Working with Meter and Rhyme

I mentioned at the end of the last post I'd save meter and rhyme for a separate entry. So I wanted to come back and offer some thoughts on what to watch out for when working with meter and/or rhyme.

The single biggest problem I see in metrical poetry is that it's too regular, and over-regular meter tends towards a sing-song quality:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

We can also hear how that regularity makes the rhymes clang.

So, how do you work in meter and rhyme, without ending up with over-regular, sing-song lines?

Standard Variations
Iambic (da DUM) pentameter does not mean every line has five iambs. It means every line has five feet, and those feet are (for the most part) either iambs or standard variations used in iambic pentameter. Even Alexander Pope, a poet who makes no use of anapests and little use of enjambment, used standard variations in his iambic pentameter.

For instance, if we look at the first stanza of Pope's "An Essay on Criticism":

'Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill,
But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

One common variation in iambic pentameter is to use a trochee (DUM da) in the line's first foot, rather than an iamb. So, we get:

BUT, of / the TWO, / less DANG'/rous IS / th' OfFENCE,

Another common variation is to use a spondee (DUM DUM) in the first foot:

TEN CEN/sure WRONG / for ONE / who WRITES / aMISS;

Another variation is to to use a pyrrhic, or pyrrhus, (da da) followed by a spondee (DUM DUM) in feet three and four of the line:

To TIRE / our PAT/ience, than / MIS-LEAD / our SENSE:

Another common variation is the feminine ending--having one last unstressed syllable at the end of the last foot. There are no examples in the Pope stanza, so let's look at a stanza from W.R. Robinson. He makes great comic use of feminine endings in "Miniver Cheevy":

MINi/ver LOVED / the ME/diCI,
AlBE/it HE / had NEV/er SEEN / one;
He WOULD / have SINNED / inCES/santLY
Could HE / have BEEN / one.

Robinson also uses a short last line--two feet instead of four feet--so that the meter undercuts Miniver Cheevy's pretensions, in sync with the meaning of the words.

The examples above are not meant to be all-inclusive--the best way to get a sense of the variations available within metered verse is to read a lot of metered verse. Ideally, across a number of time periods. Also, a couple of books I like, which give good overviews of metrical poetry, are Paul Fussells' Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (a formal analysis, coming from the perspective of literary criticism), and Judson Jerome's The Poet's Handbook (a more writer-centric analysis, coming from a poet who you used to write the Poetry Column in Writer's Digest).

NOTE: The way a line is scanned is not absolute. You start by holding both the stresses implied by the meter, and the stresses implied by the way the sentences would be spoken, and from there you make your judgment about how a given line scans. You might disagree with the way I scanned some of the lines above.

Anapestic Substitution
Up to about 1800, it was rare to see anapests (da da DUM) in iambic poetry. However, when Coleridge wrote "Cristabel," he opened the door by making heavy use of anapests within an overall iambic meter:

Tis the MID/dle of NIGHT / by the CAS/tle clock,
And the OWLS / have aWAK/ened the CROW/ing COCK;
Tu--whit !-- -- Tu--whoo !
And HARK, / aGAIN! / the CROW/ing COCK,
HOW DROW/siLY / it CREW.

NOTE: In his Preface, Coleridge claimed more than just anapestic substitution was going on--he claimed to be writing accentual rather than accentual-syllabic verse. I'll leave that debate for another time.

Since the Romantic poets, anapestic substitution does show up in iambic meters. One needs to be very careful when using anapests within iambic meter. Too many, used without care, can lead to the feel of the meter breaking down. And you will come across some critics who don't condone the use of anapests in iambic meter at all. However, if used judicially, an anapestic substitution can sometimes make for a much more natural sounding line. So, keep the idea in your toolbox. Even Robert Frost has made use of it:

The PEO/ple aLONG / the SAND
All TURN / and LOOK / one WAY.
They TURN / their BACK / on the LAND.
They LOOK / at the SEA / all DAY.

Enjambment
Your sentences don't have to end, or pause, at the end of a line. In fact, one very powerful way to get variation in your meter, and also "cover" your rhymes so they don't jangle, is to use enjambment. That is, let your sentence keep going past the end of the line, and wrap around into the next line. The following example is blank verse, not rhymed, but I love Milton's use of enjambment. Here is the opening stanza of Book Two of Paradise Lost:

High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshon the wealth of ORMUS and of IND,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Showrs on her Kings BARBARIC Pearl & Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais'd
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain Warr with Heav'n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus displaid.

