> > As for rhyming, I love it. It's always a slight bit odd for me when I come upon a poem that doesn't rhyme or alliterate or anything. I freak out when I see a poem with no structure at all.
> >
>
> Amen, preach it brother! (Heh.)
> I can dig *some* completely unstructured poetry -- I have a much easier time absorbing it when I know the author -- but by far what impresses me more is a poem that puts structure to the service of its message and its overall beauty.
>

I tend to agree, though unlike eric I wouldn't actually freak out. :-). To me a poem isn't a poem if it doesn't have at least SOME elements of poetic device like meter, alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyming, etc. If it doesn't have any of these, it is not poetry but prose arranged on the page to masquerade as poetry.

> I really like what T.S. Eliot similarly did with some of his stuff, like this bit from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" [rhyme scheme added]:
>

> This is more or less how I've written most of my own stuff ever since being first smitten with Eliot's poetry. (Not that I'm comparing any of my junk to "Prufrock".) Sometimes I take it a little bit too far, though. The rhyme scheme for my untitled poem in the Poetry Pool ("The egoist's trick") is as follows:
>

> G
> O
> O
>

> Iss "Cool; the poem ends with GOO" achar

"Beware the Poetry Pool, 'tis true;
/ The gray GOO is here hunting you!"
/ So ISS stabbed the monster, through and through...

:-)


> I figure the fact that there's a rhyme in there at all escapes a lot of people, if they even bother to read past the second or third line. :-)
>

I noticed the rhyming in your poetry, Iss. What I like about such a device is that, because it's subtle, it provokes a source of impalpable tension in the reader.

I guess I feel somewhat that way with "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Not that I'm saying it's bad. It just makes me wonder what was going through Eliot's mind, and how did he come to write this poem, when he wrote imagery like,

/ / / "Let us go then, you and I,
/ / / / When the evening is spread out against the sky
/ / / / Like a patient etherized upon a table;"

(:

Wolf "impalpable jaw drop" spirit