Does rhyme matter –
    however occasional?

It used to be
    considered vocational

a must for verse’s
    inspirational

impact, even
    educational –

but these days, it’s a
    generational

sign your stuff’s just
    recreational.

*****

Tom Vaughan writes: “For me, rhyme is not just a technical trick to help make poetry memorable. I think the world rhymes in odd ways. I also believe time rhymes, across the centuries but also in our short individual lives, sometimes in irony, but more often – if we listen hard enough to hear it – to point the way to a deeper level of challenge and reflection.”

Editor: I had been planning a rant on the essence of poetry being all the tricks that make it memorisable word-for-word: rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, etc; and on the fact that the bits of poems an adult remembers are invariably rhymed; and on poetry’s links to dance and song and the prenatal heartbeat. But Tom Vaughan introduces a whole new layer of value of rhyme, obliquely in his poem, incompletely in his comment. There are things to meditate on here.

Tom Vaughan is not the real name of a poet whose previous publications include a novel and three poetry pamphlets (A Sampler, 2010, and Envoy, 2013, both published by HappenStance; and Just a Minute, 2024, from Cyberwit). His poems have been published in a range of poetry magazines, including several of the Potcake Chapbooks and frequently in Snakeskin.
He currently lives in Brittany.
https://tomvaughan.website

Photo: “Sometimes, I like going back into #poetry and pretending like I am still in college. #johnkeats #bookstagram #annotations #reading #books” by alis.smith is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.