Bouts-rimés
Bouts-Rimés
Padgett, R., (Ed.). (2000). Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, 2nd ed. New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative.
Bouts-“rimés (“boo re-MAY) is French for “rhymed ends.” A bouts-rimés poem is created by one person’s making up a list of rhymed words and giving it to another person who, in turn, writes the lines that end with those rhymes in the same order in which they were given. For example, one person writes down tanned, jump, fanned, lump; reading, lawn, misleading, yawn; yo-yo, death, no-no, breath; France and pants for another person to use as rhymes as in this verse:
Getting burnt, evaporated, bleached, or tanned
By the sun ain’t no way to jump.
I’d rather plop in shadow, be fanned
By some geisha girl, and lay around like a proverbial lump.
I’m not that hot for so-called good reading;
I just crave a cool drink on a bluegreen lawn.
I mean, don’t let me be misleading:
Where I’m at is sorta like the center of a yawn.
You know, excitement’s like being a yo-yo—
I don’t wanna beat the subject to death,
And it isn’t that repetition ain’t no no-no,
But the last thing I hope to be is out of breath.
So let somebody else go lost-generate all over France,
Or fly to the moon, discover Africa, some damn hotshot smartypants.
—Jack Collom
The weirder the list of rhymes, the more challenging it is to make them make sense together and seem natural. On the other hand, the author might want to create a poem that doesn’t make sense. Either way, the bouts-rimés poem requires wit and mental agility.
Bouts-rimés are said to have been invented by a seventeenth-century French poet named Dulot. They were very popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when they were known in English as “crambo.” In 1864, Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers, invited all the poets of France to fill in the lines for a set of selected rhymes. The next year he published the result: 350 poems by as many poets, all with the exact same rhymes. Why not do the same with a group of friends, a class, a school, a city?
Submitted by Gretchen K. Phillips
