ext_27476 ([identity profile] sir-dave.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] kleenexwoman 2008-04-09 09:50 am (UTC)

I came back here at your suggestion ---

I found this on Googling for Lovecraft poetry

Whilst dismembering rhythmical poetry is too much of a fashion these days, Lovecraft could do with both your assonance and your bite. You can probably see from his poetry that for some, formalism becomes simple. (It is for me, except that I invent forms to suit what they are describing, and that is hard). With practice this would be the case for you, I think, and if so, then the things that you already do well would make you a far better poet than Lovecract.

As an alternative to rhyme, are you familiar with pararhyme, usually associated with Wilfred Owen? The following shows this and another trick, rhyming off-stress, which can occasionally be useful; I find it produces a very delicate effect in the right circumstances, and have used it just once in my own 'Aurorielle', whereas to date pararhyme has not entered my repertoire. Thinking about it, there is a place it would work well in the later parts of what I am now writing ---


Arms and the Boy

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges whose fine zinc teeth,
Are sharp with sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

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