21st Century Bread: Poems, by Leland Jamieson
You Rhyme It: Free Tutorial
You too can learn to write in rhyme!
Perhaps you’d like to earn a dime
by writing advertising copy
straight to the point that’s cool, not sloppy.
Write lyrics for your best friend’s song
you both will feel are really strong.
Or maybe you will need a poem
to urge your heartthrob, “Please don’t roam.”
Write rhyme with ease, write free of pain,
learn new vocab without a strain.
If you like words, you'll sure enjoy
the hours your rhyming can employ.
What You Get, and Do, in Three Steps:
1) Print out this whole page. Also, read or listen to the ‘Poem for the Week’ and "Theme" page features which you can use to model the process. (Click on the link to the right of this page.) Note: I’m a poet who doesn’t himself write song lyrics or advertising copy, but the principles of rhyming are the same.
2) Put into practice in your own writing the principles outlined in the instructions. Write at least six samples of eight to ten lines each to get in harness with the “Reverse” principle, so you are sure you are working it as described for you.
3) Send me a short example of your best work using the Reverse Principle, pasted into an email. Important: a) Tell me what your interests are — advertising copy that rhymes, song lyrics, or poetry. b) If a student, tell me your grade level, or if in college or a university what year and degree program. c) If out of school altogether, tell me what you hope to do in learning to write in rhyme.
I will respond to the best three poems received each week with a critique at no charge. Absolutely Free. I will invite authors of the best of the best to post their work on this page. Email me at leejamieson "at" comcast "dot" net. Be sure to put RPP SUB (for Reverse Principle Poetry Submission) in the Subject Bar so I will recognize it when it comes in.
KEY POINT: You will need to beg, borrow or buy a rhyming dictionary. If you have no recourse in a public library or private bookshelf and must buy one, I recommend (for American English) Sue Young’s paperback, The New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary (Avon, NY, NY, 1991) as both inexpensive and pretty exhaustive with 65,000-plus entries. If you can't buy one, try Google for one on the Internet.
Why do I offer this free service? To encourage readers to rediscover rhyme’s pleasures, and in the course of this to invite you to read or listen to a number of the poems on this site. In response I ask only that you create a bit of word-of-mouth buzz among your friends who read. Period. Fair enough?
Questions before you begin? Just email me and ask! Put RPP Query in the subject bar. Thank you.
Leland Jamieson
P.S. I should briefly define “foot” and “metrical line” for you before you begin as follows: For our purposes, a “foot” is a “ta-TUM” taken as a unit. A four stress, four-foot, eight syllable line (what the “You Rhyme It” invitation above is written in) is called Iambic Tetrameter:
ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM
and a frequent variation in individual lines is:
TUM-ta ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM
Add one more ta-TUM at the end to make it a five stress, five-foot, ten syllable line, and it is called Iambic Pentameter.
You Rhyme It: Free Tutorial Instructions
(From the Notes to 21st Century Bread, page 131, © 2007 by Leland Jamieson.)A personal note to readers and to fellow poets: A rhyme is such a slight and silly little thing to be afraid of — but for most of my life I was quite wary of it. I was afraid of being unable to find a rhyming word to express the sense of what I wanted to say that would not distort the meaning I intended. And I was almost equally afraid to manipulate lines into metrical rhythm because it made them sound sing-song when read. Both were writer’s (poet’s) blocks for me.
Early in 2003 I taught myself how to use a rhyming dictionary in a way that I imagine is akin to probability theory in modern physics. I let a random rhyme word — possessing nothing but pure potential — lead me to an appropriate next line’s imagery, action, feeling, or thought. This was a big change from my usual mode of writing. (That was to expect, once I was already in and near the end of the next line, to struggle to come up with an appropriate rhyme word to end it so it made sense and felt and sounded right. It never did.)
I learned to manipulate meter with enjambment (used by Shakespeare in his dramatic blank verse) in a way that led to a more natural reading, allowing speech-stress to play counterpoint to the metrical stress of the line.
These two steps I credit with blasting open a dam which had held back my feeling and imagination. It released an open and freely-flowing river of creativity. Nothing I ever did — and I’d been scribbling free verse since I was a teen — had ever opened up such a large, warm and exciting access to memory. Nor had anything I tried ever presented such gifts of present-time awareness and perceptivity. Why? How could this be?
In my experience, free verse is less freeing in the writing than formal verse because it tends to keep you in your left hemisphere, looking there, and from there outside, for inspiration.
A more truly freeing poetry, for me, is metrically manipulated rhyming lines. Working out the challenges inherent in writing in such a musical manner moves one’s feeling and thought processes to a large extent into the right hemisphere. It is full of present-time awareness as well as memory, warmth of feeling, insights, delights, playfulness and surprises far superior to what the cool “logical” and always analytical left hemisphere can offer. (There’s still plenty of use for the left when it comes time to make critical revisions.)
“The Reverse Principle”
Although at first you might be inclined to resist the whole idea because to stop and look up rhyming words slows the rushing flow of your creative juices, try reversing — let me repeat, try reversing — the process and writing by the line. (Your rush of creativity won’t go away. Quite possibly that rush may be your biggest obstacle, since it is filling the void of creativity — often with left-brain clichés — before you even look to see what new imagery can randomly be drawn out of it.)
Say you want to write a couplet. Try this as an exercise: To start, write a first metrical line that pleases you reasonably well. Before mentally writing the second line, look up a group of rhyming words. The more visually surprising they are the better. Let the random novelty — the pure potentiality — of one or more of them draw a possible next line’s imagery, action, feeling, or thought out of the void.
