The Art of not rhyming
It’s been years since I’ve read Charles Bukowski’s novel, Women. I like some of Bukowski’s work (Ham on Rye is probably the best coming-of-age book I’ve ever read), but I remember being underwhelmed by Women.
Another thing I remember about the book (or maybe “misremember” since it’s been so long) is that Chinaski (Bukowski’s alter-ego) describes a woman by saying she wrote terrible rhyming poetry, or words to that effect.
Chinaski didn’t say that the poetry was bad because it rhymed, but I think there is a feeling among a lot of poets that rhyming poetry is handicapped and sort of embarrassing, either antiquated in form or juvenile. Say “rhyme” to some people and the first associated phrase conjured may be “nursery rhyme.”
There are of course people who feel the same way about free verse poets as some free verse poets feel about the rhymers. Someone (maybe the polymath John Derbyshire?) once mentioned that in order for poetry to technically be poetry (rather than just tripe or doggerel) it had to satisfy two of three criteria, which were form, meter, and rhyme. So presumably if you write an elegy (form) in iambic pentameter (meter), but it doesn’t rhyme, you’ve technically written a poem.
Otherwise you’re just a self-indulgent twit, or something…
I suppose some people would feel about Derbyshire’s definition the way that teacher (Robin Williams) in Dead Poet’s Society felt about the official class text on poetry. He calls on a student to read an excerpt from the school’s book on poetry and then orders his students to shred the book’s pages.
It’s been a very, very long time since I saw Dead Poet’s Society, and even as a child I can remember feeling manipulated by its cheap, saccharine tactics. It was typical Oscar bait, like the English Patient, Forrest Gump, or Good Will Hunting; I can’t remember which better movies it overshadowed that year with its hammy theatrics and I’ve long-since stopped paying something like the Oscars as much attention as a sidelong glance requires.
My own feeling about poetry is that neither the free verse school nor the Derbyshire School (I’m making that coinage just for the sake of this blog piece) are correct or incorrect. I love Robinson Jeffers and I love rap music.
But then again, not even all rap music rhymes, and some of my favorite lines are from lyricists who, for whatever reason, decided to forego their usual rhyming and buck the trend. It was as if they were saying they rhymed so much and so well that it was almost boring to continue to do so. The rebellion against typical scansion created its own wonderful sound, like a Kaon or haiku.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. A little while back someone asked the rapper DMC (of the legendary hip-hop/hard rock trio Run DMC) who the best rapper of all-time was. Darrell (DMC) said he knew it was Chuck D, of Public Enemy, after he heard him drop this line:
My style versatile said without rhymes
Which is why they're after me an' on my back
Lookin' over my shoulder - seein' what I write
Hearin' what I say - then wonderin' why
Why they can't ever compete on my level
Superstar status is my domain
You need two hands to clap to a beat, but it’s the sound of one hand clapping that has kept people thinking all these centuries (I think Stephen King said Harlan Ellison’s writing many times achieves this quality).
If I had to pick my own personal favorite non-rhymes by rhymers, I would have to say they essayed from either Scarface or Khujo from the group Goodie Mob.
Scarface has been the most consistent rapper over the decades (with the possible exception of Kool G Rap) and his distinct Texas flow has a righteous preacherly quality to it unlike the voice of any other rapper. He’s also a bit thematically deeper than almost every rapper, and he has the most instantly recognizable voice of any rapper in history except maybe Slick Rick (with his cockney accent) or Biggie Smalls (with his baritone Bedstuy, Brooklyn accent he sounds like the unholy lovechild of Rodney Dangerfield and Barry White).
‘Face can rap his ass off, but when I think of him, the first line of his that keeps running through my mind is, “I say goodbye to you cruel world/I say peace to you red sky.” Yes, it’s simple (or seems simple), but so are most epitaphs.
Khujo’s contribution is almost as good, or maybe as good. It’s all subjective, I guess (otherwise, we wouldn’t have this unbreachable divide between the Bukowskis and the Derbyshires). “We live like kings/ And die like fucking men.” Again, pretty simple, but it reminds me of a book I read on Russian prison tattoos, in which one Cyrillic bit of Indian ink scrawled on a convict’s arm was translated as “I am not a slave. I cannot be made to work.” That work itself would be equated with slavery, I thought, meant that something was either lost in translation from Russian to English, or this was a man who had decided to turn laziness into a principled stand (a stand, to which I also hew, by the way, undoubtedly, since I woke up today at 4:30 pm and had to force myself to write this blog entry).
Still … “We live like kings/and die like fucking men” says quite a bit. It’s a strong declarative statement with no rhyme, and a lot of scansion, telling the world that I’m not budging for its whims, and I’m not backing down from a conflict, either. It’s a resolution that neither invites conflict nor avoids it.
These exceptions to the hard and fast rhyming rule of rap seem to crop up for those who have rhymed so much and so well and so consistently for so long that they can afford to throw some seemingly offhand non-rhymes out there, just to prove their point. It’s like a billionaire like Howard Hughes walking his casino floors in old tennis shoes (as he was rumored to do) or billionaire Warren Buffet sitting in the cheap seats at a sporting event (as I know he does).
That said, I love rhyming, in poetry and in rap (which arguably overlap, but that’s a topic for another blog entry). Without rhyming in general, and Eminem more specifically, I wouldn’t know that the seven syllable phrase “the burial of Jesus” rhymes perfectly with “Venereal diseases.” I guess seven truly is a lucky number.
