Man Booker Prize Content Editor, Sophie Rochester talks through this year's nominations ahead of next week's Award Ceremony.
Prize Winner Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall Daunt Debate, video part three
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part three of three.
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part three of three.
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part three of three.
Watch Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall Daunt Debate, video part two
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part two of three.
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part two of three.
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part two of three.
Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall Daunt Debate, Video Part one
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part one of three.
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part one of three.
Hilary Mantel, author of 'Wolf Hall', discusses her Booker shortlisted novel at the Daunt Debates. Part one of three.
Video Hilary Mantel and David Starkey discuss Henry VIII - part 1
Hilary Mantel and David Starkey discuss the shared subject of their new books - Henry VIII. Filmed in location in the Upper Bell Tower in the Tower of London: the scene of John Fishers imprisonment...
Hilary Mantel and David Starkey discuss the shared subject of their new books - Henry VIII. Filmed in location in the Upper Bell Tower in the Tower of London: the scene of John Fishers imprisonment prior to being martyred.
Hilary Mantel and David Starkey discuss the shared subject of their new books - Henry VIII. Filmed in location in the Upper Bell Tower in the Tower of London: the scene of John Fishers imprisonment prior to being martyred.
Biography Of Hilary Mantel
A Short Story Of Hilary Mantel: She was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and she was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991.
Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), set in Jeddah; Fludd (1989), set in a mill village in the north of England and winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize; A Place of Greater Safety (1992), an epic account of the events of the French revolution that won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award; A Change of Climate (1994), the story of a missionary couple whose lives are torn apart by the loss of their child; and An Experiment in Love (1995), about the events in the lives of three schoolfriends from the north of England who arrive at London University in 1970, winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize.
Her recent novel The Giant, O'Brien (1998) tells the story of Charles O'Brien who leaves his home in Ireland to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction in London. Her latest books are Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003), an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction, taking the reader from early childhood through to the discoveries in adulthood that led her to writing; and Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003).
Hilary Mantel's novel Beyond Black (2005) tells the story of Alison, a Home Counties psychic, and her assistant, Colette. It was shortlisted for a 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize and for the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Her latest novel is Wolf Hall (2009), winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
In 2006 she was awarded a CBE.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Autobiography, Fiction, Non-fiction
Bibliography
Every Day is Mother's Day Chatto & Windus, 1985
Vacant Possession Chatto & Windus, 1986
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street Viking, 1988
Fludd Viking, 1989
A Place of Greater Safety Viking, 1992
A Change of Climate Viking, 1994
An Experiment in Love Viking, 1995
The Giant, O'Brien Fourth Estate, 1998
On Modern British Fiction (contributor: "No Passes or Documents Are Needed - the Writer at Home in Europe") Oxford University Press, 2002
Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir Fourth Estate, 2003
Learning to Talk: Short Stories Fourth Estate, 2003
Beyond Black Fourth Estate, 2005
Wolf Hall Fourth Estate, 2009
Prizes and awards
1987 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
1990 Southern Arts Literature Prize Fludd
1990 The Cheltenham Prize Fludd
1990 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize Fludd
1992 Sunday Express Book of the Year A Place of Greater Safety
1996 Hawthornden Prize An Experiment in Love
2006 CBE
2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Beyond Black
2006 Orange Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Beyond Black
2006 Yorkshire Post Book Award (Book of the Year) Beyond Black
2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction Wolf Hall
Critical Perspective
Those who have discovered this daring and fearless writer, know never to second-guess her. Mantel has travelled to many and varied areas in her fiction. With a satirical voice reminiscent of Muriel Spark and a bleak and darkly inventive imagination, she has dealt with the French Revolution, the world of freak-shows and life in distant, troubled lands. She has a clear, cool style; she is detached and distant, observing with an acute eye the tragedies and horrors of human failings, of evil, and of the impotence of all attempts to impose order upon the world.
Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985), Mantel’s first novel, and its sequel, Vacant Possession (1986), are social comedies, full of mordant black humour and abrasive comment. The two novels constitute one story, separated by a ten-year gap. In Every Day is Mother’s Day, Evelyn Axon, an agoraphobic spiritualist, lives with her ostensibly autistic daughter. A long line of social workers has been to the Axon household over the years. Isabel Field is the latest. She is young and lives with her father and her temperamental nature suggests that she is not naturally suited to her job. Colin Sidney, a disillusioned history teacher, is married with three irritating children. His sister lives next door to the Axons in a house where he himself grew up, and he is having an affair with Isabel. The novel moves toward a horrible climax and is suffused with a near mad suffocating paranoia, claustrophobic failure and social disenchantment. Mantel strips society of its thin veneer of politeness to reveal the rotten core beneath, ‘… triteness was in his mouth like a foul taste long incubated.’ Below the surface, all is rancid.
In Vacant Possession, Muriel Axon takes centre stage. After having spent time in an asylum, Muriel, upon her release, seizes the opportunity to exact revenge on those she feels wronged her ten years earlier, particularly Colin Sydney and his family who have moved into her old house. The macabre sequel has the same intoxicating mixture of comedy and social satire as Every Day is Mother’s Day and relies once more upon coincidence. Isabel says in the first novel that ‘coincidence is what holds our lives together.’ One may be tempted to view this as a Victorian tool for the resolution of plot, yet in Mantel’s hands it is more a comment on the effect of past on present, of how one’s life is not a series of isolated moments but rather a continous interlocking and interweaving of incident, one constantly informing the other in ways often too subtle to be noticed.
In Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) Mantel draws on her own experience of having lived in Saudi Arabia. Frances, a former cartographer, lives in Jeddah with her engineer husband, Andrew. Fighting to keep a grip on her sanity, she is a witness to what Abbas Milani calls the ‘havoc Saudi Arabian apartheid wreaks on women.’ She also views with increasing alarm the casual racism of the Europeans. Mantel displays the hypocrisy of the West’s attitude to the oil-rich kingdom, and attacks its deliberate blindness. The novel is courageous and uncompromising; it is also Mantel’s most overtly political book, pouring opprobrium on state-sponsored sexual oppression. It also reminds one of Mantel’s gift for the perfectly cadenced gem of description, a group of Saudi men whose robes are flapping in the wind resemble ‘a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.’
A Change of Climate (1994) deals with Ralph and Anna Eldred. The novel moves between past and present, between their life in contemporary England and their experiences in South Africa decades earlier where they worked as missionaries at the start of their marriage. As in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, there is a dissection of the horrid obscenity of a country divided, torn and blackened by its attempts at social control. Yet like the earlier novel there is also an underlining mystery, a sinister foreboding, which gives it the feel of suspense fiction rather than mere polemic.
Mantel’s award-winning and semi-autobiographical novel An Experiment in Love, (1995) is, despite a somewhat misleading and badly chosen title, a subtle and perceptive analysis of childhood misery, youthful naivety and female friendship. The novel is an account of Carmel McBain’s journey from her childhood in Lancashire to the turbulent early seventies world of her London University hall of residence, a place of anorexic collapse, abortion and betrayal. Having come from an education system that wanted to turn Carmel and her friends into ‘little chappies with breasts’ there are the sudden but contradictory freedoms of university and maturity. The novel deals with a confused generation, trapped between conflicting values, when the existence of the pill hadn’t quite robbed girls of the belief that their proper place was in the home, ironing shirts. In many ways An Experiment in Love is Mantel’s most accomplished novel. It is certainly one of the most affecting. Full of dazzling language, sharp-eyed wit and a dissection of human motivation that is at once clinically detached yet suffused with a tangible pathos, the book comes over as Mantel’s most heartfelt work. Beneath the crisp irony and satire, there is a pressing need to examine the status of women, the baffling complexities of the class system and the purpose and significance of religion.
