03-22-2016, 10:16 PM
Thanks again, there are still rough spots but they should succumb to further smoothing.
As an experiment, let's try this:
Edit 1a
Just north of my house lay a little wood,
ten acres packed with scrub-oaks, thorny, wild,
cut by a deep ravine. Town-bred, I could
lose track and time there; forest-glad I smiled.
Last week a yellow diesel Cat arrived,
steel-taloned, dozer blade down at its head.
With screeching treads it lustily contrived
to uproot every tree alive or dead.
Now, oaks torn down, I see far neighbors where
my view was wooded; spacious houses rise.
Where squirrels rushed and owls would hoot and flare,
near neighbors soon will share my emptied skies.
Some fuel and twenty tons of steel that roams
did this - those and the yearning dream of homes.
The principal advantages I see to modern/non-legacy capitalization here are that, first, it sets off the quatrains without skipping lines and, second, it highlights the sentence break at L11 where the period preceding it tends to be missed (if this were free verse the whole third quatrain could do without punctuaion - sentence structure is loose). Might use this capitalization if the poem were ever published.
@tectak - had to look up the reference to yellow AA vans: on this side of the pond it's AAA or "Triple-A" with its well-known red oval monogram. Presumably the extra "A" for "American" was added in somewhat the spirit of substituting "A" for "R" in "RSPCA." (And perhaps "RAA" was already taken by the Royal Artillery Association or the like.) Over here "AA" connotes "Alcohollics Anonymous" or "American Airlines," both of which may have vans. Learn something new every day! One people separated by a divergent set of acronyms.
As an experiment, let's try this:
Edit 1a
Just north of my house lay a little wood,
ten acres packed with scrub-oaks, thorny, wild,
cut by a deep ravine. Town-bred, I could
lose track and time there; forest-glad I smiled.
Last week a yellow diesel Cat arrived,
steel-taloned, dozer blade down at its head.
With screeching treads it lustily contrived
to uproot every tree alive or dead.
Now, oaks torn down, I see far neighbors where
my view was wooded; spacious houses rise.
Where squirrels rushed and owls would hoot and flare,
near neighbors soon will share my emptied skies.
Some fuel and twenty tons of steel that roams
did this - those and the yearning dream of homes.
The principal advantages I see to modern/non-legacy capitalization here are that, first, it sets off the quatrains without skipping lines and, second, it highlights the sentence break at L11 where the period preceding it tends to be missed (if this were free verse the whole third quatrain could do without punctuaion - sentence structure is loose). Might use this capitalization if the poem were ever published.
@tectak - had to look up the reference to yellow AA vans: on this side of the pond it's AAA or "Triple-A" with its well-known red oval monogram. Presumably the extra "A" for "American" was added in somewhat the spirit of substituting "A" for "R" in "RSPCA." (And perhaps "RAA" was already taken by the Royal Artillery Association or the like.) Over here "AA" connotes "Alcohollics Anonymous" or "American Airlines," both of which may have vans. Learn something new every day! One people separated by a divergent set of acronyms.
Non-practicing atheist