At Church and at Strip Clubs

Three beautiful poems:

"Discharged into Clouds" by Dean Young at Threepenny Review

"The Vista by C. Dale Young at the Poetry Foundation

"The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" by Jack Gilbert (audio) at the Poetry Foundation

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I don’t want to be silent about issues that concern me because all too often, silence implies consent, but I also want to feel like we’re moving forward and making some kind of difference. Perhaps I want too much but that’s nothing new. I’m going to spend 2012 trying to figure out a better way to talk about these issues. I’m going to spend 2012 seeking out the kind of writing I know is out there but is not receiving the attention it deserves. I’m going to spend 2012 committed to great(er) expectations rather than surrendering to the status quo. We’ll see how this goes.

-Roxane Gay over at The Rumpus


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To say Southerners drink sweet tea like water is both true and not. True because the beverage is served at every meal, and all times and venues in between—at church and at strip clubs, at preschool and in nursing homes. Not true because unlike water or wine or even Coca-Cola, sweet tea means something. It is a tell, a tradition. Sweet tea isn't a drink, really. It's culture in a glass. Like Guinness in Ireland. Or ouzo in Greece.

-via Garden and Gun

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When I read the first summary of the new rules, what jumped out at me was that, to be eligible, a documentary had to be reviewed by either the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. That puts enormous pressure on the critics of those papers (“Review my doc or I’ll shoot this dog”), but to qualify at all, a documentary must open and play for at least a week in both cities, so it’s fairly likely to be reviewed.

-Roger Ebert on the new Oscar rules over at Wall Street Journal

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The first person plural is an indexical pronoun, dependent on context for meaning, but the boundaries are often unclear even to the speaker. And there’s something not only ambiguous but also incoherent in the pronoun. As Franz Boas warned in 1911, “a true [first person] plural […] is impossible, because there can never be more than one self.” Poetry, though we associate it with “I,” is rather fond of “we,” and not only the intimate “we” of private I/Thou relations. But the best poets are also aware that it’s a shifty and treacherous pronoun. Surprisingly, poetry, the genre we most identify with private, subjective experiences, is far freer in its use of the first person plural than narrative prose, though there are a few bold examples in fiction, such as Kate Walbert’s Our Kind, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and, most recently, Justin Torres’ We the Animals, works that suggest a “we” prior to or stronger than the individuating psyche. But poetry has given much freer rein to the first person plural. At the same time, the pressures and perils of the pronoun “we” are registered with particular sensitivity in the genre with the most acute linguistic self-consciousness.

-via Jacket2

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My friend Noah writes and sings remarkable songs.