Poem of the Week, by Wang Ping
The use of “they” instead of he or she is something I would vote for if it were on a ballot (that thud you just heard is the sound of a whole bunch of my friends dropping to the floor from cardiac arrest after reading that), so I was glad to see that “they,” as in “They and I went to the store,” as a singular gender-neutral pronoun, is the official Word of the Year of the American Dialect Society.
I mean, why not? “They” used that way was in common usage until a couple hundred years ago. I’ve never understood (or been able to stomach) why “he” is the default for everyone, regardless of how they identify. (See how I just used “they” in that sentence? It went down easy, at least for me.)
The use of “they” simplifies everything. Abbreviations like LGBTQIA are exhausting, impossible to remember, only get longer with each narrowing of categorization, and change monthly. Using “they” lets everyone identify exactly as they wish, without having to explain or defend. And how many times have I witnessed my students, many of whom were not born in this country, wilt as the magical content of their stories gets lost in a sea of subject- or antecedent-pronoun agreement corrections. Language is mutable, malleable, something that is intuitive and natural and passionate.
What does any of this have to do with poetry? Everything. Poem of the week, by the fearless, funny, fierce, world-changing poet Wang Ping, a woman who learned English by illegally listening to the Voice of America during China’s Cultural Revolution and who is also a fiction writer, memoirist, scholar, professor, champion figure skater, doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, rower, sword fighter, flamenco dancer (I kid you not, she is all of those things and way more) and treasured friend.
Syntax
She walks to a table
She walk to table
She is walking to a table
She walk table now
What difference does it make
What difference it make
In Nature, no completeness
No sentence really complete thought
Language, like woman
Look best when free, undressed
For more information on Wang Ping, please click here.
