So who is that guy in the hat, anyway? For those who haven't met me, I'm Eric Lee. If you've heard of me at all in the world of poetry, you're probably a fan of the genre "Cowboy Poetry", since I have never been famous in any other arena. However, I wrote my first sonnet at eight years old, and Rene (duetsdove) has accused me, on occasion, of thinking in iambic. She may well be right...I was taught to read by my grandfather and he only owned four books: the King James Bible, a Masonic Manual he never let me touch, and the Collected Works of Shakespeare in two volumes. At twelve, I fell deeply in love with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and at fourteen I was spoken to as if by the voice of God by the works of John Milton. (Don't anyone go running for the door just yet...I'm not a preacher anymore!) I've probably written over 400 sonnets in the 41 years since my first one, including a sequence of 121 in my college days that my Professor of English described as "very worthy" (whatever that means) and can take credit for adding to the variations on the form with my own creation, the Mythic Sonnet. We'll discuss that one when we start to discuss the various rhyme-schemes that distinguish one variation from the other in the realm of "fourteen lines of iambic pentameter." I want to tell you this, though...up front. Although nearly every one of those nearly 400 sonnets were written with mostly perfect rhyme and most with near-flawless meter...well over half of them were utter crap! The key to GOOD rhyme and meter poetry is that the form should be INVISIBLE! By this I mean that if you strip the poem of stanzaic line breaks, and put it down word-for-word in the simple structure of paragraphs of prose, it should read and sound like normal speech...and should read and sound exactly as it did with all stanzas and line breaks in place. A rhyme&meter poem should read as if the rhyme and meter had occurred by sheer coincidence. If you strip the line-breaks from a poem and read it aloud as prose, and anything sounds different, then somewhere in the construction of that poem, you've forced the rhyme or forced the meter. If it doesn't sound like something you would have said that way to begin with, then it doesn't sound like normal speech, and again, you've forced something. That's why over 200 sonnets with near-perfect rhyme and meter have now turned out to be crap...I forced something. Poetry is a liquid medium, y'all. If it's going to transport you, it must flow.
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