Crazy, huh?
Another thing I remember about the book (or maybe “misremember” since it’s been so long) is that Chinaski (Bukowski’s alter-ego) describes a woman by saying she wrote terrible rhyming poetry, or words to that effect.
Chinaski didn’t say that the poetry was bad because it rhymed, but I think there is a feeling among a lot of poets that rhyming poetry is handicapped and sort of embarrassing, either antiquated in form or juvenile. Say “rhyme” to some people and the first associated phrase conjured may be “nursery rhyme.”
There are of course people who feel the same way about free verse poets as some free verse poets feel about the rhymers. Someone (maybe the polymath John Derbyshire?) once mentioned that in order for poetry to technically be poetry (rather than just tripe or doggerel) it had to satisfy two of three criteria, which were form, meter, and rhyme. So presumably if you write an elegy (form) in iambic pentameter (meter), but it doesn’t rhyme, you’ve technically written a poem.
Otherwise you’re just a self-indulgent twit, or something…
I suppose some people would feel about Derbyshire’s definition the way that teacher (Robin Williams) in Dead Poet’s Society felt about the official class text on poetry. He calls on a student to read an excerpt from the school’s book on poetry and then orders his students to shred the book’s pages.
It’s been a very, very long time since I saw Dead Poet’s Society, and even as a child I can remember feeling manipulated by its cheap, saccharine tactics. It was typical Oscar bait, like the English Patient, Forrest Gump, or Good Will Hunting; I can’t remember which better movies it overshadowed that year with its hammy theatrics and I’ve long-since stopped paying something like the Oscars as much attention as a sidelong glance requires.
My own feeling about poetry is that neither the free verse school nor the Derbyshire School (I’m making that coinage just for the sake of this blog piece) are correct or incorrect. I love Robinson Jeffers and I love rap music.
But then again, not even all rap music rhymes, and some of my favorite lines are from lyricists who, for whatever reason, decided to forego their usual rhyming and buck the trend. It was as if they were saying they rhymed so much and so well that it was almost boring to continue to do so. The rebellion against typical scansion created its own wonderful sound, like a Kaon or haiku.
I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. A little while back someone asked the rapper DMC (of the legendary hip-hop/hard rock trio Run DMC) who the best rapper of all-time was. Darrell (DMC) said he knew it was Chuck D, of Public Enemy, after he heard him drop this line:
My style versatile said without rhymes
Which is why they're after me an' on my back
Lookin' over my shoulder - seein' what I write
Hearin' what I say - then wonderin' why
Why they can't ever compete on my level
Superstar status is my domain
You need two hands to clap to a beat, but it’s the sound of one hand clapping that has kept people thinking all these centuries (I think Stephen King said Harlan Ellison’s writing many times achieves this quality).
If I had to pick my own personal favorite non-rhymes by rhymers, I would have to say they essayed from either Scarface or Khujo from the group Goodie Mob.
Scarface has been the most consistent rapper over the decades (with the possible exception of Kool G Rap) and his distinct Texas flow has a righteous preacherly quality to it unlike the voice of any other rapper. He’s also a bit thematically deeper than almost every rapper, and he has the most instantly recognizable voice of any rapper in history except maybe Slick Rick (with his cockney accent) or Biggie Smalls (with his baritone Bedstuy, Brooklyn accent he sounds like the unholy lovechild of Rodney Dangerfield and Barry White).
‘Face can rap his ass off, but when I think of him, the first line of his that keeps running through my mind is, “I say goodbye to you cruel world/I say peace to you red sky.” Yes, it’s simple (or seems simple), but so are most epitaphs.
Khujo’s contribution is almost as good, or maybe as good. It’s all subjective, I guess (otherwise, we wouldn’t have this unbreachable divide between the Bukowskis and the Derbyshires). “We live like kings/ And die like fucking men.” Again, pretty simple, but it reminds me of a book I read on Russian prison tattoos, in which one Cyrillic bit of Indian ink scrawled on a convict’s arm was translated as “I am not a slave. I cannot be made to work.” That work itself would be equated with slavery, I thought, meant that something was either lost in translation from Russian to English, or this was a man who had decided to turn laziness into a principled stand (a stand, to which I also hew, by the way, undoubtedly, since I woke up today at 4:30 pm and had to force myself to write this blog entry).
Still … “We live like kings/and die like fucking men” says quite a bit. It’s a strong declarative statement with no rhyme, and a lot of scansion, telling the world that I’m not budging for its whims, and I’m not backing down from a conflict, either. It’s a resolution that neither invites conflict nor avoids it.
These exceptions to the hard and fast rhyming rule of rap seem to crop up for those who have rhymed so much and so well and so consistently for so long that they can afford to throw some seemingly offhand non-rhymes out there, just to prove their point. It’s like a billionaire like Howard Hughes walking his casino floors in old tennis shoes (as he was rumored to do) or billionaire Warren Buffet sitting in the cheap seats at a sporting event (as I know he does).
That said, I love rhyming, in poetry and in rap (which arguably overlap, but that’s a topic for another blog entry). Without rhyming in general, and Eminem more specifically, I wouldn’t know that the seven syllable phrase “the burial of Jesus” rhymes perfectly with “Venereal diseases.” I guess seven truly is a lucky number.
Crazy, huh?
No comments have been added yet.
