Some Thoughts on Rhyme

Though it is still the holiday season and most of my recent posts have been about food, I’ve been thinking about poetry and teaching, especially as we drive across country, listening to music. As we prepare to ring in the new year, I’ve been thinking about rhyme in song lyrics and in poetry. As a poet, you tend to learn to rhyme or to use sound by ear. You read great poets and listen to great music, and you pick up technique. As a teacher, you try to explain technique, and even though you can ‘do’ it as a poet, it can be virtually impossible to explain, especially to young writers whose ideas about rhyme are stuck in what they learned in grade school.

We tend to think of rhyme in terms of rhyme words. There are rhyming dictionaries that reinforce this notion. Yet I’m always dissatisfied with rhyme and with discussing rhyme in terms of the words that rhyme. Even good rhyme pairs can sound bad or predictable if they aren’t used well. I’ve noticed many of my students tend to use rhyme at the end of a sentence, and they tend to rhyme nouns. This leads to uninspired rhyming, since the words are very similar and the placement in the sentence is always the same. Even if the rhyme pair isn’t predictable, you know you’re coming to a rhyme word because you’re about to reach the end of the line and the end of the sentence. The phrasing also becomes monotonous, since every line ends with a full stop.

I’ve tried to convince students to write more enjambed lines, to write sentences that span two or more lines, regardless of whether they write with rhyme. This helps the pacing of the poem and if rhyme is part of the mix, it can help with the element of surprise. To rhyme an adjective with a noun or to rhyme a subject with the object of the sentence leads to poetry that is more inventive and playful. The best old song lyrics have this quality and often have quite dense rhyme.

So I have encouraged students to write with more internal rhyme and more techniques like assonance, consonance, and alliteration, so that their language is more dense with sound. This avoids the problem of rhyme becoming too much. If most of the line is boring until you get to the rhyme word, which is the only sound technique being used, then the rhyme hits you like a hammer over the head or the bell that sounded as you reached the margins of an old typewriter (I have to reveal my age when I pull out this example!).

All that is well and good, and it has helped some students ‘get it’ when it comes to rhyme (and others just avoid it, which may be better than sticking with elementary notions of rhyme). But I’ve been looking for another way to present the issue, and I may have come across an idea that will work. I may try it out this semester and see if it helps. That idea is to talk about rhyming within sentences.

I’ve noticed that many of the song lyrics I admire make use of complex rhymes, and that many of these happen within a single sentence. Rather than talking about rhyme as an aspect of poetry, I’m thinking of talking about rhyme as an aspect of good writing that is more pronounced in some kinds of poetry. When we talk about language in creative writing, we talk about choosing words that have the right meaning, the right connotations, and the best sound. That might be a good time to introduce rhyme and to get students rhyming within single sentences. Sentences would almost certainly have to be complex, combining an independent clause with several dependent clauses — or at least compound, joining two independent clauses with a conjunction. If you use parallel structures and words that rhyme, perhaps working on an AB rhyme pattern across the sentence, your language will automatically be more complex and rich. Students can concentrate on writing more interesting rhyme without having to think about writing in lines. It will also force them to rhyme different parts of speech or at least different parts of the same sentence (as opposed to always rhyming a direct object, for instance). Thinking about rhyme outside of poetry might make it easier for the rhyming poets to get beyond some of their habits, and it might help those who are terrified of rhyme see that it can be fun and worthwhile.

Then when we get to poetry we can talk about using end-rhyme and/or internal rhyme. We can look at different rhyme schemes and traditional forms that use rhyme. Yet hopefully students will still understand that rhyme is not a separate entity, but is intimately related to the sense and the syntax of the rest of the poem (or prose).

Garlic Mashed Potato Recipe

Tonight we had leftovers from Chistmas, but since the garlic mashed potatoes were so popular, we needed to make more, so I duplicated the recipe I created the other day. Undoubtedly this has been done before by others, but here’s how I decided to make them.

