Skies as Couple-Colored as a Brinded Cow

La Misma hopes her readers have been enjoying her excursions into poesy. She certainly has. They are ego-free exercises in wordplay, sort of like playing with a huge box of pastels but with words.

I find it's very fun to rhyme, and it's been making me remember my inveighing against rhyming to my students when I taught creative writing. I told them they couldn't rhyme in their poems -- that it sounded like doggerel, and was trite and Hallmark card-y. Of course, I encountered a lot of opposition and I frustrated a lot of rhymers by my insistence that modern poetry had moved beyond rhyming and to rhyme would be a goofball move, a corny excursion to the dark ages, or the corny ages, or whatever.

What did I know? I was way out of my depth teaching poetry writing -- I had barely written a single passable poem myself, even after a terrifying upper-level workshop in my MFA program. I learned, during that semester, that I didn't even really know what a poem was. I would produce a string of non-rhyming, sensitive lines about something and submit them to my then-boyfriend who would shake his head, decisively. No. I hadn't gotten it yet.

I finally wrote a couple of half-decent poem-like things, but it was a struggle. But one thing I thought I knew as gospel was that a poem should not rhyme. No one in my graduate workshop wrote rhyming poems. The poems we read together, by people like Galway Kinnell, Jorie Graham and C.K. Williams, they didn't freaking rhyme. Rhyming was for babies!

But now I think we were wrong. Rhyming's fun. The rappers are right. The more rhymes you can think of in a row the more exhilarating it is. It's like surfing or something. It's like volleyball.

Maybe it's really more like songwriting, and maybe my years as a songwriter have made me extra-fond of rhyming. But I say, bring it back. Bring back formalism! We've had enough of those ragged claws scuttling around in silent seas. Let's have some straight-up rhymes.