Djelloul Marbrook

I  haven’t run across it, but there ought to be something in poetics called ghost rhyme— a word that gives every appearance and sense of rhyming with another but doesn’t.

Not assonance, which is a resemblance or rough similarity to sound, but rather a sound that conveys such a strong sense of logic and inevitability that one naturally assumes it’s a rhyme—it has a twin sister or brother.

The phenomenon might also be called an absent rhyme.

It’s rather like a familiar place which nonetheless we can’t place, or a thought we’ve entertained but can’t recall its circumstances, something we’ve heard but can’t remember where or when. It calls upon the collective unconscious within us, our counting house of rhyme and would-be rhyme. Perhaps it might be compared to an absent limb. It’s still there, but we can’t see it.

Charles Wright has given us a sestet that perfectly exemplifies this spectral aspect of poetry:

Remember us who are weak,
You who are strong in your country which lies beyond the thunder,
Raphael, angel of happy meeting,
resplendent, hawk of the light.

There are at least three possibilities for rhyme here: weak, meeting and light. Light is the strongest, but it might have been possible to rhyme with thunder, and there could have been internal as well as end-rhymes.
But there aren’t, and yet we feel as if we’ve experienced the finality and logic of rhyme. With that finality, however, comes a measure of suspense that we usually don’t feel in overt rhyme, a sense of something about to happen. Perhaps it could be called something-must-happenness.

The sestet, from a poem called Flannery’s Angel (Sestets, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2009) shows us a poet drawing not only upon his own unconscious store of poetics but on ours as well. It doesn’t matter whether we’re well versed in poetics, because some words simply convey a familiar resonance and affinity for other words, and when the poet doesn’t supply the word, we supply the sound. We know many words rhyme with light or weak. The poet of the ghost rhyme is calling up out our impulse to take part in an ongoing act of creativity.

This absent or ghost rhyme has the great modernist advantage of drawing the reader into the making of the poem, rather than presenting a flat fait accompli. It makes the reader complicitous, and it is in this sense that it is a modernist poetic. By comparison, 19th Century poems with their rhymes-certain seem almost a bit cocksure, a bit smug.

But there is another more profound aspect to ghost rhyme. It reminds us that we all know more than we cop to knowing. We see more, hear more, but we fear the inconvenience and the consequence of allowing how much we apprehend. Wright’s sestet sets all this aside, allowing us to fully experience what we habitually refuse to admit knowing. It’s not an accident, it comes from the poet’s venturesome sensibility.

The absent rhyme is quintessentially a 21st Century device because it calls upon us to exceed conventions and own up to our unconscious counting house, our store of unexpressed knowledge. It pushes our sensibilities far beyond the news of the day, which is merely souped-up recital of facts that have become decrepit before reaching us, into the realm where our unconscious conspires to create our future. It calls us into the realm of alchemy, a scary but infinitely hopeful world. And it does so when we’re becoming acclimated to such ideas as micro-expression and body language, which suggest to us that we know more than we think we know and actually use these unspoken abilities.

The ghost rhyme would, I think, have been greeted by Ibn al-Arabi, the great mystic, as an aspect of divine collaboration. Al-Arabi thought of us as co-operators with God of a cosmos that is ever coming to be. Because the ghost rhyme depends upon something within us, a response summoned out of us, it gives rise to an alchemical process. The poem is the elixir. The goal is to make something noble of base elements. We are as important to the poem as the poet. Our role, in Al-Arabi’s philosophy, is to take part in the creative imagination which every millisecond re-creates the universe, and this is what Flannery’s Angel expects us to do.

Wright, of course, is hardly the only poet to employ ghost rhyme, but Flannery’s Angel is as good an example as we’re likely to find. It’s a device the pioneer theorist Carl Jung might have celebrated because it challenges us to accept that in any given situation we know a great deal more than we pretend, and in the digital age we’re coming perilously close to having to step up to the plate and confess that we’ve been holding out on each other, pretending to know less, to experience less, simply because we don’t know how society might respond to what we do know.

In other words, ghost rhyme challenges us to accept responsibility for sensibilities that have not been canonized, sensibilities that have no cultural sanction, no imprimatur of church or discipline. Does this imply an anarchic world? Perhaps. That’s certainly one of the questions ghost rhyme raises.

But it’s a challenge to the intellect in another way, because we live in a society which, perhaps in response to such an embarrassment of communicative riches, more often than not chooses its prejudices over facts. Ghost rhyme shows us how intellectually bankrupt such a response to evolution is. It opens wide a door to the unknown and half-known, a door many if not most of us would prefer to ignore, a kind of attic or cellar door that scares children half to death, the same door that scares us into preferring our half-baked notions to an exploration of the facts. Or, another way to look at it is that ghost rhyme opens the door to the collective unconscious.

Ghost rhyme is in fact scary. It separates the emotionally and intellectually brave from the larger body of cowards in a society.

Is this too much to say of such a simple thing? I’ve asked myself this question and tried to answer it by savoring ghost rhyme in my own poems. It scares me. It compels me to plumb my own meanings, to
follow them to their pits or their heights. It cautions me against laziness and trickery in poetics, implying more than I mean and thereby deceiving the reader. Ghost rhyme is, I believe, an antidote to pretense. It says to the poet, It’s your question, so answer it. It’s your door, so enter it. It stays him from messing around with the reader, fooling the reader.

Its modernity rests in its refusal to close off options, to write finis. But that’s only part of its power; it also invites the reader to participate in the poem’s possibilities. It assures the reader that the poet will not foreclose on the ideas and recognitions that the poet has served up. In this sense, it’s rather like hypertext: the reader can read just what he sees on the screen or he can click on link after link, going deep into the text, far bey0nd the words themselves.

This is precisely why poetry is more urgent and enlightening than news: it presses on to the pale of our awareness and encourages us to trespass into the unknown. News on the other hand assails and thwarts us.

I don’t raise this issue in the belief that full rhyme has run its course. In the hands of certain poets it will always retain its power and finality. Nor do I claim that ghost rhyme is something new. It’s no more new than the ablutions of Ernest Hemingway in prose and William Carlos Williams in poetry. When a Norse poet says something like “I stole his wife and set sail” we see the roots of Hemingway’s The Killers and Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow. We know that taciturnity comes from the Norse sagas.

This is true of painting as well. Surrealism as a codified movement made its mark in the 20th Century but is amply present in El Greco and many other earlier artists.

Ghost rhyme is unusually if not uniquely suited to explore the trove of recognitions opened by Sigmund Freud, Jung and others in the last century. It appeals to that collaborative impulse in us that having seen or heard something prompts us to think we ourselves can emulate or enhance it. In this sense it’s a humble poetry. You might think of it in terms of the difference between Roman and Arabic numerals. There was a certitude, a kind of foreclosure about Roman numerals. There were not too many ways you could impose them. But the balletic Arabic numeral is amenable to all kinds of pirouettes and subtleties. Even without its breathtaking zero, it’s more athletic and empowering than its arthritic Roman precursor.—DM