book review
A Review of A.E. Stallings, Like
New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018
ISBN 978-0-374-18732-3, 160 pp., USA $24.00, hardcover
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In her delightful essay for Poetry magazine, “Presto Manifesto!,” A.E. Stallings mounts a polemical defense of rhyme. “Rhyme is at the wheel. No, rhyme is the engine,” it declares with contrarian bravura. But Stallings is only getting started. Very quickly, she arrives at a conclusion which all lay readers of poetry intuitively know, but which is tragically one of the greatest heresies in poetry workshops and university presses across the land: that “There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are.” Without the latter principle, readers would feel shallow to enjoy a rhyme of even so great a poet as the Bard himself:
Links:
[1] https://www.ablemuse.com/digital-books-27/v27/digital edition/Complete Digital Version of -/Able Muse, Print Edition (Number 27), Winter 2019