Interviewing Wendy Cope
Maria S. Mendes
Wendy Cope: “There is this thing I wish people would not do in rhyming poems: when they rhyme a plural word like friends with a singular word like send, it drives me mad. And there is a bit in the House of Pooh Corner when Eeyore is trying to write a poem and he has a problem, because he realises that “friends” and “send” don’t rhyme. He alters “friends” to the singular. But then he has to put an “s” on “send”. He sees that you can’t rhyme “friends” with “send” or “friend” with “sends”. So he gets confused about it all, he can’t write his rhyming poem because of this problem. Nowadays, poets just ignore the problem and that really annoys me”.
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