The "integers" line works well for me, both in s1 and as a repetend, though it fits least well in the final stanza. And I'm very fond of line 2, with those disappearing fractions (think of children and how much they value "and a half"!).
I do wish that the second repetend were a more interesting idea, especially as it's the really foundational idea of the poem. That's a bigger problem than the "ear to ear" and "toe to toe" difficulties and the padded quality of "shedding off."
One of the first verities I heard on this forum about villanelles was that their core ideas need to develop as the poem proceeds. I'm going to think longer about whether real development happens here.
By the way, in the course of some google searches I've discovered that poems in this event are showing up in google results. That's not supposed to happen, and I suspect that the needed code to hide them hasn't been used. Could a moderator fix this, maybe? And be sure that the code is inserted for the rest of the poems? Sorry to be a pain in the neck, but it could be important to hide these poems if they're unpublished.
Last edited by Maryann Corbett; 05-27-2011 at 03:47 PM.
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