— page 6

         In Whirling Round the Sun, Suzanne Noguere occasionally turns to assonant end-rhyme to loosen up passages into humor, as in her sonnet entitled “My Grandmother Nellie Braun.” In this sonnet, the first perfectly rhymed Sicilian quatrain (fall/deck/tall/neck) presents factual description of the grandmother.  The second quatrain’s rhyme scheme reinforces the poem’s departure into humor; its two rhyme-partners veer into variance, with assonant end-rhyme (flaws/calls) as well as a whimsical slant rhyme (coarse as/horses):

 ...length hair, cut blunt and snooded, became as coarse as
 sailmakers’ thread.  Bright eyes belied all flaws:
 “I don’t drink, gamble, or play the horses,”
 she said, explaining the long distance calls.

         With the first poem in Noguere’s collection (“Ear Training for Poets”), we encounter,  “...a melody where April and maple meld,” and recognize a poet with a pleasure-taking attentiveness to language’s sounds.  The structure of her poem, “Robert Johnson,” about the blues musician, includes positions for seven rhyme partners, which she fills with five perfect end-rhymes and two assonant end-rhymes (coax/ghost and last/epitaph).  This latter coupling is especially creative in its rhyme:

 ...the heart that always goes for broke can’t last
 longer than to write its fast epitaph.

         As this essay has emphasized, there has been a long history of viewing assonant end-rhyme as a mediocre poet’s clumsy default in lieu of perfect rhyme or consonant rhyme.  Within such a context, Noguere’s quoted passage almost appears to be throwing down the gauntlet in behalf of assonance.  In her clever sonic construction of can’t last/fast epitaph, she overtly subordinates perfect end-rhyme in favor of assonant end-rhyme. In this couplet, the two end-rhymes are assonant (last/epitaph), while the first of the two partners (last) is a perfect rhyme for fast, the word preceding (and, hence, being subordinated to) the end-rhyme proper. As a further introduction of vocalic music, Noguere places the assonant echo can’t just before the first of the two rhyme-partners.  This couplet is a sign of our times in terms of formal poetry’s increasing comfort with and even preference for assonance.

         In his translator’s note to the Inferno, Robert Pinsky describes his translation’s system of consonant slant rhyme: “This system of like sounds happens to respond to some preference of my own ear, a personal taste: for me such rhymes as, say, ‘swans/stones’ or ‘gibe/club’ or ‘south/both’ often sound more beautiful and interesting than such hard-rhyme combinations as ‘bones/stones,’ ‘rub/club,’ or ‘south/mouth.’ ”  Thus, Pinsky emphasizes his contemporary unease for what can sometimes feel like the blatancy of perfect rhyme; as a solution to his wanting to adapt Dante’s terza rima for current poetry, he relies on the consonant slant rhyme which he describes as being of his personal taste, also acknowledging an adherence to precedents set by Yeats.  Probably more than consonant slant rhyme being of Pinsky’s “preference of my own ear,” his ear has been conditioned by the work of poets who preceded him in the previous century, while current trends certainly are conditioning “personal preference...personal taste” to assonant end-rhyme.