Review of Couplets: A Love Story, by Maggie Millner

At Rhino.

Teaser quote: From the Middle Ages up ’til WWI, rhyme was there to punctuate rhythm, and rhythm was considered essential. By 2023, art poetry has almost completely ceded rhythm and rhyme to popular music—where pleasure comes first, and acrobatics-for-the-sake-of-acrobatics comes last. Today, when you see rhyme in poetry, it’s almost always loveless: written by people who do not enjoy rhyming poetry, and who do not understand what those old cats were doing.

[originally posted Thursday 23 March 2023]