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11 August 2005: A few days ago, my ego suffered a mild setback. I found out from Robin Hamilton at New-Poetry that The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, (1994), discussed a kind of rhyme I thought I might have invented (privately) back in the late sixties and called various names including "fore-segment rhyme" and "backward rhyme." In fact, there's a full, albeit brief, entry on it in the Princeton as "reverse rhyme." This gives, as an example of it, "bat/bad." Its author is Terry Brogan, co-editor of the encyclopedia and author of a long, thorough entry on rhyme immediately following his entry on reverse rhyme. (He's the fellow whose name came up in my entry here yesterday.) Needless to say, Brogan doesn't say anything about me in either of his entries concerning rhyme. But he doesn't say anything about the origin of reverse rhyme nor give any examples of its use nor name any poet who has used it, either. Since I got a mention of it into print in the 1990 edition of Of Manywhere-at-Once, and used it in a poem therein, I'm not out of the ballgame. But, no, I neither now think nor ever really thought I could have been the inventor of so natural a device. On the other hand, it does not seem to have been mentioned in the 1974 edition of the Princeton or anywhere else I know of before the 1994 Princeton . . . It would be most interesting to know more about its history.
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