[Nick McRae]

Originally Posted by W T Clark

Well I'm glad you cut those other things Jim but I still think this poem requires a lot of reworking. I do not think it has imagined a mind outside of that which created it. The events it describes are blurry and indefinite where they should be sharp; its refrain of "Holy family. Broken family" falls flat because we are given no real idea what it is refering to: what family? how "broken"? The later passages are vague and fragmentary where they should cohere with the earlier sections. Maybe their fragmentariness would be less grating if we had a stronger, more sharper understanding of the family events that have influenced the narrator's guilt. The woman he has fallen in love with is a cipher and we have no incentive to care anyway because the narrative is so vague.

I said somewhere else that when your poetry abandons sentimentality, abandons the high, arch "poetic" need to be deep, it strikes me as much more alive and measured; well this poem strikes me as a move in the opposite direction: a kind of stream-of-consiousness flow with some holy concepts thrown in. I would stop worrying about deepness and start worrying about sharpness. There is an excoriating idea for a poem hidden somewhere here.

Hope this helps.

I agree with a lot of this. There's interesting language and phrases in this that I enjoyed, but I felt like my attention was being pulled in different directions, and it didn't cohere, or coagulate into a whole that I could see.

Another thing you could do vis-a-vis sharpness is continue to shroud the whole, but pare it back into it's most essential parts, and interesting language. But I think you'd still want to hint at some kind of narrative.