These are the main ways you can get variation within your lines when working with meter and rhyme. And you'll probably also want to give some thought to varying where you put the caesura (break) within your lines.

As I said before, I like metrical poetry with rhyme schemes. So for those who like to work in meter and rhyme, I hope the above thoughts will be helpful. And for those who haven't worked much with meter and rhyme, I hope this will give you some ideas to try out.

What do I look for in poetry?

Periodically I’m asked what I look for in poetry. In the poems that excite me, all the elements I talk about below work together to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. So these elements are meant only as a starting place. Hopefully they will suggest some useful things to think about when revising a poem.

Fresh Language

Probably not surprisingly, the first thing that strikes me in poetry is the language. Is the language fresh and vivid? Or does the language feel like something I’ve read before?

There is of course the issue of clichés: Did she turn “with a smile and a wink”? Did the idea “strike like a bolt of lightning?” I do see cliché language sometimes sneak into even otherwise-well-written poems. So do a read-through when revising, looking specifically for any clichés that might have crept into your poem. However, in general, I don’t see a lot of work filled with obvious clichés. A more prevalent problem is language that one doesn’t necessarily see on lists of clichés, but which still isn’t new and vivid.

One place this shows up is in adjective-noun pairings. For example, if you wanted to describe an old, unsteady fence, what word comes to mind? For me, the phrase “rickety fence” comes quickly to mind--it’s an adjective-noun pairing I’ve seen many times, and therefore it is immediately available when I look to describe that image of an old, unsteady fence. However, as a reader, the phrase does nothing for me. I’ve seen it too many times, so it doesn’t pull me into a vivid experience of a specific scene—I just read familiar words and move on. There’s nothing wrong with the adjective “rickety” or the noun “fence,” but together they create a tired, already-been-done description.

The problem also surfaces in subject-verb pairings. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the phrase “the sun rises,” but there’s nothing exciting in the language. And if too many of the subjects do the first verb that comes to mind--“the sun rises,” “the baby cries,” “the fever breaks,” “the dog barks”--it saps the energy from the language. (And yes, “saps the energy” is itself the type of language that can undermine a poem.)

This isn’t to say there’s never a place for barking dogs in poetry. Sometimes the dog barks and that’s the best way to say it. However, when you have finished your first draft, and you’re in the revision process, I would recommend going through your nouns and your verbs, and also looking at your adjective and noun pairs; your subject and verb pairs; your verb and adverb pairs; etc.--check which of your word choices create a vivid experience of precisely the scene you want to pull your reader into, and which of your choices were the result of falling back on familiar language.

Fresh Imagery

This section overlaps with the last section--familiar language and familiar images often go together. However, I did want to raise it as a separate issue, even if in practice the distinction can be blurred.

Say we want to evoke a bleak cityscape at night. Is our cityscape suddenly populated with an old lady scurrying home from the corner bodega, clutching the cat food that’s all she can afford to eat until the next social security check arrives; a jazz musician in the subway station, wailing mournfully on his saxophone, case open for change but still only containing the dollar bill he put in himself; roving bands of tall, muscled African-American teens, who would have once been noble princes in a faraway land, but who now terrorize the decaying neighborhood.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with noting that cities contain elderly on fixed incomes, street musicians and gangs. However, when I needed an example, those images came to mind awfully quickly; I’ve seen all of them many times before--in novels and short stories, in poetry, in movies, on TV.

So say you want to set a poem in that bleak cityscape. When you have the first draft down, and are revising, think about the images you chose. Are the images precise, fresh, compelling? Or are some of your images obvious ones, the ones anyone who’s watched TV crime shows and seen Hollywood movies might come up with? If some of your images do seem generic, like things you have already seen or read, push further for more specific images. What else do you see in the bodega the old woman goes to? What’s next to the bodega? What’s two storefronts down? What’s in the jazz musician’s back pocket? What are the gang members wearing? Tommy Hilfiger? Maybe look just a bit further--that's still not quite fresh. And what do the people who aren’t street musicians or gang members look like? What are those people doing right now?