Religion is also the theme of Mantel’s Fludd (1989). Set in the fictitious northern village of Fetherhoughton it focuses on this isolated community’s relationship with the Church, which as Mantel tells us in a note at the start of the novel, ‘bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world, c. 1956.’ Fludd, a character in part based on a real 17th-century scholar and alchemist, arrives in the village to assist the local curate Angwin, whose faith has long been lost. Fludd brings unrest and scandal, and with his mysterious questioning of custom and habit, manages to bring about a quiet revolution in this hitherto sheltered world. We are never entirely sure who or what Fludd is: Angel, devil, visitor from another world? Mantel, who was brought up a Catholic, maintains an ambiguous stance towards the nature of organised religion. One can never be entirely sure if one is witnessing an attack or some kind of affectionate backhanded compliment. However, it is clear that Mantel believes in the power of redemption and in this, one of her more optimistic novels, there is an alchemical transformation which brings about new possibilities and hope, something conspicuously absent from most of her fiction.
In recent years Mantel has written Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003) dealing with adult illness and the anxieties of childhood, and Learning to Talk (2003), a collection of loosely autobiographical short stories that examines transformative experience in childhood. Hilary Mantel is one of the most interesting novelists writing in English today. Never afraid to tackle demanding themes with elegance and an often caustic wit, she deserves a much wider readership.
Garan Holcombe, 2004
Mantel's novel Prize
Hilary Mantel wins book prize:
LONDON - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, a tale of intrigue set during the reign of Henry VIII, won the Man Booker Prize for fiction yesterday. The novel charts the upheaval caused by the king's desire to marry Anne Boleyn, as seen through the eyes of royal adviser Thomas Cromwell.
Mantel's novel beat stiff competition from a shortlist that included previous Booker winners A.S. Byatt and J.M. Coetzee. A Booker win all but guarantees a surge in sales. Last year's winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, has sold more than half a million copies and been translated into 30 languages.
Other finalists were Coetzee's Summertime, Byatt's The Children's Book, Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. The $80,000 prize is open to novels in English by writers from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth of former British colonies.
From an Atlas of the Difficult World [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
From a Survivor [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days
I don’t know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race
Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know
the race had failures of that order
and that we were going to share them
Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special
Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more
since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do
it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life
Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making
which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements
each one making possible the next
For the Record [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
The clouds and the stars didn't wage this war
the brooks gave no information
if the mountains spewed stones of fire into the river
it was not taking sides
the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf
had no political opinions
and if there were a house
filled with backed-up raw sewage
or poisoned those who lived there
with slow fumes, over years
the houses were not at war
nor did the tinned up buildings
intend to refuse shelter
to homeless old women and roaming children
they had no policy to keep from roaming
or dying, no, cities were not the problem
the bridges were non-partisan
the freeways burned, but not with hatred
Even miles of barbed-wire
stretched around crouching temporary huts
designed to keep the unwanted
at a safe distance, out of sight
even the boards, that had to absorb
year upon year, so many human sounds
so many depths of vomit, tears slow-soaking blood
had not offered themselves for this
The trees didn't volunteer to be cut into boards
nor the thorns for tearing flesh
Look around at all of it
and ask whose signature
is stamped on the orders, traced
in the corner of the building plans
Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied
women were, the drunks and the crazies,
the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were.
For the Dead [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
Final Notions [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
It will not be simple, it will not take long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple
It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
It will not take long, it will occupy all your thought
As a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
It will take your flesh, it will not be simple
You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
You are taking parts of us into places never planned
You are going far away with pieces of our lives
It will be short, it will take all your breath
It will not be simple, it will become your will
Diving Into the Wreck [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
abroad the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.
There is a ladder
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it's a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.
I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.
First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or week
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
and I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
Obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Cartographies of Silence [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart
as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature
A poem can being
with a lie. And be torn up.
A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own
false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.
Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.
2.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment
the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone
The syllables uttering
the old script over and over
The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie
twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word
3.
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette
the blurring of terms
silence not absence
of words or music or even
raw sounds
Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint of a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
4.
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me
though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract
without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here
This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
5.
The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer's Passion of Joan
Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera
If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words
stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.
6.
The scream
of an illegitimate voice
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself
How do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer
I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others
7.
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-
chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums
If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing
a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew
If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn
till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare
8.
