Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned There’s Nothing Wrong With An Obvious Rhyme.

The other day a good friend introduced me to the poems of Lemn Sissay, and I wanted to write a little something about it because I find it utterly wonderful.

For the past decade, Sissay has woken up every morning before the sunrise and written a four-line poem. They’re all short, simple and sweet, and pretty much all of them rhyme. Here’s one as an example:

‘How do you do it?’ said night
‘How do you wake up and shine?’
‘I keep it simple,’ said light
‘One day at a time’

As someone who’s spent more than half a year getting up (most days) at the crack of dawn (or thereabouts) to write stuff down, I felt a lot of affinity for this routine. When I was trying to get back into the practice of writing a little bit every single day, I would often go to a random word generator website, assign myself a word and try to write a short poem about it. However, looking back through my notebooks from that period, I realised that I deliberately avoided any kind of rhyming wherever possible.

Why did I do this? In a word: embarrassment. In slightly more words: I’ve never written a rhyme in a poem that didn’t immediately feel naff. It’s like my brain automatically goes to the most obvious pairs of words imaginable: moon and June, college and knowledge, that sort of thing. When I read them back I can feel myself wincing, like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop at the end of the next line.

But when I put this to my friend Louise — the person who introduced me to Sissay in the first place — she offered a different perspective on it. As a music teacher she knows a hell of a lot about the psychology of music, and the reasons why it can move us so profoundly. She argued that familiarity is a hugely important part of what makes music so satisfying. It’s why we put our favourite songs on repeat, or why the crowd goes completely ballistic when a musician plays the opening notes of their signature hit at a concert.

“Besides,” she added, “the only way to write good poetry is to write bad poetry first.”

She’s right, of couse, as she so often is. And Sissay knows this too: in interviews about his latest poetry book — a collection of these morning poems — he outright admits that some of the verses he writes are awful. And that’s OK.

So screw it. I’m going to start writing bad poems again.

In fact, here’s one I wrote this morning, after an absolutely awful pun wormed its way into my brain:

When life gives you Lemns,
make some lemonade.
I know that joke is awful,
but it needed to be made.

They’ll get better, I promise. As long as I keep writing them, it’s basically inevitable.

I can no longer hear the phrase “When life gives you lemons…” without hearing this gloriously demented monologue from Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Do yourself a favour and give it a listen.