Effective Line Breaks

The only formal distinction between a free verse poem and a prose poem are the line breaks. Yet I sometimes see poems where the line breaks don’t seem to do anything the syntax of the sentence doesn’t already do.

Readers will pause at commas,
and stop at periods.
They’ll even hesitate when a phrase ends
before continuing on to the next.

If the line breaks don’t do anything more than echo the pauses and stops already inherent in the sentences, I often find myself wondering what’s the point of writing a poem instead of prose.

So, when it comes time to revise, give some thought to your line breaks. Sure, some breaks will come together with the ends of phrases and sentences, and re-enforce those stopping points.. But also think about how your line breaks can offer a counterpoint to your syntax, creating a tension between the rhythm of your sentences and the rhythm of your lines.

Compelling Subject Matter

There’s usually a convenient operating assumption in writing workshops that what’s important is technique and execution, and that the subject matter itself shouldn’t be questioned. And that’s probably a necessary assumption in workshops, to keep people offering feedback from getting sidetracked into long rants about their personal likes and dislikes.

However, when I’m reading submissions for Noneuclidean Café, I do bring my own personal likes and dislikes in terms of subject matter, and, more importantly, I try my best to act as a proxy for the likes and dislikes of the publication’s readers. And some subject matter does seem more interesting to me, and more likely to be of interest to our readers.

For instance, since poets spend a lot of time writing poems, most of us at some point or another write some poems about the act of writing poems. While I am sometimes persuaded by a given poem about writing poetry, I see a lot of them, and it’s therefore a tough sell. And since I don’t think my readers want to read multiple poems about writing poetry in a given issue, if I already have poems about writing poems lined up for whatever issues I’m currently reading for, it becomes an impossible sell.

I certainly publish poems about love, relationships, break-ups, and the whole range of things that can happen between two people in love or lust. These are fundamental human experiences, and a source of much great poetry. However, I never find myself thinking: Wow, a poem about a relationship gone bad; I sure don’t see many of those.

I don’t like to be preached at, and I assume my readers don’t like to be preached at either. Therefore, didactic poetry is a very, very, very tough sell. And this is regardless of whether I agree with the position taken. For example, personally I strongly support the recognition of same sex marriage, and the granting of all the rights to same sex spouses that heterosexual partners have. However, I'm not going to buy a poem whose sole purpose is to state that position. Poems need to be more than position papers.

So, what sort of subject matter gets me excited? While I don’t like didactic poetry, I do like poetry that has a social and/or political dimension--take on the big issues, just don’t do it in a preachy way. I’d love to see more poetry about work--work is a major component of most of our weeks, and yet I don’t see a lot of poetry about work coming in. I like narrative poetry. I like poetry that looks outward for subject matter, to our society, to other societies, to the created and natural world around us.

Of course, you have to let your muse take you where it will when it comes to your subject matter. Writing the poetry you need to write, about the subject matter you need to grapple with, is far more important than whether or not the material jazzes a given editor, than whether or not it’s a fit for a given publication. So please don’t take this section as suggesting you should write about certain things, and not about others. If you take anything away from this section, I’d rather you took just the opposite--an invitation to look beyond the topics that first come to mind when you think about poetry, and cast your net into areas you’d never before considered might be the stuff of poetry.

On Meter and Rhyme

Personally, I like poetry that uses meter and/or a formal rhyme scheme. And I do find the use of meter and rhyme brings with it some specific challenges. However, I think I’m going to leave this topic for a future post, specifically on those challenges.

There Are No Rules

"One night [at university] a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed, I was so surprised. The first line reads, 'As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...' When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know that anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago."

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

As quoted in The Modern Library Writer's Workshop by Stephen Koch.

Art transcends rules. As soon as someone says, "Don't," some writer will come along and do exactly what was forbidden, and make it work. I think the quote above captures the danger of a rule-based approach to art: it leads young writers to the belief that some things are not allowed. As if art is answerable to some cosmic hall-monitor, telling you where you can and cannot go.

All things are allowed.

At the deepest level, a writer has to follow their muse, find their own voice, take their writing where it demands, not where some external (or internal) monitor says it should go.

