Should Rhyming Poets Be Castrated?

[YesNo]

Jar of Echoes is pretty amazing. Lyrics are here along with the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWXbi-huWD8

If these lyrics were posted on this site I can image others telling the author that he or she should stop rhyming. It would be easy to remove the few end-rhymes in this song, but what would that accomplish? One would get nothing better than what one had before.

That's why the focus on rhyming is misplaced. Artists and critics should focus on the message and improve the sound quality of the writing rather than preaching ideology that bans some sound components.

What I like about Wolf's thread is that he caricatures, perhaps unintentionally, this anti-rhyming inanity.

Not bad, but better (a thousand times better) is the Jewish poet David Lerner.

Both Larkin and Lerner are self-righteously angry. There's nothing wrong with that, but if one wants to have a major impact one has to go beyond anger.

Lerner writes, as Wolf quoted:

I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up

He didn't succeed in blowing up poetry, at least not with that piece. However, many artists do succeed. Here's an example of poetry being blown up. I like to think Adele Adkins wrote most of the lyrics but credit is also given to Dan Wilson.




It looks like the Royal Albert Hall was packed. At about 2:50 into the video, Adele took the microphone and directed it at the audience. She asked them to sing the lyrics, and they did. Not only did they all know the lyrics, they loved them.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

[WyattGwyon]

So the rhyme could be used to make discordant disturbing music & poetry – interesting idea!

I like the music on that link. Although I wish it was more – powerful & dramatic. If Beethoven were alive today maybe he would compose discordant stuff like that – but I bet it would be more powerful.

Yeah. Discordant poetry with the use of horrible rhymes on purpose. You might be onto something.

I found it insipid and uninteresting.

Speculation on what Beethoven would compose today is silly. Do you mean someone of his genetic makeup raised by a completely different set of people in a different environment? Or do you mean Beethoven transported through a time machine and forced to make a living as a composer today? If the former I wouldn't assume he would become a composer. If the latter, he would find the posted piece incomprehensible or a bad joke.

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

Two stanzas from Dylan Thomas. Write something better and then complain about rhyming verse.

[Paulclem]

Not bad, but better (a thousand times better) is the Jewish poet David Lerner. Perhaps only the literary world could make a Jewish poet so sick to his stomach that he would entitle a poem about it “Mein Kampf” :

“Mein Kampf”
by David Lerner

all I want to do is
make poetry famous

all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick

I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money



this ain’t no party
this ain’t no disco
this ain’t no foolin’ a

grab-bag of
clever wordplay and sensitive thoughts and
gracious theories about

how many ambiguities can dance on the head of a
machine gun

this ain’t no
genteel evening over
cappuccino and bull****

this ain’t no life-affirming
our days have meaning
as we watch the flowers breath through our souls and
fall desperately in love

this ain’t no letter-press, hand-me-down
wimpy beatnik festival of *****ing about
the broken rainbow

it is a carnival of dread

it is a savage sideshow
about to move to the main arena

it is terror and wild beauty
walking hand in hand down a bombed-out road
as missiles scream, while a
sky the color of arterial blood
blinks on and off
like the lights on Broadway
after the last junkie’s dead of AIDS

I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up
not to dandle it on my knee
like a retarded child with
beautiful eyes
but

throw it off a cliff into
icy seas and
see if the the mother****er can swim for its life

because love is an excellent thing
surely we need it

but, my friends…

there is so much to hate These Days

that hatred is just love with a chip on its shoulder
a chip as big as the Ritz
and heavier than
all the bills I’ll never pay

because they’re after us

they’re selling radioactive charm bracelets
and breakfast cereals that
lower your IQ by 50 points per mouthful
we get politicians who think
starting World War III
would be a good career move
we got beautiful women
with eyes like wet stones
peering out at us from the pages of
glassy magazines promising that they’ll
**** us till we shoot blood

if we’ll just buy one of these beautiful switchblade knives

I’ve got mine

I like it - but a thousand times better? I don't think it's better, but then that's just my opinion.

The problem with this kind of poetry, as I see it, is it presumes on action from essentially a passive situation. I've just glanced at his bio - so he lived a bohemian life. What did he change but fail to give himself the chance to pursue belief/ non-belief through his writing and poetry. I'm not criticising someone for leading a bohemian lifestyle, or for taking drugs, but what does it achieve if your write all the rage and then kill yourself through selfish indulgence? It is preachy and apocalyptic whilst the poet himself is self indulgent and ultimately impotent. He could well have become great - it's a good poem of its type. At least Larkin had the courage to pursue his lifelong disillusionment towards a flowering of his poetry. Lerner talks of a kind of subversive courage,but the hyperbole is unachieveable. Larkin had a downbeat courage which he pursued to the end.

[cacian]

If these lyrics were posted on this site I can image others telling the author that he or she should stop rhyming. It would be easy to remove the few end-rhymes in this song, but what would that accomplish? One would get nothing better than what one had before.

That's why the focus on rhyming is misplaced. Artists and critics should focus on the message and improve the sound quality of the writing rather than preaching ideology that bans some sound components.

What I like about Wolf's thread is that he caricatures, perhaps unintentionally, this anti-rhyming inanity.



Both Larkin and Lerner are self-righteously angry. There's nothing wrong with that, but if one wants to have a major impact one has to go beyond anger.

Lerner writes, as Wolf quoted:

I come not to bury poetry
but to blow it up

He didn't succeed in blowing up poetry, at least not with that piece. However, many artists do succeed. Here's an example of poetry being blown up. I like to think Adele Adkins wrote most of the lyrics but credit is also given to Dan Wilson.




