Recent Rhyming Poetry
June 2, 2023 3:27 PM   Subscribe

I'm looking for recent poetry to help teach English intonation. I've looked at various poetry sites and books, but most seem to be free verse. Are there any relevant anthologies? Specific examples also welcome!
posted by Trifling to Media & Arts (7 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 


Best answer: A. E. Stallings is AMAZING. Her skill - form, word choice - is, in my opinion, unparalleled.

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs

After a Greek Proverb

Containment

Fairy-tale Logic

Fear of Happiness

Extinction of Silence

A. E. Stallings at Poetry Foundation

Her comments on Philip Larkin in this McSweeney's interview are fascinating, too.

Wendy Cope has some wonderful rhyming works - I'm particularly partial to The Orange.

Carol Ann Duffy also does some great rhymes - you might like Mrs Schofield's GCSE.

Also: A Monorhyme for the Shower

You could also poke around in the poems at the Poetry 180 site - I know some of them rhyme, like Machines, Fight, and Shakespearean Sonnet.

As for other poets, or anthologies: how recent is recent?
posted by kristi at 6:22 PM on June 2, 2023 [4 favorites]


Piet Hein.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 7:48 PM on June 2, 2023


The parts in (parenthese) are the writer/ speaker's unspoken thoughts
I can be read with intonation. Not sure if it fits.

up into the silence the green


up into the silence the green
silence with a white earth in it

you will(kiss me)go

out into the morning the young
morning with a warm world in it

(kiss me)you will go

on into the sunlight the fine
sunlight with a firm day in it

you will go(kiss me

down into your memory and
a memory and memory

i)kiss me,(will go)

by e.e.cummings
posted by theora55 at 8:08 PM on June 2, 2023


Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate
posted by clew at 8:53 PM on June 2, 2023


Response by poster: Recent to me is within the last 30 or so years.
posted by Trifling at 3:44 PM on June 3, 2023


Best answer: Okay, so both poetryfoundation.org and poets.org have search engines that don't get you exactly what you want but might point you toward some good stuff if you don't mind poking around. I'm filtering by form, but modern poets tend to be rather casual (I mean creative) about form, so I'd say 20-25% of the links I click actually rhyme. Still, it's a start.

Poets.org lets you filter by form, and then you can't filter by date but the date is listed in the results, so you can just click anything that looks recent to you.

Here are the results for "Villanelle," which is typically supposed to be a rhymed form:

https://poets.org/poems?field_occasion_target_id=All&field_poem_themes_target_id=All&field_form_target_id=428&combine=

And the results are not 100% trustworthy (I'm sorry, but Oscar Wilde did not write Theocritus in 2018, 118 years after he died), BUT that search turns up some good results, including

Testimony: 1968, Rita Dove
Twerk Villanelle, Porsha Olayiwola

Meanwhile, poetryfoundation.org lets you search by form and limit to 1951-present (not quite your time frame, but close-ish).

Here's the search on pantoum:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/browse#page=1&sort_by=recently_added&school-period=1951-present&forms=272

which turns up

Halcyon Kitchen, Kiandra Jimenez

and terza rima turns up

Aria, David Barber
Blues for Dante Alighieri, Kim Addonizio

and villanelle gets us

After Roethke, Randall Mann
Daedal, A. E. Stallings (more A. E. Stallings!)
His and Hers, Diane Gilliam Fisher
Gratuitous Oranges, David Shapiro
Lullaby in Fracktown, Lilace Mellin Guignard

And the search on sonnet turns up

The Gentle Art of Shabby Dressing , Spencer Short

If you'd like a quick pointer to forms that are likely to rhyme, you can pull up the list of poetic terms at Poetry Out Loud and just search the page (Command-F) for "rhyme" to get ballad, common measure, couplet, ghazal (although all the ones I looked at just had the same words rhymed with themselves), and sonnet ... with examples of each. (Although lots of these are quite old and very not recent.)


Suggestion: please try asking your local library! (Or, perhaps, even a non-local library.) Many reference librarians love to answer questions like this.


Another couple of Wendy Cope poems:

Roger Bear's Philosophical Pantoum, Wendy Cope
After the Lunch, Wendy Cope

And finally, one of my very favorite poems of all time:

Sonnet: Against Entropy, by John M. Ford
posted by kristi at 6:22 PM on June 3, 2023 [2 favorites]


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