Out of Focus

braiker:

well played

flavorpill:

Yes.

I lack motivation today. At least the sun is out, the coffee is good, and the weather will turn back to spring.

newyorker:

Postscript: Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

The ringing, defiant poetry of Adrienne Rich, who died yesterday at eighty-two, articulated the frustrations of women who came of age along clipped paths in the nineteen-forties and fifties, only to discover in the sixties and seventies the extent of their longing to tear up the grass. Her voice resounds, three generations on. From her 1963 poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” a modernist collage in which careless references to women’s lives from Horace, Diderot, Eliot, and Shakespeare are recast in tight, furious stanzas about domestic confinement (“Dolce ridens, dulce loquens / she shaves her legs until they gleam / like petrified mammoth-tusk) to her expansive later poems that elaborate the love between two women, Rich continually stretched categories of feminine identity. She was an explorer, “diving into the wreck,” as the title of one of her most famous poems has it, to help us find what is naked and unencumbered in ourselves: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.”

We’ve gathered here seven of the twenty-eight poems by Rich published in this magazine between 1953 and 1958. In these early poems, we see the formal discipline and metric grace that Rich would maintain (and push against) throughout her long career. This is decorous verse becoming rude: the anger to which Rich would give such powerful voice bubbles beneath the taut surfaces of these fine poems.

“England and Always” (1953)

“The Marriage Portion” (1953)

“Holiday” (1953)

“Living in Sin” (1954)

“At the Jewish New Year” (1956)

“Moving Inland” (1957)

“The Survivors” (1957)

Photograph by Neal Boenzi/New York Times/Getty Images.

Sad to hear of her passing, but what a phenomenal body of work to keep us close to our thoughts.

This is how I feel. Although I think the owl has more alcohol in his system than I do currently.

hungoverowls:

“Psst-I’m ignoring everyone and everything until the hearts go away. Do me a favor and slide that bottle closer.”

Sunday mornings, winter. on Flickr.

Sunday mornings, winter.

tballardbrown:

Watch the Throne therefore should not be judged as an album, but rather as a move in this savvy strategy of institutionalizing hegemony in the face of potential decline. Kanye and Jay-Z’s alliance offers a new blueprint for managing decline in a turbulent world from which international relations scholars and American foreign policy practitioners alike should learn. And if political scientists don’t want to take lessons from hip hop artists, then allow me to give the last word to Cyhi Da Prince: “my haters got PhDs, y’all just some major haters with some math minors.”

Jay-Z’s Hegemony in the Age of Kanye | Marc Lynch

*drops mic*

This might be my favorite Tumblr post ever. (drops mic)

This big?

felixsalmon:

Angela Merkel demonstrates the size of the Greece crisis