Rushed Rhyming Regrets

    I’ve been writing a bunch of rhyming poetry lately, and I have to say I find it extremely fiddly. There are a lot of poets who can write really good poems with rhyme and meter and whatnot, but I’m just not one of them. Most of the problem is that when I’m trying to rhyme something, I’m not focused on what emotion I’m trying to aim for, which is my normal goal when writing poetry, I’m trying to figure out what my next rhyme should be. 

     It doesn’t help that English doesn’t have a lot to work with. I’m grateful for google because I keep forgetting what rhymes words even have. I know I’m not the only person who has this problem, one of the things I do when listening to music that has lyrics is trying to guess the next line by what rhymes the end of the current line has. If you’ve listened to enough songs, you’ll learn the rhymes fairly quickly. It says something that one of the reasons Hamilton became so famous is because Lin-Manuel Miranda was able to rhyme at not just the end of a line but in the middle of lines as well. He was so good that the “bad” songs in musical were better than a lot of “good” songs other songwriters produce. 

     I can’t complain about the difficulty, it’s a nice change from writing free verse poetry, but I do wish there was a middle ground between the difficulty of rhyming poetry and the openness that free verse has. I know there are other forms, like Haiku and cinquain, and a lot of poetry that focuses on meter rather then rhyming, but I honestly find keeping track of stress in lines very tricky. And a lot of other forms just feel more like gimmicks than something designed to provide challenge. 

    Sometimes I feel like everyone knows how to write poetry, but nobody knows how to do it well. You can find a lot of style guides on the internet, and stuff on metaphor and simile, but the only way to know you’re doing it right is to stand in front of an audience and pray they don’t laugh when you don’t want them to. Or throw tomatoes at you. I don’t even know what I think makes a poem good or bad, I just know that I like some poems a lot and there are some poems I don’t like but I know other people like. I’m not even trying to write good poetry; I’m just trying to express myself in a way that makes sense. The rhyming is just because I want to be able to say I could write a good rhyming poem if I wanted to, even though I doubt I will.