"Now, how many was that ... ?"

I said at some point that, in this new version of my Blogger account, we will all be learning together.

I may one day wish I'd never said that (because when you learn together, you have to submit your mistakes to open inspection), but -- here goes.

The previous poem is an experiment in what some poets call "songform." What I think they mean by that is writing a (more or less) serious poem in a verse form reserved for music.

What I tried to do with "My Mandolin Sings" is not write strict pentameter or tetrameter lines, but try to parallel my syllable count, verse to verse, like a hymn.

Also like a hymn, I tried to suggest a tune with the action of the lines (while writing the first draft, I had a kind of hornpipe-y version of "Slane" -- an Irish tune churchgoers may know from the hymn "Be Thou My Vision" -- running in my head).

But you can see, I'm sure, that, while the first verse works OK, the second and third ones have weak spots.

I tried to correct a glaring error in rhyming, when I had all the lines in the third verse rhyme with some form of an "-ing" word, by going dialectical. That may turn out to be a "good" mistake. We'll see.

I'll keep you posted (by "post") on my progress, if any.