Influential pioneer touched audiences through performance, books, albums – and even Poems on the Underground
The pioneering Jamaican dub poet Jean “Binta” Breeze has died aged 65, her agents have confirmed.
Breeze, considered one of the most important and influential contemporary poets, was a regular performer at literary festivals in both the UK and across the world.
Continue reading...Ruth Gilligan’s thriller about eight men who cull cattle in rural Ireland wins £10,000 for books that ‘best evoke the spirit of a place’
Ruth Gilligan’s literary thriller The Butchers, set in the Irish borderlands during the BSE crisis, has won the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje prize for books that “best evoke the spirit of a place”.
Gilligan’s novel beat titles including James Rebanks’ memoir of his family farm, English Pastoral, and Nina Mingya Powles’ poetry collection Magnolia, 木蘭 to the £10,000 prize. The Butchers opens with an ancient curse that decrees that eight men must touch every cow in Ireland as it dies, and follows a group of eight men as they roam rural Ireland in the 1990s, slaughtering the cows of those who still believe in the old ways. The novel unpicks the mysterious death of one of the Butchers, whose corpse is found suspended from a meat hook.
Continue reading...The royal family have released a reading of The Patriarchs – An Elegy by Simon Armitage to mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. The poet laureate said that he wanted the poem to address the duke’s values and personality. ‘A lot of the commentary has been around duty and service – I saw it as a prompt for writing something dutiful, and in service of all people like him.’
Original account of discovery is retracted by editors of the scholarly book in which it was published
When two hitherto unknown poems by Sappho were brought to light in early 2014, it was a literary sensation. The sixth-century BC poet is one of the most celebrated writers of Greco-Roman antiquity, a tender chronicler of the agonies of female desire, and a gay icon. But frustratingly few works by her survive, and those that do largely come from ancient papyrus fragments preserved in the dry sands of Egypt.
But now the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript’s “provenance is tainted,” according to a statement issued through the book’s academic publisher, Brill.
Continue reading...In A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib set out to celebrate black artists across music, dance, comedy and more, who succeeded even when their own country refused to honour them
When I began A Little Devil in America, I was thinking about Josephine Baker. The title of the book comes from Baker, from her speech at the March on Washington in 1963. It is a speech that is often overlooked. The legacy of the march so often centres on its male speakers (Martin Luther King Jr, A Philip Randolph), and Baker was well past her most notable prime. At 57, she chose to return to the US from France and make a small speech – but also to confront the country she’d left and vowed to not return to. The speech is at times tender, at times funny, at times teeming with rage. There was a fullness to it; Baker considering the vastness of her life and the many lives she’d lived. Her speech is defiant and brilliant, punctuated by Baker aligning her experiences with the national plight of black people in America:
You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.
Continue reading...Victor Obiols told he had wrong ‘profile’, the second case after Dutch writer resigned from same role
The Catalan translator for the poem that American writer Amanda Gorman read at US president Joe Biden’s inauguration has said he has been removed from the job because he had the wrong “profile”.
It was the second such case in Europe after Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld resigned from the job of translating Gorman’s work following criticism that a black writer was not chosen.
Continue reading...Poet, acclaimed for her performance at Joe Biden’s inauguration, tweeted ‘this is the reality of black girls’
Amanda Gorman, the poet who won acclaim for her performance at Joe Biden’s inauguration, has told of being followed home and accosted by a security guard who allegedly claimed she looked suspicious.
She said the incident, on Friday night, was emblematic of “the reality of black girls” in the US, in which “one day you’re called an icon” but the next day considered a threat.
Continue reading...International Booker winner Marieke Lucas Rijneveld will not translate inaugural poet’s work into Dutch after anger that a Black writer was not hired
The acclaimed author Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has pulled out of translating Amanda Gorman’s poetry into Dutch, after their publisher was criticised for picking a writer for the role who was not also Black.
Related: 'My family are too frightened to read my book': meet Europe's most exciting authors
Continue reading...The poet explains how researching her history led her to tell the story from three perspectives: the birth mother, the adoptive mother and the daughter
In one way, I’d been writing the poems in The Adoption Papers for my whole life. I’d been making up an imaginary birth mother and father with my adoptive mother for years, since I was a kid. She would say of my birth father: “I’m picturing a Paul Robeson figure, Jackie, perhaps with a bit of Nelson Mandela mixed in.”