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words
moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child's fingers
or the newborn infant's mouth
violent with hunger
No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method
whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye
the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain
for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
Burning Oneself Out [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,
the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core
the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes.
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin
Time takes hold of us like a draft
upward, drawing at the heats
in the belly, in the brain
You told me of setting your hand
into the print of a long-dead Indian
and for a moment, I knew that hand,
that print, that rock,
the sun producing powerful dreams
A word can do this
or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down
feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning [Adrienne Rich]
Adrienne Rich
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control
A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
Biography Of Adrienne Rich (1929- 1980)
A Short Story Of Adrienne Rich (1929 - Present):
To a significant extent, all poets are concerned with transformation. The very making of a poem involves a transformation from perceived reality or experience into a verbal utterance shaped by the poet's imagination and craft. For Adrienne Rich, however, transformation goes beyond the act of writing; it extends to the culture at large through the poem's ability to challenge given assumptions and offer new visions. Rich delineated her poetics relatively early in her career in a 1971 essay, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision":
For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive... Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience, it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment.
Transformation is thus private as well as public, and Rich's poetry and essays have explored the space where these realms intersect, incorporating feminist, lesbian, historical, non-capitalist, humanitarian, multi-racial, and multi-cultural points of view. The form of her poems has evolved with her content, moving from tight formalist lyrics to more experimental poems using a combination of techniques: long lines, gaps in the line, interjections of prose, juxtaposition of voices and motifs, didacticism, and informal expression. Indeed, no poet's career reflects the cultural and poetic transformations undergone in the United States during the 2Oth century better than that of Adrienne Rich.
Rich demonstrated talent carly in life, writing poems under her father's tutelage as a child. By the time she graduated from Radcliffe College her first book, A Change of World (1951), had been selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. This and her second book, The Diamond Cutters (1955), capture alienation and loss through the distancing devices of Modernist for malism, but hoth books contain poems that hint at her future thematic concerns. "Storm Warnings," from A Change of World, speaks of people "Who live in troubled regions" and foreshadows unspecified but disturbing change:
Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
"Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" offers an image of power revealed and restrained by domestic arts. Three poems in The Diamond Cutters - "Picture by Vuillard," "Love in the Museum" and "Ideal Landscape" - question the version of reality offered by art, while "Living in Sin" depicts a woman's growing dissatisfaction with her lover and living situation.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), which reflects the tensions she experienced as a wife and mother in the 1950s, marks a substantial change in Rich's style and subject matter. "The experience of motherhood," Rich wrote in "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity" (1982), "was eventually to radicalize me." Part of that radicalizing process involved Rich's relationship to both poetry and history. In 1956 she began dating her poems by year:
I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself; I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuous process.
The act of dating her poems amounted to a rejection of New Critical valucs that placed the poem outside of its cultural and historical contexts. Informed by a feminist sensibility, many of the poems in Snapshots use free verse and a more personal voice to express anger, to acknowledge a need for change, and to address or recover other women writers. The book's title piece, a ten-poem sequence written in free verse, creates an album of women's lives under male domination. The sequence moves back and forth in time and content, generalizing about the domestic repression of contemporary women and referring to female historical figures.
To many critics "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" presented a radical and problematic departure from Rich's earlier formalism, but in "When We Dead Awaken" Rich rejected the poem as "too literary, too dependent on allusion" and male literary authorities. Nevertheless, Rich's later poetry would rely heavily on allusions to literary, historical and contemporary events and persons.
Rich's next three books - Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971) - reflect the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Like other poets of her generation, such as Denise Levertov, Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin, she wrote poems protesting the Vietnam War, particularly in Leaflets. Images of death pervade Necessities of Life as the poet struggled to create a life no longer shaped by the predetermined rituals and social roles. Emily Dickinson became a recurring figure in her poems, foreshadowing her influential essay, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson" (1975). Rich's poems also became increasingly experimental, employing longer, contrapuntal lines. She adapted the ghazal, a Persian form traditionally used for expressions of love, to convey social and political comment. At the same time, Rich began to distrust her medium because of its close ties to patriarchical culture. "This is the oppressor's language // yet I need it to talk to you," she writes in "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," a five-poem sequence with prose segments in The Will to Change.