It looks like the Royal Albert Hall was packed. At about 2:50 into the video, Adele took the microphone and directed it at the audience. She asked them to sing the lyrics, and they did. Not only did they all know the lyrics, they loved them.

Now that's what I'm talking about.

OK just one think. What happened to the shoes? How unclassy is that look?!

[hillwalker]

Trust a woman to focus on shoes (or the lack thereof)

H

[prendrelemick]

I found it insipid and uninteresting.

Speculation on what Beethoven would compose today is silly. Do you mean someone of his genetic makeup raised by a completely different set of people in a different environment? Or do you mean Beethoven transported through a time machine and forced to make a living as a composer today? If the former I wouldn't assume he would become a composer. If the latter, he would find the posted piece incomprehensible or a bad joke.

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

Two stanzas from Dylan Thomas. Write something better and then complain about rhyming verse.

Actually the piece that Emil posted reminded me a bit of Beethoven's last quartets. I think there was a nod in his direction in them.

[YesNo]

OK just one think. What happened to the shoes? How unclassy is that look?!

I missed her shoes.

I don't think she is high class. Her accent, when she is not singing, sounds lower-class, but I'm not sure not being from England. For all I know, that's how the Queen talks, but I doubt it.

She started the concert out, which is available on DVD, being amazed that she was actually in "Lord f*cking Albert Hall", which doesn't sound classy, but it was funny. She also clarified at the concert that her ex-boyfriend, who was an inspiration for this song, was not totally to blame by explaining, "He's an ahsshole and I'm a b*tch." I'll take her at her word.

My daughters like Adele. I've enjoyed this song and Rolling in the Deep. I wanted to pick someone who was young, female, who wrote her own rhyming lyrics that had gone beyond any initial anger and who was currently popular as an example. This would contrast with the Dylan, Cohen, Larkin and Lerner examples that were already presented.

I am not opposed to poetry that does not rhyme nor do I like all rhyming poetry. The Larkin poem about his parents and grandparents messing him up doesn't appeal to me because of the content even though it does rhyme. I do think language, whether poetry or prose, is basically sound and meaning. Too much of the 20th century disparaged the sound component of language as well as its meaning. Thankfully, we are now in the 21st century.

[hillwalker]

I don't think she is high class. Her accent, when she is not singing, sounds lower-class, but I'm not sure not being from England. For all I know, that's how the Queen talks, but I doubt it.

The class system in England died out about 100 years ago. No one outside the Royal family and the landed gentry speaks like the Queen, thank goodness (monotonously robotic).

H

[Paulclem]

I missed her shoes.

The Larkin poem about his parents and grandparents messing him up doesn't appeal to me because of the content even though it does rhyme. I do think language, whether poetry or prose, is basically sound and meaning. Too much of the 20th century disparaged the sound component of language as well as its meaning. Thankfully, we are now in the 21st century.

The rhyme is just the form, but the poem is shocking for the fact that Larkin seems so anti his own family. There is a kind of truth that he's getting at there. The undoubted influence of parents upon their children is what he's on about, and there are plenty of examples of people being messed up by their parents. When I first read it, I didn't like it because of the shock and content. This is despite the poem being very true of my own parents, both in the effect their parents had on them, and the effect they had on my own siblings.

I've no doubt that it has relevance for a lot of people, though it is a shocking poem - and much more shocking than the stream of consciousness expletives used by Wolf.

[YesNo]

Larkin is more shocking that Wolf.

The anger in Larkin's poem did not seem resolved to me. That's the main reason I didn't like it. Perhaps the anger shouldn't be resolved. Larkin is right that parents mess up their children. They also give them at least one blessing which is the chance to live and do things differently. Maybe the poem is fine the way it is. I can see why people like it.

I do find Adele's accent attractive. Of course, it could be just those long eyelashes.

[Scheherazade]

This reminds me that we should revive the "Poem of the Week" discussions again.

[Drkshadow03]

Then I would like to see the poetical equivalent to this:

http://youtu.be/BtV0dL2jEHw

I was inspired:

Loud Echo . . . Loud Echo
Screeching through the soul;
Eech, eech, eech, O, leech,
who slurps life’s faint swells.
Listen to the blasted wastes,
the belching concrete abysses,
the arguments of everyday,
the quotidian expenses.

All the girls whistle low,
puking on Michelangelo.

Knock, Knock,
woodpecker’s incessant call
inflames these migrained senses
where nuclear war bursts
against sanity’s weak defenses.
Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!
Oh, that cacophonous breath
like rancid meat left five days
in hell’s spectacle of shames.

All the girls whistle low,
puking on Michelangelo.

Gobble, Gobble, Munch, Munch!
They chew and spit my flesh,
each of these pretty snowflakes
drifting lost in the dreariness of death.

[Paulclem]

I've written free style verse, but i consider that being able to write a sonnet that conforms to the form, has rhyme that adds to the sense of the poem, develops an interesting/ significant argument, and is stimulating to read - or in other words is worth reading - would be something for me to aspire to.

As for castration - you'll have to sew them back on first.

( Thanks to Basil Fawlty for that one).

[WyattGwyon]

Actually the piece that Emil posted reminded me a bit of Beethoven's last quartets. I think there was a nod in his direction in them.

Well it was slightly more similar to Beethoven's late quartets than it was to the sound of an exhaust fan or a flushing toilet. Does that constitute a nod?

[Eiseabhal]

Perhaps the Wolf is just cryptically saying blank poetry is really good especially when it is blank. Rap hum hum "beo is cunnertach"