In another, I started writing the book when I was pregnant. It’s difficult when your writing infiltrates your life and vice versa, difficult to work out what actually happened and what didn’t. Your imaginative life is your reality.
Continue reading...The co-founder of the City Lights Bookstore had global stature but remained a neighborhood fixture
By early afternoon, a small memorial of flowers and a can of Pabst had begun to accumulate outside the door of City Lights Books, to commemorate the death of its co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
And by the evening, a vigil for Ferlinghetti, one of the last living links to the Beat generation, was being held in the adjacent Jack Kerouac Alley, a tiny side street that separates the bookstore – a tourist attraction and official city landmark for decades – from the celebrated Beat hangout Vesuvio Cafe.
Continue reading...Lockdown has triggered a boom in the exchange of intimate shots – and now a new book called Sending Nudes is celebrating the pleasures and perils of baring all to the camera
Have you ever sent a nude selfie? The question draws a thick red line between generations, throwing one side into a panic while the other just laughs. And yet, as far back as 2009, that fount of moral wisdom, Kanye West, was advising how to stay safe. “When you take the picture cut off your face / And cover up the tattoo by the waist,” he rapped in Jamie Foxx’s song Digital Girl.
As the pandemic forces relationships to be conducted remotely, more people than ever are resorting to the virtual exchange of intimacies. Last autumn, a poll of 7,000 UK schoolchildren by the youth sexual health charity Brook put the figure at nearly one in five who said they would send a naked selfie to a partner during a lockdown.
Continue reading...Writers and artists including Róisín Murphy, Tiffany Calver and Sigala on the art that transports them to the dancefloor during lockdown
There have been many notable nightclubs in film history. The Blue Angel in the Marlene Dietrich movie; the Copacabana in Goodfellas, accessible to privileged wiseguys via the kitchen; the Slow Club in Blue Velvet, with the emotionally damaged star turn Isabella Rossellini singing the song of the same name.
Continue reading...The poet’s latest collection, How to Wash a Heart, was partly inspired by a news story about a liberal white couple taking in an Asian refugee
Bhanu Kapil’s fourth poetry collection, Schizophrene, relays a scene from India’s partition. A girl fleeing her childhood home glimpses, through a hole in the cart in which she’s hidden, countless women tied to trees on the newly drawn border with Pakistan, their stomachs cut out. “This story, which really wasn’t a story but an image, was repeated to me at many bedtimes of my own childhood,” Kapil writes. This image was, in fact, “a way of conveying information”.
Throughout her work, Kapil examines the intergenerational effects of a historical silence that has slowly lifted over the largest mass migrations in history, which was also one of the most violent. These images demonstrate how colonial violence embedded in the heart of the British empire breeds racial trauma for migrants within its own borders. As she writes, again in Schizophrene, “it is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space”.
Continue reading...Seven centuries after the poet was found guilty in Florence, Sperello di Serego Alighieri has begun a campaign to clear his ancestor’s name
The reputation of Dante Alighieri needs little burnishing: his Divine Comedy, tracing the poet’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, is widely regarded as one of the greatest works ever written. But more than 700 years after Dante was accused of corruption and condemned to be burned to death, his descendant is looking to clear his name.
Sperello di Serego Alighieri, an astrophysicist, and the law professor Alessandro Traversi are working to see if Dante’s 1302 sentencing for corruption in political office can be reversed.
Continue reading...Already a fashion sensation, the 22-year-old joins IMG Models, the same agency as Gigi and Bella Hadid
Amanda Gorman, whose performance of her poem The Hill We Climb during Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration drew widespread praise, has signed to IMG Models, the same agency as Gigi and Bella Hadid.
The 22-year-old US national youth poet laureate, has already become a fashion sensation. The red satin Prada headband she wore during the inauguration ceremony led to the item selling out, while her yellow coat (also Prada) caused searches for “yellow coats” to increase 1,328% (according to fashion search engine Lyst) in the wake of her appearance.