Informed more distinctly by a feminist analysis of history and culture, Diving into the Wreck (1973) marks another turning point in Rich's career. In it she expresses her anger regarding women's position in Western culture more directly and alludes to problematic dualities or images of Otherness. Language, too, remains on trial for its duplicitous nature. The book's title poem, one of the 20th century's most significant poems, uses an androgynous diver to examine a culture wrecked by its limited view of history and myth. As with Leaflets and The Will to Change, this book's tone ranges from critical to accusatory. When Diving into the Wreck was awarded the National Book Award in 1974, Rich rejected the prize as an individual but accepted it, with a statement coauthored by Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, on behalf of all unknown women writers.
Rich's essays and poetry from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s have been considered her most radical, in part because in them she rejects her earlier use of androgyny and seems to make a case for feminist separatism. "There are words I cannot choose again: / humanism androgyny," she writes in "Natural Resources," in which a female miner replaces the androgynous diver of "Diving into the Wreck." Rich defines and addresses her villain more clearly: a patriarchical culture that inherently devalues anything female or feminine. The impulse behind the search, however, remains the same: finding a way to "reconstitute the world" (The Dream of a Common Language, 1978). Rich advocates a woman-centered vision of creative energies that she aligns with lesbianism in her essays "'It Is the Lesbain in Us'" (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, 1979) and "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience" (Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 1986). She also critcizes the impact of patriarchical culture on motherhood in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Other essays as well as poems in The Dream of a Common Language and A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) offer important new readings of female literary and historical figures. Rich's lesbian love sequence, "Twenty-One Love Poems," also dates from this time and is as striking for its sensuousness as it is for its philosophical probing.
The poems and essays fron this period contributed greatly to contemporary understanding of the social construction of gender; they also generated controversy. Critics objected to the didacticism in her poetry and considered her feminist/lesbian vision too narrow. Rich's strategies are more usefully seen as a counterpoint to the pervasiveness of patriarchical culture, which harms men as well as women. While Rich may claim, for example, that women together create "a whole new poetry" in poems such as "Transcendental Etude," her ultimate vision is broader. The "lost brother" Rich describes in "Natural Resources" "was never the rapist," but rather "a fellow creature / with natural resources equal to our own" (The Dream of a Common Language).
Rich's books published in the mid- to late 1980s, Your Native Land, Your Life (1986) and Time's Power (1989), examine her relationship to her Jewish origins and to the men in her life, as well as what it means to be a feminist in the Reagan era. Her landscapes include include not only Southern California, to which she moved in 1984, but laso South Africa, Lebanon, Poland and Nicaragua. She addresses a public "you" held accountable for her quality of life: her parents, her former husband, her current lover, and a self wracked with arthritic and psychic pain. What remains consistent is Rich's insistence that poetry remain linked to a political and social context. "Poetry never stood a chance / of standing outside history," she writes in the second poem of her sequence "North American Time" (1986). "Living Memory" in Time's Power is a trasitional piece, recalling the poet's past explorations in "Diving into the Wreck" and looking ahead to her future work. The poem instructs:
Open the book of tales you knew by heart,
begin driving the old roads again,
repeating the old sentences, which have changed
minutely from the wordings you remembered.
Rich follows her instructions in An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), one of her most accomplished books of poetry. The title piece, a 13-poem sequence, invites comparison with other long poems of the American experience by Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Pinsky. Its general theme of knowing one's country, however painful and disappointing, continues in Dark Fields of the Republic (1995), in which the poet's examination of America's problems uses the phrase "not somewhere else, but here" from The Dream of a Common Language. In 1995 she increases the load this phrase must bear, claiming in "What Kind of Times Are These" that "the edge of dread" along which she walks is
not somewhere else, but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
Rich sees undercurrents of violence in the materialism of the 1980s and 1990s that neither poets nor individuals can afford to ignore. These themes, as well as the role of poetry in political and social life, are also explored in her book of essays What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993).
