I just finished a fairly quick revision of my comment on a poem by JoAnne Growney for the next entry of my Scientific American blog and thougt I’d done such a spectacularly fine job to show the passage here, before and after, as a lesson in Superior Composition:

BEFORE:

This reminds me of my reflections on different brain areas for different thinking with the mathematician in her asensual awareness barring paint from invading her platonic sphere, the poet in her sensual awareness accepting it—reveling in it I infer!  Meanwhile, a reader rides into problems like where mathematics takes over from reality, and what it is the red paint on.

From my point of view as a critic of poetry, its main (very large) virtue is its emphasis through maximal contrast of the beauty of red—and paint’s liquidity–with the beauty of sphericity, whose occurrence takes place in a third brain area, an association area, where we experience some hint of the vastness of our sensually-rich, conceptually-rigorous cosmos.  In a little poem where someone is thinking wryly about how strange that cosmos is.

AFTER:

From my point of view as a critic of poetry, this poem has a single main (very large) virtue: an emphasis through maximal contrast of the beauty of red (and paint’s liquidity) with the beauty of sphericity.  Result?  A hint of the vastness of our sensually-rich, conceptually-fundamented cosmos—in a little poem where someone is thinking wryly entertaining thoughts about how strange that cosmos is.

The second version may be over-written, one of my big faults when I’m in my poetic mode.  If so, it’s still a huge improvement on the first version.  One value of it, I believe, is that it trades number of interesting points for an interesting over-all point.

(I just got lucky.  I forgot to save what I was typing after every paragraph, or sooner, and just got zapped.  But I only lost two lines.  I remember them pretty well.  I noted that I’d made three changes to what I had after putting my text into this file.  One was breaking up the first sentence with the colon.  Another was ending it where I did instead of at “cosmos.”)

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