Essay

Global Englishes, Rhyme, and Rap: A Meditation Upon Shifts in Rhythm

by Natalie Gerber

1. Introduction

 

For centuries, sophisticated readers and performers of rhyme have derived pleasure from the ways in which innovative poets and lyricists have simply altered the tempo--either of the spoken language, the implicit prosody of language on the page, or the performance of language to a beat, as in folk song or light opera--to create novel rhyme pairs in which the number of syllables or the lexical boundaries within a linguistic string are compressed or expanded to rhyme with another. Probably the best known example from canonical literature is Lord Byron's rhyme from Don Juan, "But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, / Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?” 

 

Of course, in recent usage virtuosic examples of multisyllabic rhymes and their variants (e.g., apocopated rhyme; mosaic rhyme) come as much from spoken-word poets and rap artists as from poets writing for the page; as just one instance, consider the following verbally dexterous chain rhyme that virtuosically extends a single rhyme over a succession of lines by deleting word boundaries and even consonants: “tenfold/rental/essential/utensils/confidential/ continental/ compliment all/competent souls. Indeed, rap's ability to reshape what counts as a phonemic equivalence has attracted significant and important attention in Adam Bradley's The Book of

Natalie Gerber's picture

I look to linguistics and cognitive studies to shift conversations about prosody from investigating “what” a poem’s prosodic practice may be described as to “why” prosodic patterns and disruptions engage us at all. My writing has connected expansive blank verse to free verse practice and, especially, tackled intonation as an under-explored component of verse prosody. At the State University of New York at Fredonia, I teach poetry, 20th-century literature, and professional writing and currently serve as an associate editor for The Wallace Stevens Journal and guest editor for The Robert Frost Review.