primeideal

Serendipitous flea-market pickup last week: "Rhyme's Reason," by John Hollander. He was one of the first English poets to write what Agha Shahid Ali calls "real" ghazals--not just a series of couplets, but preserving a repeated word and rhyme scheme. This book is full of similar self-illustrating examples of various poetic forms.

One that was new to me and I'd like to try experimenting with is Hollander's take on the pantun, a Malay form that influenced the French pantoum (the latter being a series of quatrains linked by repeated lines.)

Recently read "Rhyme's Rooms," which is a book about the more technical aspects (rhyme/meter/alternate formats) of (especially English) poetry. There was a funny interchange where the reviewer was like "who is this book even for? people who like literary allusions and dense analysis but somehow have avoided poetry up until now?" author gets snippy "dude did you even read the book?" Having read the book, I agree with the reviewer that it's not clear who the target audience is--like, I think I knew many of the "basic" ideas already. But it was still worthwhile because it included a bunch of poems I hadn't seen before that do playful things with language! So here are some recs:

"Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line" -- some of the abbreviations are a bit of a stretch, but it's funny.

"An Evening of Russian Poetry" -- making the point that just as English has "trite" rhymes like June and moon, other languages do too.

"A Measuring Worm" -- rhyming AxA haikus!

"Easter Island" -- from a book of sonnets with lots of overlapping constraints.

Following on from this: if the messy beginnings of Major League Baseball map onto the messy beginnings of the USA, then the baseball equivalent of Paul Revere is Tinker to Evers to Chance. Both are notable, but are perhaps even more famous than they "should" be due to some poetry/rhyming verse. Later appraisals (20th century) have been like "actually, the poem wasn't all that great, too much rhyming" and "these guys might not have made it to the Hall of Fame as individuals." But then re-revisionism in the last few years is like "Tinker, Evers, and Chance are noteworthy as more than the sum of their parts because they represent the many regional/cultural traditions [Californians doing their own thing out west, rural Midwest, Irish Catholics in the northeast] that fed into the modernization/"professionalization" of baseball in the 1900s decade" (I read a book about them recently) and "Paul Revere's Ride should be read in context, the context is that the Civil War was about to break out and people needed to be ready to fight for the Union/freedom again."