Reading the Spring’s Oxford American, our copies of which are now signed by Jamie Quatro, I am reminded that there is no better way to feel warm and fuzzy about the South. In the editor’s note, Roger Hodge introduces a new a magazine section: Points South. Vignettes, overheards, all approachable and oh-so-Southern. After those comes, graciously framed by white space, a poem.
I first heard Sandra Beasley read a couple of years ago at Millsaps College. She was candid about her work, cheerful, and young with covetable awards behind her name. She had written books of poetry and a memoir about food allergies, a stereotypically whiny topic that she reframed as something lovely and human and very funny. And she is, if you will, Southern.
Sometimes, I think, my generation of Southerners loses our roots among what feel like dishonest or archaic portrayals of the culture of which we are a part. Which is what I love about what this magazine, and Beasley’s poem “King of Mississippi”: they reframe things in a Southern perspective that is very true to my experience of Southness. For my generation, I think, art is community and let poetry ne’er be forgotten just because it is quiet. Read real Southerners.
“Among the kings
the one-eyed man goes blind. Don’t get too close,
his gut growls. What a man hungers to love
makes him a bear. What he bears makes him king.”
by Whitney
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