I'm cleaning out handfuls of old poetry. Some of it worthwhile, much of it drivel, I try to find and save, finish the worthwhile bits.
I've noticed that I'm bad for rhyming words that end in "ee". The hard e sound. And I wonder why, but it's obvious, there are an immense number of easy rhymes for words that end in the ee sound: "He, She, Me, We, See, Free", .... one syllable through many: "integrity, futility, celibacy, ingenuity, aristocracy".
And with the addition of suffixes (ly and y for example) you can make almost any word in the English language rhyme with e.
Look at the musical scale: A B C D E F G - 5 out of seven of the notes rhyme with e.
While it makes for easy, musical rhymes it's a bit lazy, (hard e sound), and combined with my tendency (hard e sound again) to overuse the rhyme-scheme abababab it's ruining my flow...
But poetry, (hard e sound), it's like a hydra, and as I sort through and try to finish old poems new ones spring forth:
Some Doggerel:
Her new suitor suits her better
He's what she asked for to the letter,
(Musical with red hair?)
She can't wait for him to bed her
Only question is is when she asks if he will let her...
Irrelevant, but I'm a fan of the light play and double-entendres, thought to polish and improve it, but it's not the sort to be polished and improved.
Then on the heels of that there comes another, Chalk Circle - "She's drawing a chalk circle, when she's done she salts the line, ..." and this one, this will be great, and there's an epiphany where I'm distracted and begin making notes, finding rhymes, building ideas...checking the online thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, it's a poor cheat, my imagination is better and there is no tool finer, there could be though....I need a rhyme for book, the rhymes online are poor, there's "hook, crook, took, cook", a few others, none to the purpose, the visual thesaurus is no help whatsoever either, what would help...reorganize the sentence, and here I pause, move on, then there flows again a torrent of ideas: "Library --> shelf --> book --> page --> word --> letter"; the scale of ideas, each one an order of magnitude above or below the other, and the thesaurus, it doesn't have this, and now I have 6 words I can find synonyms for - now more brainstorming, the maps, paper maps as there are no computer tools that come close, read - the verb of book, there are words like chapter, paragraph, sentence, and more synonyms, antonyms, rhymes, and the brainstorming continues.
And the original poem, the one I began restoring, it's so far up the page now that I've forgotten it's existence.
What is needed is an associative thesaurus, a flash program that generates associated ideas, maps them for you in different colored bubbles, to click on one will lead you to another, the link above does something similar but not at all, instead generates a list and doesn't order them in space...
Perhaps it's for the best, poetry isn't supposed to be easy. But it'd be nice to finish it all up and move on.