Zohran Mamdani has entered the chat.

If it’s good enough for Peter Stampfel… louisianaredhotrecords.bandcamp.com/track/she-dr...

I also think rhyme that doesn’t have that bounce can still contribute to a poem’s overall effect, its sense of musicality or eloquence, as so often happens with assonance and consonance. Which is not the case, obviously, in his prose version of Millner.

I like his distinction between rhyme and the rhyme effect, though I think I’d credit the latter’s “bounce” (as he nicely puts it) to positioning in general—“rhythmic set-up” for sure, but also syntactic and spatial positioning.

I was thinking just that!—how her revisions disrupt the very distinction Hollander is making.

Another example, this one closer to Hollander’s, is Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Mrs. Small” (here’s the first page). It raises the question of what exactly counts as free verse, slipping in and out of something that looks like metrical regularity (and GB herself was moving toward free verse then).

Here’s one that comes to mind—James Merrill’s “Prose of Departure, a Japan travel diary that occasionally breaks off into rhymed 5-7-5 stanzas, sometimes mid-sentence. The effect is hardly Ogden Nash-like.

I’ll try to think of examples.

It’s like saying William McGonagall proves metrical rhyme ridiculous. Also, he’s assuming that rhyme means end rhyme. I suspect free verse has more truck with internal rhyme. I know my own does.

There are traditions of rhymed prose in other languages so there must be critical writing that could offer some guidelines. Personally, I don’t see any defensible principle behind his claim that rhyme is only appropriate for metrically regular verse. I mean, what does his example really prove?

I stopped reading the New Yorker because of this.

That makes sense!

Yikes!