Ingredients:
Yukon Gold Potatoes (or other potatoes for mashing)
Water
Garlic
Salt
Butter
Buttermilk

Peel and cut up potatoes. (Peeling is optional.) Put in pan and fill pan to half the level of the potatoes (or less). (Typically, you add more water than this when boiling potatoes, but I don’t see why you should waste water and the good liquid, especially since it would lose some of the garlic flavor.) Add whole cloves of garlic (peeled). I used 3 for enough potatoes for 9 people, but you can judge based on how strong you like the flavor. This wasn’t too noticeable — I might try it with more another time. Add salt.

Boil potatoes, garlic, and salted water 20 minutes or more until the potatoes are soft enough for mashing and most of the liquid has boiled away. Remove from heat.

Add butter and buttermilk to make mashed potatoes. (You can use milk or cream to replace buttermilk, but buttermilk will give a creamy texture and slightly tangy taste, while still remaining low in fat, especially if you use low fat buttermilk instead of whole milk buttermilk.) Of course, the butter is optional…

Mash with a potato masher. As needed, add more buttermilk and salt to taste and to get the texture and flavor you want. If necessary keep the mashed potatoes on a very low burner to keep warm or to thicken up the mashed potatoes. Your garlic will mash in with the potatoes and not be noticeable other than the flavor.

On Christmas, I actually used milk and buttermilk when mashing the potatoes, but tonight I decided to go with just buttermilk, since I had plenty that I wanted to use. I liked it better tonight, though both were good and everyone liked them.

Vegetarian Dressing (not stuffing) Recipe

This year for Christmas dinner, my extended family agreed to humor the vegetarians and allow me to make vegetarian dressing to go with their turkey. This recipe is based on my mother-in-law’s cornbread dressing recipe with a few alterations like leaving out the chicken or turkey, and leaving out the cream of celery soup, which we noticed often contains chicken stock. If you can find vegetarian cream of celery soup, go for it. If not, you can make your own, like I did. As usual, this recipe will be a little vague about amounts, since I don’t measure. That may make it easier to adapt to the number of people you need to feed!

Ingredients:
Onion
Garlic
Celery
Olive Oil
Flour
Salt
Cornbread (I made a recipe and a half)
1 bag of Breadcrumbs (or for a true Southern version, use leftover biscuits)
4-6 cans of vegetable broth (or make your own with onion and garlic skins, celery tops, and any vegetable stalks or ends, plus salt)
Rubbed sage, other spices like marjoram, thyme, celery seed, and black pepper to taste.

Make a recipe or two of cornbread in advance. Crumble in a large bowl, and add breadcrumbs or crumbled biscuits.

To make cream of celery soup substitute:
Saute a little onion, garlic, and celery (I used 4 stalks) in some olive oil or butter
Add 1/4 cup or so of flour and mix in the oil until flour is absorbed
Add 16 oz (or so) of vegetable stock to make a white sauce with the celery
If you like a creamier taste, you could use milk for the white sauce, but I had extra home-made vegetable stock on hand, so I used it.

To breadcrumbs and cornbread, add cream of celery soup (or canned condensed vegetarian cream of celery soup — cream of mushroom would probably also work fine, but then you’d need to add celery or celery seed to your dressing for flavor, and you’d have mushroom bits in your dressing.)

Add 4-6 cans of vegetarian vegetable broth (or the equivalent of home-made broth). The dressing should be fairly wet, almost soupy. My mother couldn’t believe how much stock I added; my wife thought it wasn’t wet enough, so I added one more than I had planned, but she still said her mother’s was soupier. I left it at 4 cans (but had used more than one can for the celery soup, so you’d need extra if you used canned).

Add spices and salt to taste — we generally use a lot of sage. Poultry seasoning is a good mix for dressing, esp. if you don’t have sage, since that’s a main ingredient.

The dressing turned out perfect for my Iowa family. It was drier than my mother-in-law’s, so my wife was right, but I was happy with the consistency. We had plenty for Christmas dinner (2 pans — one large, one medium) and plenty of leftovers for another dinner. Use your own judgement about how wet to make the dressing, but err on the side of wetter, rather than drier. You’ll be surprised how much liquid the dressing soaks up when cooked.

