Mistressing Poem by gershon hepner

MISTRESSING WITH NEAT RHYMES AND NEAR-RHYMES

Misstressing is a sin in rhyme,
but in the real world is quite licit,
so long as having a good time
like hidden rhyme is not explicit.

Neat rhymes may brighten the impact
of lives that otherwise are boring,
Neat mistresses who've been in-sacked
bring symmetry to metered whoring.

Near rhymes in some ways are more subtle,
like near-mistresses they tease,
rejected partly, near-rebuttal
reward they get each time they please.

Inspired and by an article on Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat, by David Thomson ("Red Silk is the Best Blood, " LRB,12/16/10) :

Sondheim's short essays on other lyricists go hand in hand with his introductory essay, ‘Rhyme and Its Reasons', and an introduction in which he issues ‘Ground Rules': ‘content dictates form'; ‘less is more'; ‘god is in the details.' Yet these are modest compared with the insistence on meticulous rhyme and stress (‘Mis-stressing is a cardinal sin, and as an occasional sinner myself, it drives me crazy.') So he tells us about true rhymes, near rhymes, visual rhymes, regional rhymes, assonance, consonance, run-ons and identities. In asserting the necessity for true rhyme, he quotes an unnamed pop music lyricist who once said: ‘I hate all true rhymes. I think they only allow you a certain limited range … I'm not a great believer in perfect rhymes. I'm just a believer in feelings that come across. If the craft gets in the way of the feelings, then I'll take the feelings any day.' To which Sondheim replies:
The notion that good rhymes and the expression of emotion are contradictory qualities, that neatness equals lifelessness is, to borrow a disapproving phrase from my old counterpoint text, ‘the refuge of the destitute'. Claiming that true rhyme is the enemy of substance is the sustaining excuse of lyricists who are unable to rhyme well with any consistency … A good lyric should not only have something to say but a way of saying it as clearly and forcefully as possible - and that involves rhyming cleanly. A perfect rhyme can make a mediocre line bright and a good one brilliant. A near rhyme only dampens the impact….
He goes on to call Lorenz Hart the ‘laziest of the pre-eminent lyricists': the man slurs his rhymes and makes errors of syntax. He pours scorn on the line ‘Your looks are laughable, unphotographable' from ‘My Funny Valentine': ‘Surely what Hart means is "unphotogenic".' Suddenly he sounds like a fusspot. I don't think Hart meant, or needed to mean, ‘unphotogenic'. It wasn't that he was clinging to rhyme when he wrote ‘unphotographable'. Rather, he felt his valentine (it's a song from the 1937 Babes in Arms) had a quality that's beyond being photographed. This failure to get the message is rare in Sondheim, but it's revealing, and the talk of picturing may remind us how hard he's worked to change his own look. As a young man, he had a depressive, untidy, wolfish look; now he is bearded, handsome and nearly immaculate. Technically, he has led our eye away from his gangster mouth to his saintly eyes. I can't believe he doesn't know it.
There's more on Hart. Sondheim takes ‘Ten Cents a Dance' to task, and mocks the ‘misplaced' stress in
Seven to midnight, I hear drums.
Loudly the saxophone blows.
Ridiculous, he says, for the stress falls on ‘hear' and not ‘drums'. But isn't that ‘error' part of the song's poignancy? Isn't it the misdirected stress that uncovers the pain of the experience? For all his slovenliness, Hart's songs live on in the heads of people born long after his death in 1943. He was a wreck of a man, a sad case, but his unique (and daring) dismay was a formative influence on Sondheim. It is in Hart more than in any other lyricist that one can hear something of Sondheim's unease about relationships. For example, from Hart's ‘I Wish I Were in Love Again':
Now I'm sane, but …
I would rather be gaga!
The pulled-out fur
Of cat and cur,
The fine mismating of a him and her -
I've learned my lesson, but I wish I were
in love again!
It's in the fine mismatings of hims and hers that Sondheim is most unsettling and comes closest to tragedy, while working in a form - the Broadway musical - that was once insistent on staying cheerful. The notes on other lyricists are smart, but disconcerting. They're like Nabokov tearing strips off Edmund Wilson over Eugene Onegin, or Norman Mailer beating up on his rivals for Heavyweight Champion of the Novel. And they tread all over the melancholy Sondheim shares with Hart.

6/9/12 #10462