jubabeast

First, I grew up during a time when most poems rhymed. At least I grew up reading rhyming poetry. If you wrote lines of text that didn’t rhyme, you were just stories. If you were writing non-rhyming lines without proper subjects, verbs, objects, prepositions, adverbs, punctuation, and all of those other grammatical things, then you were a numbskull.

Secondly, poems that don’t rhyme are far too often sad and depressing. Of course, saying sad and depressing is redundant, but I like saying it anyway.

Why people who write free verse feel sad is a puzzle. Maybe if you are sad you are to tired to make words rhyme. Probably when a free-verser accidentally makes a rhyme he or she immediately cheers up and quits writing free verse. I wrote a couple of free verse poems and one is very sad and the other is very crazy.

A good rhyme and meter is a lot of work. It shows that you really care about what you have created, that you didn’t just slap some words down and dare someone to critique them. When a rhyming poem works, it really works with the blood, sweat, and tears thing,,, and don’t start in on how blood doesn’t fit with sweat and tears, ok,

Anyway, poetry should rhyme all the time…that’s what makes it poetry. There should be another name for the lowercase, unpunctuated, allover the page stuff. Here’s a little poem I wrote to describe them:

A Free-born Poem

A bastard poem, born to morn
Without a rhyme, without a form
No one cared to dress it right
Teach it to walk, talk, or recite