The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 58:Revitalizing Melody I’m an experimenter in lyric verse, traveling through space and time to find poetic stanza patterns that start memorizing themselves in me. My attitude is playful: you don’t know what you will find. In this book, I use a form that Victorian poet Swinburne called a “ballad” stanza. I accompany each experimental “ballad” poem with a commentary that I call a “blogatelle,” a blog that’s more like a piece of music since it contains, usually, a supplementary wordsong in verse. “27. A Ballad of Play” creates a mood for considering poetry writing as playful, and my blogatelle compares “A child, a cat, an otter, and a bard” in this light. “28. A Ballad of Brief Lines” focuses on the refreshingly supple flexibility of the Swinburne stanza, and the blogatelle offers a sketch of a “shaman” as creator of a religious and therapeutic solo-poem, healing the reciter and the hearer. “29. A Ballad of Equality” quotes a passage from the Qur’an that I especially love. The blogatelle develops the equality idea by bringing in a related Qur’an verse: “There is no compulsion in religion.” “30. A Ballad of Camouflage” presents a moth I saw on the internet, whose wing-art design depicts a predator bird devouring and excreting its prey. The blogatelle develops the idea that Nature includes much, it is filled with life-and-death as a unified package, so “being one with Nature” means also a willingness to die when it is time.