Bake (with or without a turkey, depending on who’s eating with you) for an hour or more at 350. I baked covered until the last 15 minutes or so. A few complications getting the turkey browned and ready to go meant the dressing stayed in the oven a little longer than planned, but it turned out fine.

I didn’t do anything with the turkey or the gravy, obviously, but did make garlic mashed potatoes, cranberries, and squash. It was a great dinner and more than enough to be our main meal (really our only real meal after breakfast, but snacks and rice pudding that my brother-in-law, Rudy, made were more than sufficient).

Merry Christmas

As a Christmas present to the blogosphere, I’m posting a poem from my second book, Time Capsules. It was originally composed on a bitter cold Christmas Eve in 1996, when I was visiting my parents. Lilith, the black lab/border collie mix, who is mentioned in the poem, died several years ago. She was a constant companion for over 14 years on late night or early morning walks.

This year, Iowa has relatively warm weather and our chances of snow are slim. I’m here with my family and our new dog, Zinneke. Though much has changed in the last 15 years, the dark nights of deep winter and the clear air or Northern Iowa, especially walking out into the countryside late at night, still brings a special kind of clarity.

Christmas: Osage Iowa, 10:00 p.m.

I take 10th Street out of town. The only life
on the road is a snowmobile, a couple of cars,
my dog Lilith, and me. It’s ten below
with a light snow. The wind is still tonight,
making the cold bearable. Snow underfoot
and the slightest breeze in the pines create
the only sounds. Then just beyond
the city limits all stops. Around me, empty
white fields and tiny flakes descending
gather up a little stray light to illuminate
the dim landscape. There, half a mile off
the lighted trees at a farmhouse add color
to the stark white of yard lights, muted
now by snow. A car’s red tail lights
glide along the highway headed north.

This stillness is what I’ve traveled two
thousand miles for: the clean, crisp
subzero air, the light invading the dark
to clear my soul. It only lasts a moment,
then the wind picks up and Lilith wants
to play, dashes at me, herds me back
toward home. We run back and forth along
10th Street, stop to savor the cold night,
check the scent of pheasant in the windbreak,
search for a trace of the near-full moon
through thin clouds. The snow obscures
everything even as it makes everything
brighten. The turning point of the seasons
remains elusive, and yet this moment is
enough to take me through another year.

Favorite Poem, Persia

One of the neat things about the internet is that it’s full of surprises. The other night, after stumbling on the Wall Poems site, I searched a little further and came across a copy of my poem “Persia” on a site called Iranian.com — there, Soosan Khanoom has a blog of Favorite Poems, and s/he reprinted mine. I suppose I should be upset that they didn’t request permission before reprinting, but this is a poem from my first book, Landscapes and Architectures, and it was originally published in The Literary Review. It’s had a life in print, and it’s nice to see the poem crop up in a new environment. The blogger did at least give me credit as the author of the poem, though it would be nice if s/he also credited the magazine as first publisher or link to my blog or mention my book. Still, I’m glad someone liked the poem, and maybe a few more people will have read it, thanks to the site. S/he did mention that the poem was nominated for a Pushcart, which is true (it didn’t win, but the nomination was an honor), though they did list the year wrong. The poem was written for a good friend from grad school, published in The Literary Review in the Spring issue of 2001, and nominated later that year.

Wall Poems

Leave it to the Dutch to create neat graffiti. In Leiden, they have printed poems on walls in beautiful fonts, like this poem by Paul Snoek, “Een zwemmer is een ruiter,” which appears on the wall of the public pool, De Zijl. It has apparently been there since 2003. Now there is a website that catalogs the wall poems, which were inscribed between 1992 and 2005, and which I stumbled upon this evening while trying out Google’s Webmaster Tools and then searching for links to this blog. I didn’t actually find a link to this blog that time, but did find a blog that referenced the poem and my translation of it (posted on the website) from Hercules, Richelieu, and Nostradamus, published by Green Integer Press in 2000. Most of the website is in Dutch, but most of the poems seem to have translations in English and other languages. If you’re interested in seeing pictures of a Dutch city or seeing the way these poems have been printed on buildings or in interior spaces, check it out.

