Published: July 12, 2008 08:00 pm      

On Poetry: Rhythm washes up in waves

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

My cousin Alan stands in front of the campfire on the beach and recites this long poem by Robert Service without a hitch. We love the way it rhymes and has a regular meter, the way it tells a good story. So, here's a question for summer: When the tide goes in and out, when the waves wash up in rhythm, why is it that most contemporary poetry doesn't have a regular rhythm, doesn't rhyme and often doesn't tell a story? What's the pleasure in that? I've been asked this question a lot. When I give poetry readings, many young people raised on rap want me to read rhyming, metered poems. Rhyme (and regular rhythm) is still around, I say. It always has been. You can find it in the best literary magazines. Cowboy poets are using it. Hallmark cards are using it. I use it sometimes.

There's no doubt, it's comforting and fun to know what's coming next. It's comforting and fun to follow a rhythm. People have thought so for many years:

Western wind, when will thou blow,

-- Anonymous (1450?)

But poetry didn't start out with rhyme and meter. Before the printing press, when poems had to be memorized, they contained all sorts of repetitions to make that easier -- repetitions of phrase (check out the Psalms) and repetition of sounds (look at the alliteration in Beowulf). But even printed poems are spoken. We speak a poem in our head as we read it. The poet W. B. Yeats ends a poem with "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" The sound and the sense of a poem are so fastened together there's no separating them.

Since the early 20th century, it seems as though most poems have been "free verse." One explanation is that as it became increasingly easy to map the surface of things (with movies, photography, recorded music), poetry, like modern painting, began to intensify its role as mediator between our interior and exterior worlds. And that's reflected in the forms of the poems. The mind, we notice, moves in mysterious ways. It doesn't come to neat closure. It doesn't move like a metronome. It's always open, exploring. It doesn't necessarily know what's coming next. Listen to this poem spoken by a swimmer who imagines returning to her beginnings, being a fish again. Be careful to pause briefly at the line breaks as you read it.

The Sea

-- Mary Oliver (1935 - )

The short, staggered lines rock us like waves. Notice the sounds that chime against each other -- life/cries, flesh/legs/lock, scales/shingling/sprawled/salt, and so on. They're subtle as a symphony. Notice how this poem, although speaking publicly, connects the outer and inner worlds surprisingly, and deeply. And notice how compressed, and how complex, it is.

It's not a question of either/or. It's possible to love rock 'n' roll's four-beat rhythm and also to love difficult symphonic music. As long as the language is rich and meaningful, there's room in poetry for rhyme, regular rhythm, irregular rhythm, strange line breaks, strange shifts of thought, silliness and seriousness.

Fleda Brown, of Traverse City, is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. Learn more about her at fledabrown.com