James T. Sapp

I guess I'm old-fashioned. That's what the internet wants to tell me.

As I gaze across the burgeoning landscape of popular published poetry today I see very little but the rocks and cactus and featureless dust of free verse, which is devoid of rhyme or intelligible rhythm and is largely indistinguishable from prose. This strikes me like music that has no melody or pictures with no form or focus.

For this reader, who samples verse for relaxation, revelation, and rumination I find very little free verse poetry which will grab my attention or hold it like the singing mental music of rhythmic rhymes. (Unless, of course, it is word craft of such caliber that it quickly presents imagery of especially soaring grandeur as found in timeless treatises like the thirty-eighth chapter of Job or the Song of Solomon.)

English-speaking peoples have historically loved the short lines and rhymes of iambic tetrameter (8-count syllabic verse). Its easy rhythm and singing lines flow easily and smoothly off the mind and tongue and are instantly recognizable as poetic form no matter the content. I believe the majority still do. This is borne out by the large number of successful advertising jingles and particularly by the massive amounts of musical lyrics that continue to blossom in almost every genre, every year, using this form.

To this old-fashioned reader, rhythmic rhymes will always be the tastiest tidbits of poetry, no matter the pounding on our ears of the popular myth that rhyme and meter are dead.

For those who share my concerns and tastes, I humbly present the following collection of books (in no particular order) of rhyming poems and stories which contain some adventure, some spookiness, some beauty, some imagery, and some touching tears for the reader's reflection.

-JTS