Broccoli Casserole Recipe

It has turned cold again in Mississippi. Okay, I know it’s not really cold, even though we had a chance of snow last night and it’s supposed to get down below freezing tonight. That’s nothing for most of the country, but for Mississippi, it seems like winter is knocking at our door, and it’s a good time for some comfort food.

That, and having most of the ingredients on hand, got me to make a Broccoli Casserole. Now, I know the traditional recipe probably calls for Cream of Mushroom soup or something, but that isn’t something we keep in the cupboard, so I decided to improvise. We’re trying to cut back on using canned foods, anyway — they tend to have too much salt and too high levels of BPA — so even though we don’t use much canned food, we try to find fresh alternatives whenever possible. That’s where this recipe comes in. I worked from memory and intuition to concoct a recipe that didn’t involve soup. My apologies in advance, since I tend to cook without measuring much, so there’s a little guess-work in the proportions.

Ingredients for 3-4 servings as a main dish:
Brown Rice (1 cup)
Water (2 cups)
1/2 Onion
1 clove Garlic
Broccoli (about 1 head, plus the stem, peeled and sliced)
Spinach (about a cup)
Olive oil (2 Tbs or so)
Four (1/4 cup)
Milk (a cup or so)
Buttermilk (a cup or two)
1 egg
1/4 Lb Cheddar Cheese, grated
Salt and Pepper to taste
Pecans, ground for topping (or bread crumbs, if you prefer)

Cook your rice as directed. For Brown Rice, use 2 parts water for 1 part rice and simmer for 45 minutes on low until done. Or use leftover rice if you’ve got some (about 2 cups would be good).

Preheat oven to 350, 400, or 450 degrees (depending on how soon you want to eat!)

Sauté onion and garlic in olive oil. Add Broccoli stems and sauté, then add Broccoli florets. Let simmer briefly, then add 1/4 cup flour and stir so it mixes with the oil. Add a little extra oil if necessary to make the flour mix in. It should have a paste-like consistency.

Add a cup or so of milk to make a thick white sauce. Turn down the heat so the mixture is barely simmering, then add 1-2 cups of buttermilk to make a creamy white sauce. Be careful not to let the buttermilk get too hot, as it will separate if it comes close to a boil. That’s not the end of the world, but the consistency is nicer if you keep it under a boil as it mixes in the white sauce. Once it’s mixed together and begun to thicken up, turn off the heat.

Add the rice, egg, spinach, and most of the cheddar. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir together. Grease a 9×13″ baking pan (or whatever size you have that this mixture will fit in). I used butter, but you could use oil or skip this step. It only helps keep the casserole from sticking. Sprinkle remaining cheddar cheese and chopped nuts or breadcrumbs on top and bake for 20 minutes or so until the casserole begins to brown slightly on top and bubble.

Last night I served this with a side of steamed, buttered carrots and rutabaga (we had half of one that needed to be used, and it was very good with the carrots). It made a filling meal, and brought back memories of comfort food. Baking on a cold night helped warm the kitchen, as well.

Making the white sauce instead of using a can of soup was pretty easy, and the texture was perfect. You wouldn’t have to use buttermilk, if you don’t have it on hand, but we keep it around for making pancakes, and it gave the sauce a slightly tangy taste that I like. Substitute milk, if you don’t have the buttermilk. It hardly took me any more time to make the white sauce than it would to open a can of soup and add water until it was the right consistency. And by making it myself, I know more about what went into what I was eating.

That’s the best way to control your calories (which I never bother to count) and keep unwanted salt, sugar, fat, preservatives, and other chemicals from creeping into your diet without your knowledge. If you cook it yourself, you’re less likely to overdo it with salt, sugar, or fat, even if you do add some for flavor, and if what you cook is fresh, there’s no need for preservatives or chemicals from the canning process. Do wash your vegetables, and whenever possible, buy locally grown and/or organic food. It’s less likely to have been mistreated before you got it.