In her latest book of poems, Midnight Salvage (1999), Rich continues this discussion from the perspective of an aging activist poet looking back on her life. She alludes to several of her previous poems and books, and poses several questions: Has anything useful been salvaged from the wreck of culture Rich has been exploring for more than 30 years? Have art and language served society and the poet well? Do material comforts blind Americans to the lessons of the past? Her questions are not casually answered, and the book's tone borders on despair. "I wanted to go somewhere / the brain bad not yet gone," she writes in "Letters to a Young Poet," "I wanted not to be / there so alone." The "wild patience" that helped Rich to survive into the late 1970s and early 1980s has become the "horrible patience" the poet needs to find language she can use effectively. Images of windows appear throughout the book as if the poet, enclosed and cut off from the world, were struggling to see it clearly. In the book's closing sequence, "A Long Conversation," Rich wonders if it is the "charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language" that "sways and presses against the pane," blocking her view.
Rich is best known as a key figure in feminist poetry. Her dream of a better language and a better world, however, aligns her with the visionary poetess of Shelley and Whitman, and with American transcendentalists such as Emerson. The documentary nature of her work - her poetry of witness and protest - is in keeping with the work of poets such as Carl Sandburg, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn Forché, and the lesser-known 19th-century worsen poets in England and the United States who wrote about social and domestic injustice. Rich's exploration of the points where private lives and public acts intersect, as well as the confessional mode her poems sometimes employ suggests the work of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plash, and Anne Sexton. Her frank discussion and celebration of lesbian sexuality have contributed to a more open discussion of homosexuality today, not only within the walls of the academy but in the culture at large: it is difficult to imagine the work of Marilyn Hacker or Minnie Bruce Pratt without Rich as a precursor. Finally, her insistence in the 1980s that feminism move beyond the white midlle class and be more sensitive to the needs of women of color and of varying economic classes aligns her with a number of poets: Audre Lord, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Judy Grahn, and Irish poet Evan Boland. This is a short list of links and influences, suggesting the complex and generative quality a poetics of transformation can possess. Her uses of anger, domestic imagery, and the poetic sequence or long poem suggest other possibilities.
Biography by: Biography written by Rhonda Pettit, from Encyclopedia of American Poetry, 2001. Compiled and hyperlinked by Gunnar Bengtsson, 2002 .
When Ure Hero Falls [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
when your hero falls from grace
all fairy tales r uncovered
myths exposed and pain magnified
the greatest pain discovered
u taught me 2 be strong
but im confused 2 c u so weak
u said never 2 give up
and it hurts 2 c u welcome defeat
when ure hero falls so do the stars
and so does the perception of tomorrow
without my hero there is only
me alone 2 deal with my sorrow
your heart ceases 2 work
and your soul is not happy at all
what r u expected 2 do
when ure only hero falls
The Rose that Grew from Concrete [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
Did you hear about the rose that grew
from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature's law is wrong it
learned to walk with out having feet.
Funny it seems, but by keeping it's dreams,
it learned to breathe fresh air.
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
when no one else ever cared.
Liberty Needs Glasses [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
excuse me but lady liberty needs glasses
and so does mrs justice by her side
both the broads r blind as bats
stumbling thru the system
justice bumbed into mutulu and
trippin on geronimo pratt
but stepped right over oliver
and his crooked partner ronnie
justice stubbed her big toe on mandela
and liberty was misquoted by the indians
slavery was a learning phase
forgotten with out a verdict
while justice is on a rampage
4 endangered surviving black males
i mean really if anyone really valued life
and cared about the masses
theyd take em both 2 pen optical
and get 2 pair of glasses
Jada [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
u r the omega of my heart
the foundation of my conception of love
when i think of what a black woman should be
its u that i first think of
u will never fully understand
how deeply my heart feels 4 u
i worry that we'll grow apart
and i'll end up losing u
u bring me 2 climax without sex
and u do it all with regal grace
u r my heart in human form
a friend i could never replace
In the Event of My Demise [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
In the event of my Demise
when my heart can beat no more
I Hope I Die For A Principle
or A Belief that I had Lived 4
I will die Before My Time
Because I feel the shadow's Depth
so much I wanted 2 accomplish
before I reached my Death
I have come 2 grips with the possibility
and wiped the last tear from My eyes
I Loved All who were Positive
In the event of my Demise
In The Depths of Solitude [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
I exist in the depths of solitude
pondering my true goal
trying 2 find peace of mind
and still preserve my soul
constantly yearning 2 be accepted
and from all receive respect
never comprising but sometimes risky
and that is my only regret
a young heart with an old soul
how can there be peace
how can i be in the depths of solitude
when there r 2 inside of me
this duo within me causes
the perfect oppurtunity
2 learn and live twice as fast
as those who accept simplicity
I Cry [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
Sometimes when I'm alone
I Cry,
Cause I am on my own.
