Rhyme Removal (6.1.21)

Here's a curious idea for a writing project: find a poem written in rhyme and revise without the device.  

I was thinking of letting the poem be your own, but what's more delicious is to hack a famous poem, or at least one written by an established poet.  

This is an exercise in seeing a poem differently, how or whether the art can be made without traditional devices like rhyme and meter.  It's also an exercise in understanding what rhyme actually contributes to a particular poem, how it reinforces meaning or "beautifies" the reading experience.

This is not an exercise in humor.  The idea isn't to reduce a sober piece of writing, like "Stopping by Woods," for example, to a funny little poemlet.  Nor is it to make something strident or passionate into something ironic, sardonic, satirical.  Try to preserve the tone, temper, timbre, etc. of the original.

I recommend borrowing something from one of your lit survey anthologies, where you know the rhyme is "professional grade."  Failing that, go to an online compendium or catalog of poets and poetry, like one of the two provided through the links below.

So here is the project . . .

1. Choose any poem that is more or less a “standard,” such as “Stopping by Woods . . .” “Ozymandias,” ”On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” or something by Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Poe, Dickinson.  Or maybe something more modern, say, by Frost, Cummings, Roethke, Sexton, Lowell, Plath, H.D., or a poem by a recent or contemporary poet, like Arthur Sze (if you can find a rhymer by him!) or Rosanna Warren (ditto that).  You might also go out to Academy of American Poets or Poetry Foundation to look for the well-known rhymer and/or the well-known rhyme.
2. Read the poem several times through to get your footing in it.  Read for its theme(s), tone, voice, persona, etc., and, of course, for its rhyme scheme.  Your objective is to come to an understanding of the poem that’s deep or involved enough that you will be able to “break” the rhyme it’s built upon WITHOUT ALSO DESTROYING THE POEM’S “MEANING” OR TONE OF VOICE OR PERSPECTIVE OR STYLE/DICTION.  In other words, the only thing you want to change about the poem is the rhyme.  So, let’s say you select a poem by Sir Philip Sydney (Renaissance).  You’ll want to recreate the poem sans rhyme, but still using Elizabethan diction.  (One day, we’ll try a project in which we revise an Elizabethan poem into contemporary American English – but not next week!)
3. As usual, send your poem to me by Tuesday evening so I can collect everything into a single file for Wednesday’s salon. 

Have fun with it, learn something new about writing poems.  You know, just to see and hear what happens.

👍