From the time I started the rice until the time I took the casserole out of the oven took about an hour and a half. Of course, I got to do other things for about half an hour while the rice was simmering, and you wouldn’t need any of that time if you use leftover rice (make a little extra next time!). Making the sauce and baking the casserole took 45-50 minutes. While the casserole was in the oven, I made the side dish and helped clean up. It’s a pretty easy recipe, and you could substitute just about any vegetables you want, if you don’t have broccoli or spinach. Usually there’s no spinach in broccoli casserole, anyway, I just added it for an extra vegetable. If it doesn’t turn out exactly the way mine did (or if mine doesn’t turn out the same next time), it will still be good.

Black Friday / Cyber Monday Ambivalence

Those who know me, know I’m not much of a shopper. When I do buy things, I usually look for a good deal, so you might think I’d be into the big sales on Black Friday or Cyber Monday (now a weeklong event at some online stores). But I always feel a little ambivalent about it. I sure as heck don’t want to fight the crowds for late-night Thanksgiving pre-Christmas deals. Now one of our favorite retailers gives a good rational for skipping the cyber deals. Fair Indigo on their blog, note that free shipping is never really free. Companies either pay themselves, raise prices to cover the difference, or take it out of the workers’ salaries by paying less for their products. I’m all for saving a buck, but there are times when I’d rather pay more for something I care about, like fair trade products (from stores I trust). So this shopping season consider paying a little more for things if you can buy them from a small business you trust.

Twice Baked Bread

This is not a recipe I plan to replicate anytime soon! In fact, I’d probably classify it as a major mistake, but it turned out pretty good in the end, so I thought I’d write about it.

The mistake was to put the bread dough I was making in the oven to rise, and since it was a cool morning, to turn the oven to 200 to let it warm up a bit. I do this all the time, but this time, since I was also making breakfast, I forgot all about it for over an hour, until it was time to punch down the dough. Then I realized I’d never turned the oven off. What I had was far to warm for the yeast to still be living (it dies off at about 100 degrees), and I thought I’d have to just throw it all away and start over.

But I’m stingy and didn’t want to waste all that flour needlessly, so I let the dough cool down a bit, then kneaded it until it was just warm to the touch, about hand temperature. Then I mixed up a little yeast in a little water, and added flour and a touch of molasses to help it get started. I took a little of this at a time and mixd it into the dough by spreading the paste on top and kneading until it blended in. Then I took some more.

Needless to say (pun intended), the dough got a lot of kneading this way. And when it rose in the bowl after an hour or so, I knew it would be all right. I made it into loaves, let it rise in loaf pans until it was as big as I wanted — this took a little longer than usual, and I could have let it go a bit longer for a lighter loaf — then I baked it as normal: 425 degrees for about 35 minutes. The bread came out with a great texture (probably due to the excess kneading) and everything was fine.

Like I said, I doubt I’ll try this again anytime soon, but if I do make the same mistake again, I might try salvaging it again. It might help to note that, though the top was a little like bread when I discovered my mistake, most of the dough was still pretty doughy. If it had baked through, I probably would have just cut it and tried to eat it! But since it still had mostly the consistency of dough, I thought it was worth trying to salvage what I could out of my mistake.

Do Grad Programs in English require the GRE Subject Test in Literature?

A question from a colleague and an advisee got me looking around last night for information on English literature graduate programs. The question was whether the GRE Literature in English subject test was still necessary. I initially gave my standard response — it depends on where you want to apply. Fewer and fewer schools require it these days, but many still do.

