[Maryann Corbett]

Thus, much Unjust
still leaves Nonplussed,

I am the contrarian today. I like this for its striking rhyme, and I don't find the syntax all that troubling. Using an adjective for a noun, or omitting the copula, is not unheard of; I read "much [that is] Unjust" without difficulty. And I'm intrigued by the decision I have to make in the next line: is it "me," the N., or the impersonal "one" I should fill in before "Nonplussed"?

My full disclosure is that I've been reading Berryman's Dream Songs and am currently in love with weird grammar and pleased with the small challenges of working it out. Standard syntax, like standard capitalization, would make this poem less interesting.

[Elise Hempel]

I've already said it, but that fourth couplet is the only one with such close rhyme -- very distracting. Whether I think it's a sonnet or not, it's a nicely simple poem until that word "nonplussed." Awkward and forced. A "big word," as they say, that doesn't seem to belong in the poem. It's not syntax for me but diction.

[L.M. Price]

I probably wouldn't have read this if I'd seen it in a book somewhere or something, but since it was here, and I did, I quite like the beginning and the ending. The 4th & 5th stanzas don't work for me - the fourth is difficult to say and the fifth is just confusing.
I don't know if I would call it a sonnet; it doesn't feel like one to me, but it's an interesting poem.

[Mary Meriam]

I just can't make myself like this Not-a-Sonnet. I wish I liked it. I find it annoyingly cryptic, though the caps are vaguely interesting.

[Jean L. Kreiling]

A little bit clever, but . . . I like Mary's and David's word "cryptic." A sonnet in dimeters can be a brilliantly concise gem, but I'd like those short lines to be packed with intriguing words and/or images; I want the nursery-rhyme lilt to be contradicted by something more clearly disturbing (and I want the lilt to be more precise).

[Marta Finch]

This little poem has nothing of the feel of a sonnet for me. Nor is there the consistent light fun of a nursery rhyme, having too much attention given to the syntax—and even that not successfully—or to trying for the enigmatic. Like a child’s rhyme imitated by a stodgy grown-up? (And yes, the word nonplussed.) I find myself reading it over and over and still ending up saying, “so what?”

One is tempted to think that this poem was chosen solely to stir up controversy.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Sonnet or not this one elicits a big hippo yawn for me. I'll just go on chewing my swamp grass, thanks.

[Catherine Chandler]

A sonnet? Maybe.

A successful poem? Not for me, anyway. I find the capitals a pretentious distraction. ED wannabee?

I understood N as being the "Man" in question. A sort of internal dialogue by a man, perhaps past his prime. Teetering on the brink of self-pity.

I don't think the poem comes even near to being good enough to provoke "controversy".

[Alex Pepple]

FYI - The original post of the sonnet was missing spacing intended by the author. I've just added them.

...Alex

[Ann Drysdale]

Like Cyn, I read this aloud. Several times. I am not a gesticulator as a rule, but I found myself pausing and physically reaching on each of the capitalised words, making a gap into which more words came, silently. The words that were necessary to make it make sense. To me. Other people will have different words, different hooks on which to hang the anger.

I could put my words in and scan them into a conventional sonnet. But if I did it would be a different poem - and an utterly conventional statement of the bleeding obvious. So I won't. But you could if you wanted to.