This does not mean that choices don't have consequences. One needs to know the effect one is looking to create and what choices will achieve that effect, as well as what choices will undermine that effect. Technique is not a matter of learning rules, but of familiarizing oneself with the full range of effects that have been achieved in good writing, understanding the connection between one's choices and the effect of those choices, and developing skills in executing the broad range of choices available.

For instance, one of the effects that much fiction strives for is to create an ongoing fictional dream for the reader, in which he or she stops seeing words on a page, and is pulled into the experience of the fictional scene as it unfolds--seeing the rescue plane take off before the hero reaches it; hearing the dog (the reader hopes it's only a dog) rustling through the garbage in the alley below the bedroom window; feeling the hot sand of the Cote d'Azur beneath their feet. And many of the "rules" in fiction derive from the fact that poor grammar, unclear sentences, confusion about who is speaking, phony-sounding dialog, large dumps of exposition, use of cliches, lack of clarity with POV, etc. can all pull the reader out of that fictional dream, and instead leave them confused or annoyed, or even angry, over the writing. (Of course, striving for that fictional dream isn't a rule. Some fiction works by purposefully breaking the fictional dream. John Barth's short story "Lost in the Funhouse" tells a story about a boy and his family going to an amusement park, but intentionally interrupts that narrative to point out the techniques used in telling the story.)

The fact there are no absolute rules also does not mean that writers will never choose to work within a framework: adopting the rules of a given form, the expectations of a specific genre, or the requirements of a particular market.

For example, much of the best poetry in English--from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Keats to Robert Frost--is written in iambic pentameter. A great many English poems make use of a formal rhyme scheme. Both meter and rhyme are somewhat out of fashion these days, but they certainly remain viable options to a contemporary poet. The villanelle is one of the most restrictive poetic forms--specifying not just a rhyme scheme but a specific pattern for repeating whole lines. Yet can you imagine the beauty of Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night not expressed through the villanelle form?

In terms of genre, readers will have certain genre expectations. If you're writing mysteries, readers are going to expect a crime, or some mystery, to be solved. You can of course break that rule, but at a certain point, it might become meaningless to call your story a mystery. If you are writing a literary short story, opening with a star ship captain chasing down aliens with his ray gun is going to turn off many readers who have different expectations of the literary genre.

And of course given markets have guidelines. If one is writing for Analog, there needs to be a speculative element in the story. If one is writing a screenplay one hopes to sell to a major studio, one's chances greatly go up if it is at least one and a half hours long, but not (Return of the King notwithstanding) three and a half hours long.

So the writer will always have to deal with the effect their choices achieve--intended or not. And a given writer might choose to adopt the rules of a given form, genre or market. That said, at the deepest level, there are no rules.

Saying "No" Sucks

I sometimes wonder how many slushpile readers reach a personal limit on how many stories and poems they can say "no" to. We all know how much being told "no"--whether for a date, story, job application, whatever--sucks. I hate seeing my stories come back with the form rejection note as much as anyone, I'm sure.

What I hadn't thought about until I had to start sending those notes myself was how much it sucks to say "no" to someone else's story or poem. I usually take a liking to the writers who submit to Noneuclidean Cafe, particularly writers who submit regularly enough that I get to know their work, even if I haven't accepted a piece of theirs. I find out an odd fact or two about their lives in their cover letters, get a sense of what subjects and themes excite them as writers, see what technical issues they're dealing with. How can you not like someone who still works (in an era when media spend more time covering Paris Hilton than every poet in North America combined) with meter and formal rhyme schemes, even if they sometimes struggle with their lines getting too sing-songy? How can you not like someone who finds the time between work and family and dozens of other responsibilities to sneak away and write stories about distant planets, even if they sometimes lose control of POV?

I wonder if the suckiness of repeatedly saying "no" is why I've heard some editors sound so negative about the slushpile--knocking the quality of both the submissions and the writers who send them. It's easier psychologically if you can look down on the whole process, than if you have to think about the people on the receiving end as, you know, actual people. And I have to say, sometimes the anger an editor expresses about slushpile submissions seems out of proportion to the problem--if the problem were strictly a rational one to them.

