David Green

David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.

Thursday 10 November 2016

Ripple

Thinking ahead to a forthcoming Portsmouth Poetry Society evening on rhyme and back to 'ripple poems', the brainwave invention of Roddy Lumsden in which the consonant sounds of the title are replicated in any order as line endings, I have this.
I can actually, perhaps, extend the form to 12 lines with 'forever loop', 'slurp', 'pillar', 'water polo' and anything else that crops up in idle moments and one can see how the search for rhyme can lead one to outlandish ideas that would never have happened without the discipline. Although we must use them in subtle ways and not be seen to be crowbarring them in.

Another poem to take is Ted Hughes' October Dawn that is half-rhymes throughout before rounding off on a full rhyme.



Ripple

Some poets regard rhyme as puerile,
something they need to withstand or repel
unlike Chaucer in his undemure pool
of couplets that he begins in April.

But somewhere in this short downward spiral
it might lurk disguised, keen to explore
in the same way that many people are.
Thus rhyme is a gentle interloper.