© 2012, 2015 by Leland Jamieson
(This page, like the one that precedes it, is fairly long – a personal account of my discovery of the poetry-writing zone. Send your poem in your comment as instructed on the first post before you spend time on this. Then print it out for future reference. Adapted from Chapter 1 of my book, How to Rhyme Your Way to ‘Metaphor Poems’.)
Do you like, or would you like, to express yourself and your feelings in a poem which does not later embarrass you?
Would you like to go more deeply and with more perception in a poem than you seem able to do at this time in your life?
And would you like to compose poetry more easily than you are able to now, if that were possible without compromising your poem’s honesty and quality?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, read on.
From my early teens I consciously wanted to write poems that rhymed. Try as I might, they were awful — forced rhymes made them ridiculous. I gave up finally and joined the free verse poets. I was afraid I’d never acquire the ability to think up unforced end-rhymes.
I chose William Carlos Williams as my mentor. I read and studied all his poetry, as well as a big biography, and, in it, much of the correspondence between him and both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
Williams had a deep longing to discover a metrical system to replace the English Foot. Yet this eluded him all his life. He had been a strong voice leading us out of the 19th Century’s clichéd sentiment, language, and subject matter. His voice, among others, ended the overly-stressed, end-stopped ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM lines that characterized most public readings of English and American Poetry of that time. We can thank him for freeing us from those readings!
Even in the hands of his followers, however, his “revolution” has failed to this day to solve “the problem of rhythm” in free verse. (I address some of the inherent reasons why in the post that precedes this.)
My own free verse poems, even the 39 or so that found publishers, were more than a disappointment to me. In hindsight, they never deserved publication.
I set out, at last, to learn how to write metrical or “blank” verse on contemporary themes. That mastered to a small degree, I turned again to an effort to learn how to write unforced end-rhymes. I finally stumbled, yes, literally stumbled, upon an approach which made natural-sounding end-rhymes possible, even easy, for me to write.
The result was a liberation of my imagination, feeling, and consciousness to a degree I had never before experienced! I began to see things in my peripheral vision I had never seen before.
This process can make it possible for you, too, more easily to write natural end-rhymes. And it can liberate your imagination, feeling, and consciousness as well. How I Stumbled on Random-Potential “Reverse Composition” Rhyming
Rhymes are slight and silly little things to be afraid of — but for most of my life I was afraid of them. As I’ve said, I was afraid I couldn’t find a rhyming word to express what I wanted to say that would not distort the meaning intended. And I was equally afraid to manipulate lines into metrical rhythm because it made them sound sing-song when read. Both were writer’s (poet’s) blocks for me.
(Maybe they are for you, too!)
I stumbled upon a strategy for how to use a rhyming dictionary that I imagine is somewhat akin to random-potential “probability theory” in modern physics. After composing the first metrical line of a new poem (a couplet, for example), I opened my rhyming dictionary. I scanned a list of rhymes matching the end-word of my first line. This took my mind off the poem, and in those moments it did I began to see, looking at suggestive rhymes, peripheral connections to what was buried in my mind and heart to say. Working at random, but also by intuition, and responding to the suggestiveness of each of the rhyme words, I let one of them — possessing nothing but pure potential — draw out of my heart and mind the most appropriate next line’s imagery, action, feeling, or thought. You might call it “reverse composition.” I call it “Reverse Composition Rhyming.”
When the lights go out at night and you are looking but can’t see directly, it often helps to glance to one side, and find what you’re seeking in your peripheral vision. This is, in effect, what happened in my mind as I glanced through a list of rhyme words.
(It was a big change from my usual mode of composing. That was to expect, once I was already in and even near the end of the next line, to struggle to come up with a rhyme word to end it so it made sense and felt and sounded right. It never did.)
Let me state this as clearly as I can: The process is “reverse” because rather than starting a new line and struggling for a rhyme, you start with the rhyme and let it gently pull a new line into place without a struggle, because you do not hold too strict a preconception of what that line might say.
Let me repeat, in different words: First find the rhyme, and only then the new line. Do this without too strict a preconception of what the new line might say, or what words it might employ. I don’t want to press this dynamic to the point of surrealism or deconstructionist chaos. I only want to impress upon you this: Be open to the possibility that the poem may take you coherently to a new and different place than you imagined when you first set out to compose. Be alert to this, and go with it. Your creativity lies within the poem, not apart from it or outside it, not even apart from it somewhere in your heart or head.
In addition, I learned to manipulate meter with enjambment in a way that leads to a more natural reading, and frees it from seduction by ta-TUMs. It allows speech-stress more freedom to play its jazz-like counterpoint to the metrical and musical stresses of the line. This works especially well when the upper enjambed line’s last word is an active verb that turns the reader without a pause to the next line below it. The absence of punctuation at the turning supports that reading.
I credit Reverse Composition Rhyming and Enjambment with blasting open a dam which had held back my range of feeling and imagination. That is to say, it released an open and free-flowing river of creativity. Nothing I ever did (as I said, I’d been scribbling free verse since I was a teen) had ever opened up such a large, warm and exciting access to memory. Nothing I’d tried ever presented such serendipitous gifts of present-time awareness, sensitivity, perceptivity, and access to appropriate imagery. How could this be? Through peripheral vision.