Continue reading...Her recital at Joe Biden’s inauguration electrified viewers and sent the hitherto little known poet’s work to the top of the charts
On Wednesday in Washington DC, a striking young woman stood at a podium on the steps of the US Capitol, surrounded by the country’s leaders, who were masked against the pandemic. She was unmasked, at a safe distance, so she could speak with resonance and force, spreading her enthusiastic vision without danger. She radiated joy, conviction and purpose as she declaimed the poem she had written to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as 46th president of the US: The Hill We Climb. Tears sprang from the eyes of many listeners, those weary and wary from four years of domestic discord, whether they sat on folding chairs at the Capitol, or on easy chairs in their homes. Hearing her words, they felt hope for the future.
That woman’s name is Amanda Gorman. She is America’s first national youth poet laureate and, at 22, she also is the youngest poet accorded the honour of delivering the presidential inaugural poem. But despite her youth, Gorman’s assurance and bearing made her seem to stand outside time. Erect as a statue, her skin gleaming as if burnished, her hair cornrowed, banded with gold and drawn tightly back into a red satin Prada headband, worn high like a tiara, she evoked what poet Kae Tempest calls the “Brand New Ancients”: the divinity that walks among us in the present day. According to Greek mythology, nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, inspire creative endeavour, with five devoted to different kinds of poetry – epic, romantic, lyric, comic or pastoral and sacred. Gorman suggested a new poetic muse – one to inspire the poetry of democracy.
Continue reading...President decides against relocating remains of French poet to Parisian memorial
The remains of the famed French poet Arthur Rimbaud will not be moved to the Panthéon mausoleum despite a campaign to honour him as an artist and symbol of gay rights, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has decided.
A petition last year backed by a number of celebrities as well as the culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, called for Rimbaud to be reinterred alongside his lover and fellow poet Paul Verlaine at the monument in central Paris.
Continue reading...Stella Nyanzi is Uganda's most outspoken, self-described radical queer feminist. She has been imprisoned for her activism and is known for her attention-grabbing naked protests and poetry. In an election campaign that has become increasingly violent, Nyanzi is standing to be the elected MP for Kampala, as part of the growing nationwide opposition to the 35-year presidency of Yoweri Museveni.
With most attention focused on Museveni's presidential challenger Bobi Wine, Nyanzi is on the streets and in the media campaigning for her own votes. She vows that, unlike other women who have been elected, she will not forget her commitment to feminism if she wins
Continue reading...As she prepares to ring in 2021 with a performance on screens at Piccadilly Circus, the punk poet explains why she’s optimistic amid the ‘debris’ of Trump’s years in office
Patti Smith talks about her first poetry performance – in 1971 at St Mark’s Church in New York’s Bowery – as if it were yesterday. “I remember everything,” she says over the phone from her home in New York. Smith was in her early 20s, working at a bookshop and living in the Chelsea Hotel with her then lover, the playwright Sam Shepard. She had attended poetry readings before, most of which put her into a deep sleep. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t boring,” she recalls. “Sam said that since I sang to myself all the time, I should try singing a song, or maybe do something with a guitar.” And so she called on the musician Lenny Kaye to provide “interpretative” noises on guitar while she half-read, half-sang her poems.
The show was an instant hit. “It seemed to make a big impression on people – which I really didn’t understand,” she says. The producer Sandy Pearlman approached her afterwards and suggested she front a rock band. She eventually took his advice, making the landmark album Horses in 1975, and an icon of American punk was born.
Continue reading... Looking for a more positive new year resolution? From a Shirley Jackson short story to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 30-minute Ted talk, nourish your mind with our one-a-day selection of literary treats
Our revels now are ended and January looms, with its exhortations to get fit, lose weight, dry out. So here’s a radical alternative diet: instead of depriving yourself, how about making it a month of treats – but feeding your brain instead of your face? Our one-a-day calendar will take you into magical realms of poetry and prose, argument and imagination. It will transport you to some places you always wanted to explore, but couldn’t find the time, and to others you never knew existed, where you will find strange and wonderful things.
In fact, this calendar very nearly didn’t happen because I kept disappearing down rabbit-holes so deep and fascinating that, had I been the white rabbit himself, someone would have had to drag me out by the ears. Some entries – such as John Huston’s film of Malcolm Lowry’s mescal-fuelled modernist masterpiece Under the Volcano (20 January) – come with the authority of a full year’s leisurely burrowing (it is among the BFI’s list of 100 great films to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime, which was a comfort and joy through lockdown, and is handily still being updated).
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