Surprised by Sound

Sporadic rhyme, by its nature, is unpredictable. It makes us stop, look back, and say, ‘What was that? What just happened?’ Roi Tartakovsky’s Surprised by Sound does something similar for a previously unexamined strand of the English-language poetry tradition. Delayed recognition, pattern completion, and present-tense construals of the past are the Gestalts it outlines. It discovers new constellations in the literary firmament. ~Haun Saussy, author of "The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies"

Surprised by Sound: Rhyme’s Inner Workings is a subtle, intelligent, and wide-ranging study of an important topic. Its sensitive readings and important insights make it a pleasure to read. Tartakovsky listens carefully and sympathetically to sporadic rhyme, convincingly showing its prevalence in canonical and avant-garde poetry, hip hop, and political advertisements and deftly revealing the complicated effects it achieves. ~David Caplan, author of "Rhyme's Challenge: Hip Hop, Poetry, and Contemporary Rhyming Culture"

Surprised by Sound addresses a fascinating paradox: even the freest of free verse—the dominant poetic form of the past century—often turns to “sporadic” rhyme, rhyme that falls outside the typical end-rhyme pattern, appearing precisely at points and in places where we least expect it. Indeed, sporadic rhyme is the exception that validates the importance of the rule. In a series of dazzling oppositions—rigid/pleasurable, organizing/disruptive, motivated /accidental, progressive/regressive—Roi Tartakovsky shows that, however much poets—from earlier centuries as well as contemporary—want to evade rhyme, its potential to “awaken, evoke, suggest, invite, sway, soothe, surprise, and startle” the listener/reader continues to hold powerful sway. This is a highly original, a truly ground-breaking study, not only of rhyme, but of the way poetry works. ~Marjorie Perloff, author of "Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century"