That's all your mouth control center knows. It knows a series of muscular commands. It does not know spelling or meaning. And because it's an efficient mouth control center, it classes that series of muscular commands as being very similar to one next door to it: rune. The end is the same, and it's going to store that near "moon," but it's going to give you a different beginning. It's going to say, Okay, go back in the back of your mouth, I want you to do something kind of difficult with the back of your tongue. And then I want you to flip your tongue up. Rrr. Don't roll it! Don't roll the R, don't trill it, because you are not Sarah Bernhardt. You're not William Butler Yeats. You're just going to say "rune."
The tongue is a rhyming fool. It wants to rhyme because that's how it stores what it knows. It's got a detailed checklist of muscle moves for every consonant and vowel and diphthong and fricative and flap and plosive. Pull, relax, twitch, curl, touch. And somewhere in there, on some neural net in your underconsciousness, stored away, all these checklists, or neuromuscular profiles, or call them sound curves, are stored away, like the parts of car bodies, or spoons, with similar shapes nested near each other. Broom and loom and tomb and spume and womb and whom are all lying there on the table in one spot. And you figured all that out by yourself. They rhyme.
And what's different about them? The all-important beginning. The removable hair. Or the wig. The sound has a body, a sort of a snaky thing, with a little bell on its tail. And then when you get up to the head, the head can have a bunch of puffy P kind of hair on its head, poom, or a fluffy FL kind of hair, or a dark black M hairdo, or big blowsy bastardizing hair. You can have all kinds of hair preceding that oom sound.
Buh. Hoo. Huh. Hay. And once you've got them classed and labeled, you can start taking off and putting on the sound-wigs. You pick up "plume" and you carefully, patiently, take off the PL and you put it aside. Don't drop it! And you pick up the BL, put that on. Get it properly adjusted. Brrrrrr. Brrrroooom.
So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain. Before they meant something specific, they had a shape and a way of being said. And now, yes, gloom and broom are floating fifty miles away from each other in your mind because they refer to different notions, but they're cheek-by-jowl as far as your tongue is concerned. And that's what a poem does. Poems match sounds up the way you matched them when you were a tiny kid, using that detachable front phoneme. They're saying, That way that you first learned language, right at the beginning, by hearing what was similar and what was different, and figuring it all out all by yourself, that way is still important. You're going to hear it, and you're going to like it. It's going to pull you back to the beginning of speech.
And that's why we like puns, too. Some puns. A few puns. Orange you glad. Puns and plays and near-misses and alliterations. Fair and foul. Fee fie fo fum. Liquor locker. The Quicker Picker Upper. Road rage. Boxtop. Pickpocket. Smile and dial. Drink and drive. Lip-smacking, whip-cracking Cracker Jacks.
Or: Sir, isn't that a steering wheel sticking out of your zipper? Yes, it's driving me nuts.
We like to visit the parallel sound-studio universe with all these mixing boards and XLR patch cables going here and there, independent of the other part of our head, which is the conscious part that has spent a long time sweating the books and trying to make sense of objects and ideas and meanings. Trying to be a responsible citizen.
Rhyme taught us to talk.
I RANG NAN'S DOORBELL and told her how good the chicken was, and she said she was glad to hear it. But she seemed a little preoccupied, maybe even a little down. She said that she'd just gotten two very high estimates to put in a wide plank floor in her guest room-both more than twenty-eight hundred dollars.
"To nail in a pine plank floor?" I said, exaggerating my incredulity. "Well, blow me down. I'll do it for you at cost."
She said no, no, that was impossible-and anyway did I know how to install floors? Which was a legitimate question in the circumstances. I said that yes, I did know how to install floors, if by "floors" you didn't mean hardwood floors. I'd installed the plank floor in my ell with my dad a few decades ago. And I've done a little light cabinetwork over the years, I added modestly. "You have to allow a little space at the ends for expansion, that's all."
She considered. "I'd have to pay you, otherwise it's awkward."
"Pay me fifteen dollars an hour. I'm not a real carpenter. We can do it together. Your son can help."
She looked at me for a while and then she smiled. Would I like to come over later and measure the room?
I said I would.
8
MAYBE I COULD DO a weekly podcast. Play some theme music, maybe Root Boy Slim singing "Put a Quarter in the Juke," and then: Hello, this is Paul Chowder welcoming you to Chowder's Bowl of Poetry. And I'm your host, Paul Chowder, and this is Chowder's Plumfest of Poems. Hello, and welcome to the Paul Chowder Poetry Hour. I'm your host and confidant, Paul Chowder, and I'd like to welcome you to Chowder's Flying Spoonful of Rhyme. And this is Chowder's Poetry Cheatsheet, and I'm your host, Paul Chowder, from hell and gone, welcoming you to Chowder's Thimblesquirt of Verse.
I could never keep it up. You have to hand it to those pod-casters. They keep on going week after week, even though nobody's listening to them. And then eventually they puff up and die.
Let's begin today, however, by talking about the history of rhyme. If you're prepared, I'm prepared. Actually I'm not all that prepared, because when I'm prepared that's when I fail. I learn too much and it crowds out what I actually know. There's crammer's knowledge and then there's knowledge that is semipermanent.
So the first thing about the history of rhyme, and the all-important Rhymesters' Rebellion of 1697, is that it's all happened before. It's all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can't stand it and let's stop and do something else.
LET'S TRY AGAIN. The history of poetry began, quite possibly, in the year 1883. Let me write that date for you with my Sharpie, so you can have it for your convenience. 1883. That's when it all began. Or maybe not. Could be any year. The year doesn't matter. Forget the year! The important thing is that there's something called the nineteenth century, which is like a huge forest of old-growth birch and beech. That's what they used to make clothespins out of, birch and beech. New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world. There was a factory in Vanceborough, Maine, that made eight hundred clothespins a minute in 1883. Those clothespins went out to England, to France, to Spain, to practically every country in the world. Clothes in every country were stretched out on rope to dry in the sun and held in place by New England clothespins. Elizabeth Barrett Browning probably used New England clothespins. I'm not kidding.
And the way that we write the nineteenth century on a piece of paper is we go "19" and then we do a special little thing on top. A nifty little thing that's sort of like a little bug flying around the nineteenth century. And that's called the "th." It means "nineteenth" century. And that's how we abbreviate the enormity of what happened.
But here's a tip. If you say "nineteen hundreds" when you mean "nineteenth century," you're going to get in trouble with your dates. Because the nineteenth century is the eighteen hundreds. But! Don't say "the eighteen hundreds." People who say "the eighteen hundreds" are looked at in a special way by the people who say "the nineteenth century." The people who use eighteen hundreds don't know that. They don't know that the people who say "nineteenth century" are looking askance at them. So please consider not saying "eighteen hundreds," because the people who say "nineteenth century" will dismiss what you have to say. You can refer very knowingly to a specific decade of the nineteenth century- you can say, for instance, "the eighteen-eighties," or even, extra-knowingly, "the eighties"-but never "the eighteen hundreds."