The tears I cry are bitter and warm.
They flow with life but take no form
I Cry because my heart is torn.
I find it difficult to carry on.
If I had an ear to confide in,
I would cry among my treasured friend,
but who do you know that stops that long,
to help another carry on.
The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.
Then to stop and see what makes one cry,
so painful and sad.
And sometimes...
I Cry
and no one cares about why.
Fallen Star [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
They could never understand
what u set out 2 do
instead they chose 2
ridicule u
when u got weak
they loved the sight
of your dimming
and flickering starlight
How could they understand what was so intricate
2 be loved by so many, so intimate
they wanted 2 c your lifeless corpse
this way u could not alter the course
of ignorance that they have set
2 make my people forget
what they have done for much 2 long
2 just forget and carry on
I had loved u forever because of who u r
and now I mourn our fallen star
Can You See the Pride in the Panther [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
Can You See the Pride In the Panther
As he grows in splendor and grace
Topling obstacles placed in the way,
of the progression of his race.
Can You See the Pride In the Panther
as she nurtures her young all alone
The seed must grow regardless
of the fact that it is planted in stone.
Can You See the Pride In the Panthers
as they unify as one.
The flower blooms with brilliance,
and outshines the rays of the sun.
And 2Morrow [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
Today is filled with anger
fueled with hidden hate
scared of being outcast
afraid of common fate
Today is built on tragedies
which no one wants 2 face
nightmares 2 humanities
and morally disgraced
Tonight is filled with rage
violence in the air
children bred with ruthlessness
because no one at home cares
Tonight I lay my head down
but the pressure never stops
knawing at my sanity
content when I am dropped
But 2morrow I c change
a chance 2 build a new
Built on spirit intent of Heart
and ideals
based on truth
and tomorrow I wake with second wind
and strong because of pride
2 know I fought with all my heart 2 keep my
dream alive
Ambition Over Adversity [Tupac Shakur]
Tupac Shakur
Take one's adversity
Learn from their misfortune
Learn from their pain
Believe in something
Believe in yourself
Turn adversity into ambition
Now blossom into wealth
Keep Reading Biography Of Tupac Shakur(1971–1996)
The Sort Story Of Tupac Shakur:Rapper, actor. Born on June 16, 1971, in New York, New York. Shakur has become a legend in hip-hop and rap circles for his talent, his violent behavior, and his brutal death. The son of a Black Panther activist, Shakur moved around a lot as a child. In his youth, he explored acting by becoming a member of the 127th Street Ensemble, a Harlem-based theater company.
As a teenager, Shakur attended the Baltimore School for the Arts, where he took acting and dance classes, including ballet. While living in Baltimore, he discovered rap and began performing as MC New York. In the late 1980s, Shakur and his family moved to the West Coast. He joined the Oakland, California-based hip-hop group Digital Underground, which earlier had scored a hit with the song "The Humpty Dance."
In 1991, Shakur emerged as a solo artist — using the name 2Pac — with his debut album 2Pacalypse Now. The track "Brenda's Got a Baby" reached as high as number three on the Billboard Hot Rap Singles chart. His second album Strictly 4 My N. I. G. G. A. Z. crossed over to the pop charts, with singles "I Get Around" and "Keep Ya Head Up." The album went platinum, selling more than a million copies. Around this time, Shakur also appeared in several films, including Poetic Justice (1993) opposite Janet Jackson.
