I often write sonnets (Shakespearian or Elizabethan, Petrachan or Italian, Spenserian, Donnean, Hopkinsian, and every other sonnet form.); rhymes royal; ballades; ballads; roundels; rondels; and even villanelles; as well as dozens of other forms. 

     I know and use the various types of meter, as well as non-metrical rhythmic flow when that fits the meaning and emotion of the poem.

     I am perfectly able to rhyme as I wish.

     When I don't use rhymes, it is because I think that particular poem is better without them.

     The  rhyming method I use most these days is called echo rhyming.  Which means that instead of placing the lines with the rhyming end words as adjacent lines, or as every other line, I have them appear a few lines apart, so that memory's ear hears the rhyming more subtly; or sometimes, without hearing the rhyming at all, nevertheless the reader or hearer simply senses the quality of music without pinpointing it. 

          In many poems, I use internal rhymes, which are rhyming words that do not appear at the ends of lines, but are scattered within the text of the poem (sometimes within a single line). 

          In many poems I also use half rhymes; as in this quotation from one of my poems:

                      "I dream that I may keep forever safe 
                      At least my memories from time's all-drowning wave." 

     The previous lines demonstrate not only half-rhyme, but a subtler use of language: I end each line with a fricative.

     Knowledge of the sonics and phonics of language can be used to add texture and subtle music to a poem.  Some aspects of the sonics of English are: fricatives, plosives, sibilants, dentals, gutterals, etc.  Repetitiions of these sounds are more subtle than alliteration or consonance.

          I also use off-rhymes; as in this excerpt from a poem of mine:

                   "I must swing back and forth from mood to mood,
                    Or else my mind would break and soon go mad. 
                    I dwell in days that range from highest joy to deepest hurt:
                    Life's agony and life's ecstasy gives meaning to my heart.
                    And as my days of life diminish and recede, 
                    I leave, behind me, legacies--in lines, of happy life and sad." 

     I seldom write fully classical poetry anymore--only around three or four a month--having been somewhat influenced by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, Alan Gisnberg, etc.  But as much as I love Walt Whitman and Carl Sandberg, nevertheless, my favorite American poets are Robert Frost, Emily Dickenson, and Edgar Allen Poe.  I owe more to them.  But I still owe more to Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Fitzgerald, and Swinburne, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Sappho--the singing poets of the flute and lyre: I am at heart a lyric poet--a romantic poet--and always will be--despite occasional ventures into other kinds of poetic form and sound.


                          --by Michael LP, aka MLP
                             aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
                             Copyright (C) 2010 by Michael L.P.  All rights reserved