The Poem Workshop

“…It is for the poet to chose whether or not rhyme is appropriate in each particular poem. But if you write traditional rhyming verse, you also have to follow a rhythmical pattern, the meter. The meter dictates not just the number of syllables in a line but also which of those syllables should be stressed.”

“There is a widely held but totally unfounded belief that poetry has to rhyme, or it’s not poetry. This enables the uninformed to dismiss much modern poetry as some kind of aberration. Yet rhyme has never been the defining characteristic of poetry.”