CALL me old fashioned, but does no one use rhyme any more? I've just been reading the latest issues of three poetry magazines - Poetry Ireland Review, Tracks and Agenda - and out of the 217 poems contained in their pages I was dismayed to find only seven that rhymed.
That may seem inconsequential to you, and I'm not saying that rhyme should be applauded for its own sake - too many bad poets and amateur versifiers have clunkingly used the moon/June formula for that to be valid. But I do think that the recognisable formality of a structured stanza with a consistent rhyme scheme can still yield special pleasures for the reader - Auden and Larkin and Lowell and Mahon and Heaney have shown this to be true.
Perhaps rhyme is simply too hard for all but the most rigorous practitioner - it locks the poet into a limited set of options, and only the very finest can turn that strait jacketing into something remarkable, remaining technically within its constraints while imaginatively breaking free of them. Far easier, I suppose, to write unstructured verse, where there are no formal rules and where the next line can be whatever you want it to be.
There's an interesting thesis (honestly) to be written on all this. Space, alas, doesn't permit such indulgence, so I'll just add that there are some fine (unrhymed) poems in these magazines. The 49th issue of Poetry Ireland Review offers its usual mix of poems and reviews, the eleventh issue of Tracks is largely concerned with tributes to John Montague, while the London based Agenda offers a bumper edition of recent Irish poetry.
The last named also offers critical essays on a number of Irish poets, and I have to say I found some of these tough going. John Bayley's assessment of Derek Mahon is fine, but "Seeing Things in a Jungian Perspective: Archetypal Elements in Seamus Heaney's Recent Poetry" by someone called J.R. Atfield is complete gobbledegook. There ought to be a law.
HAVE you ever heard of Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat and Tony Earley? You have? Oh, well, how about Chris Offutt, David Haynes and Stewart O'Nan? Really? Then you're obviously a better read person, not just than I am, but than many American cultural commentators.
It's the latter who have been getting their literary knickers in a twist over the top twenty list of Best Young American Novelists that's about to be announced by the London magazine, Granta. And their rage concerns not so much those who are included as those who are left out - most notable among the latter being designer violence king Bret East on Ellis, posh whodunnit queen Donna Tartt, and that maestro of shopping mall minutiae, Nicholson Baker.
All of these are under forty (Granta's required age limit) and would have been eligible for inclusion, but they've been brutally left out by the magazine's editor Ian Jack and his fellow judges Robert Stone, Anne Tyler and Tobias Wolff. Nicholson Baker, however, is being very stoical about his exclusion, wondering if his bald pate and silvery beard deluded the panel into thinking me must be an old geezer: "There could be, a feeling I'm eighty."
Tartt and Ellis aren't saying what they re thinking, but Rich ard B. Woodward of New York's Village Voice has described the list as "laughably wanting", while American Vogue has dismissed it as biased inept and irrelevancy. Even Malcolm Bradbury, something of an expert on American literature, says he recognises barely half the names on it in, fact, half of them haven't been taken up by publishers on this side of the Atlantic.
Perhaps English publishers should rectify this, because Ruth Killiek, of Dillons bookstores thinks that such matters as Top Twenties and literary prizes can do wonders for sales - she points out that in some Dillons' outlets Pat Barker's sales increased fifteen fold after she won the Booker Prize, and that Seamus Heaney's tripled after the Nobel win.
I'd love to tell you about the contents of Big Picture Small Screen: The Relations Between Film and Television, edited by John Hill and Martin McLoone and published by the University of Luton Press. I'd love to tell you, but I can't, because the consignment of copies intended for the launch in the Irish Film Centre got lost somewhere in transit and so the book wasn't available.
Still, I did get to hear a lengthy and serious speech by Farrel Corcoran, who is chairman of the RTE authority when he's not running media studies in Dublin City University, and I did get to hear a not so lengthy but just as serious speech by Lelia Doolan, who chairs the Irish Film Board. They were both full of praise for the book and referred to it so often that I almost felt `I'd read it, though of course I hadn't, it being somewhere on the road to Coleraine or Kinnegad by mistake.
But if it ever finds its way into my hands, I promise to peruse it thoroughly before putting it on the shelf containing all the other media books that have been launched in the Irish Film Centre during the past two weeks.