Poem in New Verse News
 

My poem, "Altar Boy", is on the New Verse News website today, Sunday, August 26, along with a 3-minute video. Unfortunately, the reverend was "kicked upstairs" (i.e., promoted to Monsignor) and transferred from my church to another parish, where he abused a dear friend of mine. My chopped up sonnet is the second poem on the page.

I like the poem, Cathy, but found it harder to read with the spacing and the lack of punctuation. I had to ignore those in order to hear the music of it.

Susan

The chopped-up nature of it struck me as apt for the speaker and the subject. Brava, Cathy!

I like, too. While one of the words starting with f rubs me up the wrong way, at least the jolt of crudeness is purposeful; an indecent word for an indecent object of treatment. I could say the same thing for the want of punctuation and the spacing that further disorients. Yet as Aaron rightly observed, the absence of such coherence is, for this particular speaker and subject, only apt. I should think it well compassed, then. Congratulations, Cathy!

(Never mind. Embarrassed by the clanging noise of my own opinions.)

I think it's a brilliant, powerful poem, Cathy.

Congrats, Cathy! The poem is powerful. Here is the link to the actual poem, rather than the website.

https://newversenews.blogspot.com/20...altar-boy.html

I sincerely thank Susan and Erik for expressing their honest opinions about whether the poem would be more effective if approached in a different way.

However, I can't resist mentioning that of the dozens of poems on this topic that I have written in a more formal and more euphemistic way than Cathy has here, I have only ever succeeded in getting ONE published. (Bless you, editor emeritus Paul Lake at First Things.) [Edited to correct this statement: He only retired from teaching, and is still poetry editor at [i]First Things[.i]]

Regardless of what punctuation conventions and diction are used, is very, very hard for victims' point of view to be heard on this subject. Period.

[TMI deleted.]

For disturbing topics like this one, I think that techniques that work for one audience will fall flat with another. And that's okay.

I liked it, Cathy. Thanks.

Again, as above.

(Aside question: is Paul Lake no longer poetry editor at First Things?)

The course of my life was directly impacted by what the Monsignor did to the first and greatest love of my life. It took fifty-two years to get to the truth of the matter, and I am devastated.