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Etheridge Knight’s poem in your September 2019 issue [“Feeling Fucked Up,” Dog-Eared Page] is an affront to all Christians, with its blasphemous references to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Clearly The Sun’s editors lost their sense of decency when they published this.
Cancel my subscription. Moreover, I urge you to issue an apology to all Christians who were offended by this lapse in judgment.
To Name Withheld [Correspondence, January 2020], who demanded The Sun issue an apology to all Christians for publishing Etheridge Knight’s poem “Feeling Fucked Up” [Dog-Eared Page, September 2019]: Please speak for yourself only. As a Christian minister, I read Knight’s impassioned plea to have his lover back and felt my heart break open. His poem aches with the knowledge of what he lost — a loss so complete as to make everything else irrelevant.
In this holiday season, when Christians claim that God came to the world in the form of Jesus — amidst the stench of the stable, to a young, scandalized mother — I am reminded that none of us needs to protect the holiness of God. Instead we would do well to allow poets’ words to break our hearts.
I want to say that I found Etheridge Knight’s poem “Feeling Fucked Up” moving and am glad it was in The Sun. One person’s blasphemy can be another’s holiness.
Give in to the temptation. We love getting mail.
(Of course, we reserve the right to edit.)
