I really love to rhyme words. It’s a simple and pure pleasure. I know that a lot of people struggle with it, though, because often it makes poetry seem trite and forced and sing-songy. I love using rhyme as a way to make poems more lyrical and atmospheric. So, I wanted to explain the way that I think about rhyming when I write.

I visualize words as people living together in a city. Every word has neighbors - both next door and on the same street - and every street intersects with another street which intersects with another. Everything is part of a connected whole.

1. The next door neighbors are exact rhymes (say, hey, tray). They’re useful as the basic building block of rhyming, but you should absolute venture beyond them.

2. The people who live on the same street are near rhymes (say, grave, thank) that usually share important vowel sounds and maybe a few consonants. These are the bread and butter of any well-rhymed poem. And you shouldn’t feel limited to only using these at the end of a line - you can chain these along anywhere.

3. The intersecting streets are more abstract. They can be words that share a phonetic sound (fleck, crass, acknowledge), or they can be words that are organically associated with each other based on meaning (moon, galaxy, midnight).

You can see how when you visualize words like this, everything is connected with each other on some level; even totally different words might live only a few blocks away.

Writing poetry with rhymes stops becoming a chore and starts becoming a nighttime walk through avenues of language. The key is to be fluid and understand the ways that words can connect. Don’t lock yourself into a pattern. Realize the possibilities within walking distance.

Here’s a very extreme example from a poem I wrote called “Marginal Thinking.”

wispy days, we wished away the whips and waves of yesterday. the lips of praised tripped, stiffly stayed, then lifted me from wintry graves.

When you think about rhyming the way I do, you can tell that nearly every word in this stanza is connected with another in some way. Besides the abundance of assonance (wispy, wished, whips, lips, tripped, stiffly, lifted, wintry), there’s a lot of repeated consonant sounds like Ws, Ss, Ts, and Ps. And I didn’t sit down and figure this out as I did it - it all arose organically by using the visual style of rhyming that I described.

Hopefully this post was of some help to you, and hopefully you’ll start to love rhyming too!