Allow the rhyme word you select to interact with the meter, and shape a new line into a tentative, palpable, first existence. Feel free to drum your fingers to test the rhythmic “fit” of various mental or spoken formulations of it internally, as well as externally with the line already written above it.
When satisfied, or nearly so, write down that line.
Thus you draw every line out of the creative void. The rhyme words do the drawing, the heavy lifting. (Go back and reread a number of illustrative poems on this site to keep a model before you.)
Now ask yourself where this poem wants to go, and write another couplet, if it urges you on, to carry forward the imagery, action, feeling or thought that you have discovered is emerging in your poem. Use enjambment as appropriate to pull in the counterpoint of reading stress. Repeat this step as many times as needed until you feel “what wants to emerge” in fact has. Put the poem away and come back later to polish it.
Try it if you haven’t! I think once you get the hang of it you’ll find it such a liberating experience you’ll truly enjoy it. You may even come to prefer it to ‘free’ verse! Happy versifying!
Leland Jamieson
A Further Word to Encourage You
In my free-verse days, up until '02, more often than not I’d feel so dry I had nothing to say. I had to take a walk to generate inspiration. Plus, it bugged me that most of my poems, which tended to be “nature poems” looked alike and sounded alike — over and over only slight variations on the same theme which never seemed to advance or develop.
Looking back at the 40 or so poems I’d published, I felt embarrassed (none of them made it into my first book). With the help of Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing (great book!) I taught myself to write in meter. But blank verse wasn’t enough by itself.
In the middle of a poem I stumbled onto a “random potentials” strategy (sounds like modern physics, doesn’t it?) which “cornered” and “tracked” like the first front-wheel drive automobile I ever drove: It didn’t fishtail! I wanted to experience more of that! I bought a copy of Sue Young’s New Comprehensive American Rhyming Dictionary.
This rhyming strategy opened up a whole range of new feeling and new tactics for writing poems. Meter and Rhyme together became the twin anchor lines to a wholly new source of creativity I didn’t at all suspect might lie inside of me — and to new poems that expressed it.
What, besides desperation, turned the trick for me?
The desperation I felt at the poverty of feeling I experienced was what turned the trick for me. (My dad died just before I turned six. Circumstances conspired to inhibit my sister’s and my grieving our loss. I spent 60 years in unconscious “denial.” That blocked areas of feeling. This was, of course, what blocked the poetry.)
The interplay of the musical elements — of meter’s underlying rhythm, speech-stress in composing, and rhyme’s melodic end-chimes — exercised for me an extraordinary incantatory power. I can only describe it as healing. It was healing regarding my dad’s death. This put me in touch with feeling levels I’d previously denied. It also burst out the sides of the box of my imagination.
In sum, it was a “right-brain” phenomenon which, like a car’s front-wheel drive, pulled me out of the box of my habitual feeling and thinking. How? When composing, I let one of a number of contextually suitable rhyme words, possessing nothing but pure potential (as in modern physics), do the work. Each would pull other images into the line, and bring it out in a new place!
Composing from line to line, following the formal rhyme scheme of the form chosen, the poem would take shape, its content always surprising me.
I invite you to let it surprise you,
Leland
Oh, Yes, and About Your Source of Creativity
Thanks to to Natalie Goldberg, I seldom run dry of things to craft poems about, and neither will you.
Natalie Goldberg, in several of her many books devoted to creativity for writers, suggests making a list at random of ten nouns on the left and fifteen verbs on the right — on opposite sides of a column of numbers 1-15 going down the center of a page. You use the verb to make a sentence in which the corresponding noun serves either as the subject or object of the verb. Verbs 1-5 and 11-15 work with nouns 1-5. You have more verbs than nouns because verbs yield more pay dirt.
I've added to Natalie Goldberg's exercise another dimension: the five senses. I require of myself a use of verb and noun that employs sight for #1, sound for #2, smell for #3, touch for #4, and taste for #5, repeating each sense three times. I try to write out of personal experience, not just imagination.
Poets have to be as honest with themselves as possible and use those results from this exercise which produce, out of experience, warmth of feeling about a subject. It is useless to try to write about a subject you feel no warmth for. In view of this, I avoid scientific words because they give me no warmth. I like Anglo-Saxon words best because they are often the warmest. Words my stepfather used often are on this list, as are words frequently used by other members of my family or my close friends. I mine the dictionary for familiar words so they’re random accept for some alliteration.
Although I have well-developed intellectual and philosophical interests, and these sometimes intrude themselves into my poetry, and sometimes even get published, they don’t make my best poetry, and probably won’t yours.
Using Natalie Goldberg’s strategy for discovering creativity and my rhyming strategy to find out where the poem wants to go, and getting up at 4 a.m. to do this, I am often surprised to look up and see that it is 8 or 9 a.m. I have no idea where the time went. I am so stiff I can hardly stand up straight. And I have a poem which surprises me by having brought me out in a new and often pleasant, sunny place.
Try it, and let me know how it goes with you.
Leland
THE BEST OF BEST REVERSE PRINCIPLE POEMS SUBMITTED TO YOU RHYME IT
(Who will go first? Your Best of the Best poem goes here with a link to your site if you have one and desire that, and perhaps a reading on the next video program, CHANGE PACE POETRY, if you desire that.)
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