The Boy Who Couldn’t Rhyme
written by: Lot Hildegard
When I was a kid growing up in a small town in the South, most of the other boys were tone-deaf. I might have been eleven years old and in the band before I met another male child who could carry a tune. But what was really tragic was the case of Deward Smelter. Deward couldn’t figure out whether things rhymed or not. Poetry being an important part of school back then, and almost all of it being rhymed, Deward could never pass English on schedule and was still in third grade at age fourteen. He’d be out there on the playground, hanging around the swings and monkey bars, chanting, “I see London! I see France! I see a little girl’s underwear!”
I’ll leave it to you to imagine what he did with Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts, Popeye the Sailor Man, Suffocation, and the remainder of the schoolyard canon of that era, and the results for his social standing.
From such experiences are assassins and serial killers made.
When Deward was in tenth grade, at age twenty-four, Ms. Devereaux came to town to teach in the high school. She had recently graduated from one of those feminist Northeastern colleges and believed poetry should be about female body parts and not rhyme. Under her tutelage, Deward was able to complete three years’ worth of work in one six-week grading period, at which point he and Ms. Devereaux ran off together.
I always wondered what had happened to Deward and Ms. Devereaux, and I am pleased to be able to tell you that I did some research via the miracle that is the internet, and they are still together. Deward is a tenured professor of poetry at Harvard, and Ms. Devereaux holds the Mara Dudgeon Endowed Chair in Implacable Rage at her alma mater. Deward, much to the surprise of female classmates to whom I have communicated his whereabouts, is now openly gay, but Ms. Devereaux has had some work done and is now known as Grady. I’m not in a position to know anything about her undergarments, but whatever they may be, Deward is surely ready with just the right versification.
The most heartwarming development of all is that Deward appears to have overcome the bitterness of his multitudinous schoolyard humiliations. His next book, Blank Verse for Jumping Rope, is due off the press any day.
- The Boy Who Couldn’t Rhyme - October 11, 2025
- When the Shoe Drops - July 28, 2025
