Yannis Ritsos and the New Blog Look

If you don't know about it already, make time to check out the blog Hints: The Poetry of Yannis Ritsos, it is a daily posting of the works of this magnificent Greek poet. Here is a poem from their post last yesterday:

-----------------------------------------------------

The Shadows of Birds: 42

42.
Discreet lights of avenues
beneath the trees
a bicycler talks
with a soldier
a drinking glass breaks
on the pavement
the orange juice sketches
a broad-shouldered angel
with one foot missing.

Athens—May 15, 1980

-----------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile, hope you like the new look of the blog. There were a number of reasons I changed, not the least of which was I was getting sick of the old color. More importantly, with a color background Blogger was not allowing me to indent individual lines of poems, so any poems with variously indented lines couldn't be used, which is a pretty big limitation. Here is an example of a poem from issue #146 of Lilliput that I would not have been able to print previously:



--------------------------------------------------

field of sunflowers
---far as the eye can see
_____farther

Anne LB Davidson

--------------------------------------------------


Before, no matter what I did with the formatting, it would have come out like this:


---------------------------

field of sunflowers
far as the eye can see
farther

---------------------------


Obviously, you can see in this case that this violates the poet's intent. Hence, the new look. The workaround I came up with is kind of goofy, but it appears to work in both Firefox and Explorer, so I'm good.


For now,
Don


Note: If you would like to receive the two current issues of Lilliput Review free, just make a suggestion at the Near Perfect Books page.