I remember hearing one editor on a panel at Balticon a couple years ago--I've forgotten his name or magazine, so I couldn't share even if I wanted to--saying that he usually reads submissions within a week or two, but because he doesn't want submitters bombarding him with work he has a program that doesn't send the rejection note until sixty days have passed. At the point one has that little respect for writers and their time, why is he even in publishing? (Even given he has a legitimate need to limit submissions, if he cared about his writer's time, he could just limit submissions to one every sixty days--a number of good publications place limits like that--rather than keep them waiting for a response.) But he managed to work with writers while nonetheless seeing writers in general as a problem, with no cognitive dissonance.

Given that alternative--I'll stay with feeling bad every time I say "no."

Should You Believe An Editor's Feedback?

Well, yes and no.

First, let's differentiate between feedback offered as part of a rewrite request, and feedback offered in a rejection. Whatever else it does or doesn't do, the feedback in a rewrite request will help a writer publish their story in that publication. For that reason, if it doesn't violate the author's sense of the story, it's probably worth taking. What I'm thinking about in this post is feedback given in a rejection, offered simply to be helpful, without any invitation to resubmit the revised piece.

Now, back to that yes and no. First, what do editors do well? Editors have a strong sense of what's a good match for their publication. If an editor specifically says it isn't a fit for the publication, believe it.

Editors can usually detect quickly and accurately when a story flat-out doesn't work. (Yes, occasionally one hears of a future Pulitzer Prize winner that was rejected by 80 publishing houses. But those are rare exceptions.)

If an editor gives specific feedback about problems in your story, there is a good chance your story does have some problems, and there is a fair chance that the editor conveyed at least part of what needs to be looked at in his feedback. (The more fundamental the problems, the higher the odds of this.)

So, what don't editors do so well? I suspect when editors give feedback, the percentage of time we miss on the specifics of the story's problems is higher than we like to think. More seriously, however, the writer needs to take into account that rejection-note feedback is a simplification of what's going wrong with a story and the possible options available to the writer, and may suffer from any or all of the following shortcomings: (1) the incompleteness of generic feedback, (2) the editor's biases about how good fiction works, and (3) the tendency to overvalue plot and undervalue language in most rejection-note feedback.

Editors are in a hurry, going through many pieces, so there's a tendency to fall back on more generic feedback. And generic advice is, in important ways, going to be incomplete. Also, generic advice tends to imply certain rules. But one can't help notice, reading Chekhov say, that his stories don't always work according to current generic workshop rules. More than rules, the writer needs to think about his/her desired effect and the actual effect of his/her choices.

Also, some editors have specific beliefs about how a story works, and that means those editors' feedback will sometimes say more about their beliefs than about the internal logic of the story they're looking at. One magazine I've submitted to has strict beliefs about not withholding information that the POV character knows from the readers. Now, in general, I agree--I think "surprise" endings created by withholding key information is a cheat. However, I've had them complain that waiting to paragraph five to tell something, instead of stating it in the first paragraph, was an attempt to build false suspense. While I agree withholding info for the big reveal at the end is usually a cheap trick to try to generate false suspense, I don't mind a little storytelling license, where you hook people with a bit of mystery, and slowly let them in on the secret. In terms of my own editorial feedback, I know I went through a period when I regularly pointed out violations of the third person limited perspective to submitters. Now, in most of those cases, I still think those shifts out of third person limited made those particular stories weaker. However, these days, I would rephrase much of that advice, as I'm no longer as committed to the current norm for strict use of third person limited. I'd rather have the author think about the trade-offs involved with stepping outside that third person limited POV, instead of seeing it as breaking a rule.

Finally, editors tend to bias feedback towards plot problems--which an editor can sometimes help identify quickly--and not talk about problems with the prose, which isn't so easy to offer quick feedback on. As I'll talk about in a future post, language plays a bigger role than plot in selling short stories. (Some types of novels, and certainly movie scripts, can operate by different marketing rules.)

Publications that always offer feedback will tend to miss more often than ones who only offer the occasional piece of advice. I know from my own experience, when we used to have a policy of providing feedback on every submission, I fell back much more on generic suggestions. Not that the advice was wrong, but as mentioned, generic advice is incomplete. Generic advice carries unstated assumptions about the kind of story the writer should be working towards.

In Francine Prose's book Reading Like a Writer she talks about how she came to question much of the advice she had given over the years when teaching writing workshops. It's a good book to read if one is submitting, as it gives perspective both on the process of offering feedback, and on the breadth of possibility in good fiction.