But that answer felt too imprecise, so I decided to try to quantify it somewhat. How many programs really do require the subject test anymore? What I learned was that my answer was still pretty good, and about as accurate as I can be without crunching the numbers for every program out there. So if you want the short answer, you can stop reading already! But I did learn a few things…

The current cost of the GRE general test is $160 (for those of us in the US who take it on a computer). The current cost of the subject test is $140. So as you might guess: a) applying to grad school is expensive, and b) the subject test nearly doubles your cost. Then there’s the cost of reporting. You can send your scores to 4 schools for ‘free,’ but you have to know which 4 schools you want to send to when you take the test, so you have to make your mind up early or wait to take the test until closer to the deadline. It costs $23 to have your scores reported to another school. Add in application fees, and you see why applying to grad school isn’t cheap. ETS does offer some fee reductions for qualified test takers.

Incidentally, I looked at several schools and also realized that they’ve pushed their application deadlines up. Three of the ones I examined now have December 1 deadlines. This may be the result of electronic submission of application materials and/or internal routing of those materials. I also saw a few January 15 deadlines. Seniors, watch out for these deadlines, and Juniors, get started early.

The most revealing and in a way disappointing site I found was the MLA, which has a Guide to Doctoral Programs in English (and other foreign languages). There is a lot of useful information here, but the Guide hasn’t been updated since 2005, so it is a little dated. MLA needs to work on an update (and maybe they are, since the previous update had been completed in 2001). Maybe MLA could come up with a system like AWP, that has an annual update of information from each Creative Writing program in their Guide — of course they rely on us to update our information each year, so it could be out of date for individual programs who let the ball drop.

Anyway, according to MLA’s dated Guide, in 2001 43.8% of doctoral programs required the literature subject test along with the general GRE test. By 2005 this had dropped to 41.5%. If this trend has continued, then you might expect 38.5% (or so) to require the test now. As I looked around, though, I saw a number of schools that had previously required the test and now explicitly stated that the subject test is no longer required. My sense is that more and more graduate programs have determined that the subject test in literature is not a good indicator of performance in their programs. More than likely this is due to the the changes in the discipline. Specific content is less of an emphasis in most undergraduate English programs. Students are exposed to a wider array of content, though what they have read (or should have read) is harder to predict. As the canon has grown, it is harder to test.

Frankly, this is a good thing. It was already the case when I was an undergraduate. I didn’t know anyone who felt the literature subject test was easy or was a fair assessment of their background in English. The test felt random and arbitrary. If you were lucky to be tested on material you happened to have covered, you could do well. If not, you could be out of luck. Fortunately, I did okay, despite getting a lot of questions on Russian and French authors I hadn’t read or prepared for. And fortunately, even by that time, though most programs required the test, many did not take the results too seriously. As I think about the freedom our students have to take a variety of courses, I think it is a very good development that the GRE subject test in literature is becoming less important.

Rather than knowledge of specific texts, students are expected to be well-versed in interpretive strategies. This kind of knowledge is difficult to gauge with a multiple choice test or even with a written test. (Interestingly, GRE has included a written analysis section on the general test, but even that would be hard to do on the subject test.) Grades, a writing sample, and letters of recommendation are really the better way to determine whether a student has what the graduate program wants in its students. Arguably, a standardized test won’t tell you much, though the general test may tell enough about whether the student can hack it in grad school and provide a baseline for comparison. The literature subject test does not appear to fulfill that function for most grad programs today.

However, many of the most prestigious programs do require it. Some require it of their PhD applicants but not of their MA applicants (though I don’t know if you could get in through the back door by applying for the MA and then applying for the PhD program later and avoid taking the subject test that way). One school said they require it on one part of their page, but then didn’t list it with the requirements on another part of the page. A couple of schools said the subject test is no longer required, but it is recommended. I have no idea what that means. If it were free, I would take it on your recommendation, but if you want me to pay $140 for a test, you’d better require it. Of course, if one school does require it, and you take it for them, then there may be no harm in reporting your score to at least 3 other places.

So my original advice, that it depends on where you want to apply, is probably still the best. If you want to apply to grad school and not take the subject test, you can. That choice will limit the range of schools you can apply to, but there are many good programs who will accept you without that score. If you want to be considered by the top schools in the country, then you will probably still need to pay your money to go through that rite of passage. Study (like crazy) and then take a deep breath and hope that the questions you get are ones you can answer…