The time for rhyme has ended

A polemic

There is no greater evil than rhyme. And no poem of mine will ever contain one. No sentence will rage with repetition. No asinine alliteration will litter my work. The age of rhyme is over and a line has been crossed that will never be re-crossed. Poetry is approaching a new dawn when we can say what we mean without having to worry about such stupid sidetracks as beauty, aesthetics, melody, and music.

Imagine! Poetry shall be streamlined into perfect form. And it will be the norm to hear poetry that is clearly conceivable, free from all the clutter of mythic resonances and mysterious resolutions. A poem will be clear, simple and direct. It will not repeat, recapitulate, or reiterate a single meaning three ways so that a fairytale quality might quietly pervade a piece. It will not add adjectives simply for alliterative allusions. A poem will be like a user manual. A poem will teach us how to assemble a camera. It will show us some real estate. It will describe to us Paris.

What has stolen us away from this clear, direct, perfection? Rhyme is the insurrection that has irked us to illegitimate ruin! Rhyme has sacrificed utility on the altar of futility. It has slaughtered words for beauty’s sake, and by this same goddess, Aphrodite, poets allude to some greater truth that words alone cannot comprehend. As if there is more to life than this. A poem is a picture of reality, not some exercise in redundancy, and anyone who wishes for more than this is bound to tradition. They are bound on a pile of sticks awaiting witchlike ignition.

Metaphor and mist are to be banished. Rhyme and rhythm are soon to vanish. Slant rhymes, and rhymes inside jar with syllables and force time on the palpable. Mist has no beauty. It cloaks the earth in tendrils of illusion that lie over perceptible phenomenon with the force of the phenomenal. What beauty is there in clothing? The beauty lies when clothing is removed, and if by removing mist, familiarity makes a phrase mundane there are always other things to be uncovered.

The facts of existence are absolute in their actual authenticity. Being is the bottom line of brass tacks, and certainty is concrete in its corporeality. Deed and entity exist in a genuineness that is how things are and like it is. Materiality is matter, which is the name of the game, and the nuts and bolts of object palpability. Perception is a phenomenon of presence. Real world realism is real. Sensibility is in solid substantially substantive substance. Tangibility is truth. Validity is in the verity of verisimilitude. The way of it is what’s what. There is only one way to say a thing, and that way is the clearest and most direct.

A grand battle commences. And in this morally wandering war, I stake down my flag in hope that it incenses intellects to fight beside me against wrongful rhyme. There was a time when light was gone from the world, and poor poets were forced into the regulation of rhyme, but now at last we arise and see the shine that rhyme had so brutally beaten down. Walt Whitman is our prophet against the magic music possessed. He has shown us a quicker, easier, more efficient means to art.

The word is in the street of our rebellion for realism. It is new two hundred years after its conception. We must teach it to unknowing students who might still not know that beauty has been butchered and reality revived. We must teach it in each pamphlet on poetry, in each workshop on words, in each class on creation, and by each priestly poet as they read their work. Rhyme has ruled so long that its influence attracts new poets still, and sucks them into rhythm before they can be saved.

Veiling your words can convey no greater truth. Good couth compels us to speak clearly and state our mind. If we say precisely what we mean we shall be understood, and the more we dig for the truth the closer it will come. Like digging for water in a receding tide we must dig faster, frantically, as truth hides itself ever deeper in the sand from our probing hands. You cannot coax the waves back in with rhyme. At no time will the waves return to fill the elaborate earthworks rhythm makes.  There is no greater mind that wells up in the choice of our words. No greater truth to be gained from placing an unwanted word within an intended phrase.

Lyricism is an assault on pure reason. And in this sure season of the mind this is a time when poetry is a picture without music. Poetry is like all other writing, a means of expressing our endless ideas, our wisdom in words. It is a way of showing a place directly without illusion, showing an emotion without allusion, showing an idea without preclusion. Let us strip lyricism and its lies from poetry. Poets shall not practice the sacred art of poets. Art and its aesthetics, music and its muses, even the tree of life from which the word poetry sprung must be thrown out. Inspiration shall arise from necessity rather than nuance. We will write how to take out the garbage, newly full from the tortuous trash of our past.