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Unread 04-24-2025, 01:41 PM
Max Goodman Max Goodman is offline
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This is delightfully quirky!

FWIW, I'll share my apparently minority view of the poem's technique, which frequently feels to me too convenient to achieve the sparkle wanted for light verse.

If the syntax shifts are desired for any reason other than filling out lines or getting the rhymes to fall in the right places, consider working one into the first sentence, to establish that as part of the poem's voice.

"A day as June as any other" is a delightful description of a summer day. "as June as any other in that month" weakens it to a wordy (conveniently wordy, to fill out the line) way of saying it was June.

Enjambing morn/-ing takes the poem away from the oral feeling of most of the rest.

"loud as parakeets"! Nice.

"pass right by is what she will" would be more grammatical than the current version.

World of Len feels as though it were named for the rhyme. Nothing wrong with rhyming on a name, of course, but The Mangled Cat shows that this is a world where the establishments' names can delight me, so rhyming without doing more is a disappointment.

"almost ten to twelve" strikes me as odd (in its mix of looseness and precision), without the charm of the poem's other oddities.

"For blue the sky was" is the first syntax twist that doesn't facilitate a rhyme or a line completion. It's helpful that it's there.

"not long ago" feels rhyme-driven. It doesn't add anything and might (hard to tell) contradict the idea that this happened long enough ago for some who were born that year to be taking in the story.

The other imperfect rhyming doesn't bother this reader, but the misstress of sha-DOW does.

The "Grey, the cloud" stanza delights me.

"the climate change" with the article in front, isn't familiar to me. I assume it's one of those across-the-pond things, and so I don't mind it, but if non-Yanks aren't likely to recognize it either, consider a change. Ditto "crem."

I echo the wish for a better rhyme at the crucial crash/squashed moment.

"Soon. Soon." would read more smoothly with unstressed syllables in front of each. quite, oh, yes, lots of possibilities.

Some typographical issues:
I assume the stanzas are all meant to be four lines and that the 3- and 5-line ones are the results of typos.
A period would help after "pedalling" (and maybe a comma at the end of the previous line). And one after "shift the cloud." A comma after "expectation" in the last stanza?
The semi-colon after "over" confuses me. A comma instead?

I hope some of this is helpful. The poem provides lots of fun.
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