2Pac became quite a sensation, earning praise for his musical and acting talent as well as condemnation for his explicit, violent lyrics. Many of his songs told of fights, gangs, and sex. He appeared to be living up to his aggressive gangster rap persona with several arrests for violent offenses in the 1990s. In 1994, he spent several days in jail for assaulting director Allen Hughes and was later convicted of sexual assault in another case. Shakur himself fell victim to violence, getting shot five times in the lobby of a recording studio during a mugging.
The next year, after recovering from his injuries, Shakur was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in the sexual assault case. His third solo album, Me Against the World (1995), started out in the number one spot on the album charts. Many critics praised the work, noting that tracks like "Dear Mama" showed a more genuine, reflective side to the rapper. The possibility of an early death runs through several songs on this recordings — something that many have seen as a chilling moment of foretelling.
After serving eight months in prison, Shakur returned to music with the album All Eyez on Me (1996). He was reportedly released after Death Row Records CEO Marion "Suge" Knight paid a bond of more than $1 million as part of Shakur's parole. In his latest project, Shakur as the defiant street thug was back in full force on this recording. The song "California Love" featured a guest appearance by famed rapper-producer Dr. Dre and made a strong showing on the pop charts. "How Do You Want It" also was another smash success for Shakur. It appeared to be a golden time for Shakur. Besides his hit album, he tackled several film roles.
Daphne [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Why do you follow me?—
Any moment I can be
Nothing but a laurel-tree.
Any moment of the chase
I can leave you in my place
A pink bough for your embrace.
Yet if over hill and hollow
Still it is your will to follow,
I am off;—to heel, Apollo!
Counting-Out Rhyme [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.
Conscientious Objector [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.
City Trees [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.
Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.
Chorus [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Give away her gowns,
Give away her shoes;
She has no more use
For her fragrant gowns;
Take them all down,
Blue, green, blue,
Lilac, pink, blue,
From their padded hangers;
She will dance no more
In her narrow shoes;
Sweep her narrow shoes
From the closet floor.
Burial [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Mine is a body that should die at sea!
And have for a grave, instead of a grave
Six feet deep and the length of me,
All the water that is under the wave!
And terrible fishes to seize my flesh,
Such as a living man might fear,
And eat me while I am firm and fresh,—
Not wait till I've been dead for a year!
Bluebeard [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed... Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see... Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.
Blight [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Hard seeds of hate I planted
That should by now be grown,—
Rough stalks, and from thick stamens
A poisonous pollen blown,
And odors rank, unbreathable,
From dark corollas thrown!
At dawn from my damp garden
I shook the chilly dew;
The thin boughs locked behind me
That sprang to let me through;
The blossoms slept,—I sought a place
Where nothing lovely grew.
And there, when day was breaking,
I knelt and looked around:
The light was near, the silence
Was palpitant with sound;
I drew my hate from out my breast
And thrust it in the ground.
Oh, ye so fiercely tended,
Ye little seeds of hate!
I bent above your growing
Early and noon and late,
Yet are ye drooped and pitiful,—
I cannot rear ye straight!
The sun seeks out my garden,
No nook is left in shade,
No mist nor mold nor mildew
Endures on any blade,
Sweet rain slants under every bough:
Ye falter, and ye fade.
Being Young And Green [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Being Young and Green, I said in love's despite:
Never in the world will I to living wight
Give over, air my mind
To anyone,
Hang out its ancient secrets in the strong wind
To be shredded and faded—
Oh, me, invaded
And sacked by the wind and the sun!
Autumn Daybreak [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,
I know—for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor—
How may boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.
Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;
When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.
Assault [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I
I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.
II
I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!
Ashes Of Life [Edna St. Vincent Millay]
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,—and would that night were
here!
But ah!—to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
Would that it were day again!—with twilight near!
Love has gone and left me and I don't know what to do;
This or that or what you will is all the same to me;
But all the things that I begin I leave before I'm through,—
There's little use in anything as far as I can see.
Love has gone and left me,—and the neighbors knock and
borrow,
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,—
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There's this little street and this little house.
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