In my experience, free verse is less freeing in the making than formal verse because it tends to keep you in your left hemisphere, looking there, and from there outside to the world or inside to the realm of feeling without the help of peripheral vision's random inspiration.
A more freeing poetry, for me, and probably for you, is metrically manipulated rhyming (musical) lines. Working out the challenges inherent in crafting poems in such a musical manner does move one’s thought processes to a large extent into the “feeling” right hemisphere. It is full of present-time awareness as well as memory, warmth of feeling, insights, delights, playfulness and surprises far superior to what the always-analytical left hemisphere can offer. (There’s still plenty of use for “the left” when it comes time to make critical revisions.)
Let me invite you to anticipate the direct benefits to you of a strategic application of Reverse Composition Rhyming:
1. A reverse composition rhyming poem starts with a metrical line describing anything which causes you, the poet, to feel warmth. The subject or topic (what the poem is “about”) emerges only later in the process. This approach eliminates the crisis which you often experience (and may express in moans and groans) when deciding what to write a poem “about.” In fact, a rhyme word that particularly delights you with its warmth may cause you to change direction regarding what the poem is all about. It keeps you fluid and enables you to follow where the emerging coherence in the poem “wants to go.”
2. Reverse Composition Rhyming is crucial to freeing you from the panic of not being able to find an appropriate unforced rhyme once past the first line of the poem.
3. The process helps you know how to handle matters when you are “stuck.” Just try a new approach with a different line. Or try a different rhyme (to a new end word in the prior line synonymous with, or superior to, the original) to pull a new line into place.
4. Working in Reverse Composition rhyme builds vocabulary and reduces the temptation to fall back on clichés while you are selecting optimum rhymes from a larger universe than those that come first to mind.
5. Reverse Composition Rhyming offers a more supportive structure than free verse. That’s because it focuses and stimulates and (believe it or not) frees you to be more creative in the process of thinking in similes and, subsequently, metaphors. This also helps you revise a poem with greater point and intelligence by offering a more artistically complex and focused challenge than free verse.
Would you, my good reader, like to take the same steps to move your poetry composition more deeply into the right hemisphere, and enjoy the same benefits?
You may fear you have nothing at all to say worth saying. (I have that fear most every time I start a poem.) Yet, you will feel aroused by the music and rhythm which metrical reverse rhyming makes You will enter the poet’s zone. You will discover you do have “something to say” — or the Muse does, through you. The Muse speaks most originally through self-taught “meter-&-music-making” poets who write with their lips, fingers and ears in the “zone.”
Surprise yourself! Discover that it is easier to write formal verse well than “free” verse well. Formal verse, framed in contemporary feeling that is yours, language that is yours, and images that are yours, is most truly freeing. Work that is truly yours will be contemporary and will deserve to be shared.
Welcome to the poet’s realm of peripheral vision’s metrical random-potential reverse rhyming composition, bursting with music and creativity that is almost magical in the way it puts you in your poet’s “Zone”!
Oh, yes! Get and use a good American rhyming dictionary. The one I find most useful is Sue Young’s The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary (1991). It is an inexpensive Avon paperback with 65,000 entries. While you await that at the bookstore or mail box, start with lists of rhyming words you and your friends can think up working together.
I’ll close with a poem I wrote for a Middle School Student, and another for a more general audience. I suggest you read them aloud for full effect:
Dance of the Quivering Digits
For Savannah and her Fifth Grade friends. April, 2005.
When thought and feeling don’t pan out,
does your heart throb with aching doubt?
You fear that you will never write
another line that feels quite right?
Then drum your fingers, and find “feet”
to dance the line your digits beat!
Next, find a rhyme word that can pull
a second line — one trim but full —
from heart and mind and quivering hand
whether or not it’s what you “planned.”
When once you’ve got two lines that dance,
across your lips quick smiles will prance.
Where do these two lines want to go?
How step aside and let them flow?
If you rely on feet and rhyme
they’ll find you more lines, every time.
Say “Yes!” to their uncanny smarts —
well known for warming poets’ hearts!
They’ll often lead you to express
a thought or feeling with finesse
you did not know you had in you
until the rhyme pulled it in view.
Thus, you may open inner eyes
to see what’s true — for you. Surprise!
Formal Poet as a Rooster
As a violin beneath one’s jaw
will resonate in the conch of ear,
spread gooseflesh through the player’s maw,
electrify his chakras’ sphere,
impel him toward a right-brained awe —
so may a formal chanticleer.
The horsehair bow of reading stress
contests each line — articulates
what’s drawn across pentam or less
(tetram or trim) — and celebrates
new vibes that “free verse” can’t express.
What un-taut string reverberates?
It’s speech-stress firing at the breech
ignites taut measured lines’ end chimes,
push-pulls at sense with feeling’s reach —
as poet (reader, hearer) times
out moss-thick tongues, cliché-gray speech,
and cries up dew-fresh paradigms.
Okay! Enough of my chatter. Let’s see you find your poet’s zone in your work. Please follow the Three Requirements in the first opening post above. Thank you.
Leland
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