as high-fiving one another.

rime on time

In the worst use of form you’ll find you’re reading ahead to see what the next rhyming word will be.

rhyme right

Rhyme that can lead one to locutions that strike a false or forced note or rhyme that rings true with a surprisingly new way of saying.

conjoined

The rhymes were too close: Like Siamese twins, sometimes one must suffer for the vitality of the other.

heroic couplets

Is it just me, or is there an echo in here?