As I spent most of the afternoon singing passages of
The Messiah, and most of the evening taking an accidental nap (no doubt from all that focus on notes and dynamics and so on), I failed to post on what is now yesterday. And so I leave you with a thought and tumble (deliberately this time) back into bed...
I think there does persist, however, a basic misunderstanding about rhyme and the use of rhyme. Rhyme is not an “ornament”—it is essential to a rhyming poem; without it, the poem would not have happened. That is, the poet does not “know” exactly what the poem is going to say and “translate” it into rhyming verse—or shouldn’t, in my book. On the contrary, it is the strange dream-logic connections of the rhymes themselves that lead the poem forward, perhaps into territory the poet herself had not intuited. Rhyme is a method of composition.
--Alicia Stallings
Read the interview
here.
