On Tuesday, August 22, 2023 at 3:10:24 PM UTC-4, General-Zod wrote:
George Dance wrote:
Today's poem on Penny's Poetry Blog:
Post Meridian, by George Dance
Venomous time is slithering
Across manicured lawns
[...]
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2023/08/post-meridien-george-j-dance.html
#pennyspoems
Another read.... quite good....
Thanks for the encouragement, Zod. I've been rereading it myself, since I blogged it, and what I've kept seeing was a flaw I've been trying to fix. (It's good to realize that others haven't seen it.) What's bothered me was that the stanzas were
unbalanced; while I tried to balance them by giving them each an equal number of lines, the result was one with longer lines than the other, meaning no balance. I thought about that for a day, and decided what I had to do was add a 7th line to the last
stanza, and make it as long as L1; that would be the best way to restore the balance.
But what? This is an imagist poem, with nothing there but the one impression, and adding other thoughts would mess that up. All I could do was look at my closing metaphor. I'd actually had two: at first I compared the flowers going into darkness to
lights going out, and second to music stopping. Back in the original I'd tried to combine the two by having the last line read "and their lights go silent." When I wrote that I was thinking of synesthesia, but on this year's reread it just looked like a
mixed metaphor, so I'd changed it to "and their notes go silent." That of course got rid of the earlier metaphor completely; meaning it was one thing I could add back in with the new line.
And that's what I did. I won't bore you with all the mechanics, but the result is now on the blog page. For me it's a much better poem, and I hope you see an improvement, too.
https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2023/08/post-meridien-george-j-dance.html
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