Rhyme

Try to encourage students to not focus on rhyme. Suggest letting rhyme be the extra ingredient, but not the main ingredient of their poem.

When they do use rhyme, help them to be sure they say what they want to say. The rhyme needs to make sense; needs to help create, make clear, or finish, the thought. Even if a poem is funny, even if a poem is hilarious, it must make sense to be a poem. Shel Silverstein did not write that Sylvia Stout was a lout. Or had a pout. No, since his poem was about what she would not do, plus a list of all kinds of food (trash and garbage)...he said that she “would not take the garbage out.” His rhyme enabled the rest of the poem to make sense. He used those two rhyming words for a reason.

Free verse as opposed to rhyme: Does it sound like poetry? Even if a poem doesn’t rhyme, it shouldn’t sound like normal conversation or be lines written in regular prose and then simply broken up into shorter lines. Introduce elements of poetry—inner rhyme, repetition, alliteration, personification, imagery, metaphor and simile, etc. If a poem doesn’t sing, why not just write it as a story in straight prose? A poem is different, a poem “dances with open arms,” while prose “walks on solid ground.”