by Ana Sampson
Extract from The Land / Full Moon are here and here.
Sappho (c. 630–c. 570 BC)
Not many facts are known about Sappho’s life, but she lived on the Greek island of Lesbos – probably in Mytilene, the island’s biggest city – and is thought to have had several brothers, a husband and a daughter. Most of her poems survive only as fragments, some of which were discovered in ancient Egyptian papier-mâché coffins in 1914. We do know that she was praised throughout the ancient world – Plato called her ‘the tenth Muse’ – and that her image appeared on statues and coins. At a time when most poetry was formal and meant for public performance, Sappho wrote passionately about her private feelings, including love poems addressed to women. It is from her home island of Lesbos that we get the word ‘lesbian’.
Long Departure is here.
Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862)
Elizabeth was working in a hat shop when one of the Pre-Raphaelite painters persuaded her to model for him. John Everett Millais painted her as Hamlet’s Ophelia, though she became ill because she remained still and uncomplaining when the lamps warming the bath in which she was posing went out. Painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti fell in love with her and painted her obsessively, perhaps thousands of times. Scandalously, they lived together for eight years before marriage – Rossetti was reluctant to introduce the working-class Lizzie to his aristocratic family, and she constantly feared (with good reason) that younger models would claim his heart. She suffered from depression, poor health and a laudanum addiction, and had to be carried to the church when they eventually married. She died aged only thirty-three. Rossetti buried a manuscript of unpublished poems with her but, seven years later, he had her body dug up to retrieve them for publication. Elizabeth’s drawings and paintings were bought by leading critic John Ruskin during her lifetime, but her own poems were only published after her death.
The Lust of the Eyes / Dead Love are here and here.
Di Slaney
Di founded Nottingham marketing agency Diversity and runs poetry pamphlet publisher Candlestick Press. In 2005 she abandoned city life and moved to an ancient farmhouse, sharing it with – at the last count – 170 rescued and rehomed animals. Caring for livestock has taught her valuable lessons about giving goats antibiotics and closing your mouth when you kiss sheep goodnight, and inspired her first poetry collection, Reward for Winter, which includes poems from a hen’s point of view.
How to knit a sheep is here.
May Riley Smith (1842–1927)
May was born in New York. Her poems became hugely popular when she was middle-aged, and her books included Sometime, and Other Poems. She also wrote hymns.
The Child In Me is here.
Stevie Smith (1902–1971)
Christened Florence, Stevie got her nickname from the jockey Steve Donoghue because she was so small. She was mostly brought up by her beloved, fiercely independent aunt (whom she nicknamed ‘Lion’) and remained single, observing that marriage looked rather tiring. Stevie published poems illustrated with her own quirky doodles, and rather autobiographical novels in which friends – including George Orwell, with whom she may have had an affair – thought they recognized themselves. She was fascinated by death and religion, and her lively readings won her many fans, including Sylvia Plath, who called herself a ‘desperate Smith-addict’. Though she often suffered from ill health and sadness, she had a mischievous sense of dark humour that shines through her poems.
Not Waving but Drowning is here.
Edith Södergran (1892–1923)
Edith was a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet born in St Petersburg during a turbulent time for Russia. After her father became ill, her mother supported the family, giving Edith a strongly feminist role model. Edith fell ill herself and was sent to recover in a Swiss clinic where she met and was inspired by several writers. Her modern, distinctly female style of poetry was ahead of its time – critics were unimpressed, though her work became hugely influential after her death from tuberculosis aged only thirty-one.
On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems is here.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
Born in Pennsylvania, Gertrude moved to France in 1903 and became a leading light of the Parisian poetry scene. She and her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas held parties that attracted writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Her very abstract and innovative poetry did not find a wide audience at the time, but her writing has influenced many generations of poets since.
The house was just twinkling in the moon light is here.
Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)
Sara’s poetry was hugely successful, and she won the first Pulitzer Prize in 1918 (when it was called the Columbia Poetry Prize). She had many suitors, including a poet, Vachel Lindsay, who felt he couldn’t support her financially, so she married and later divorced another man instead. Afterwards, she rekindled her friendship with Lindsay who was by now married with children. Two years after his death, Sara sadly took her own life. Her poem ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ has had a varied cultural history – it provides the title for a short story by Ray Bradbury, and is recited by a robot after the apocalypse in the computer game Fallout 3.
Let It Be Forgotten / There Will Come Soft Rains are here and here.
Kate Tempest (born 1985)
Kate was born in London in 1985. Her work includes the plays Wasted, Glasshouse and Hopelessly Devoted; the poetry collections Everything Speaks in its Own Way and Hold Your Own; the albums Everybody Down, Balance and Let Them Eat Chaos; the long poems Brand New Ancients and Let Them Eat Chaos; and her debut novel, The Bricks that Built the Houses. She was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for her debut album, Everybody Down, and received the Ted Hughes Award and a Herald Angel Award for Brand New Ancients. Kate was also named a Next Generation poet in 2014.
Thirteen is here.
Jean Tepperman (born 1945)
Jean has worked for most of her life as an editor at alternative and advocacy publications including the Dorchester Community News, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and The Children’s Advocate. Now retired, she continues journalism as a freelance reporter. An activist since the age of sixteen, she has always tried to use writing as a tool for building a mass movement for radical social change. In 1975, over forty years before the #MeToo movement, she compiled a book called Not Servants, Not Machines, in which female office workers spoke about pay inequality, race and sex discrimination and harassment at work.
Witch is here.
Katharine Towers (born 1961)
Katharine’s poetry collections have won several awards and one of the poems from The Floating Man was selected as a Poem on the Underground in London. Her second collection The Remedies contains a sequence which imagines that the flowers that inspired Dr Edward Bach’s 1930s health remedies were each afflicted with the problem they are thought to cure. Katharine lives in the Peak District with her husband and two daughters.
Nerval and the Lobster is here.
Sojourner Truth (1797–1883)
When she was nine, Sojourner was sold as a slave and she had several owners before securing her freedom. She took a slave owner to court in 1828 to win back custody of her son, becoming the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. Sojourner joined organizations working for civil and women’s rights and she lectured in front of audiences around America, giving a famous speech in Ohio in 1852. This poem was written later, using a Southern dialect, though in fact Sojourner was from New York, and Dutch was her first language.
Ain’t I a Woman? is here.
Alice Walker (born 1944)
Born in rural Georgia, Alice is blind in one eye after an air-gun accident when she was a child. She met Martin Luther King Jr as a student, and has spent her life campaigning for civil and women’s rights. After being arrested for a protest at the White House on the eve of the Iraq War, she wrote the essay ‘We Are the Ones We Ha
ve Been Waiting For’. Alice also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple, which has been filmed and turned into a Broadway musical.
Before I Leave the Stage is here.
Mary Webb (1881–1927)
Mary grew up in Shropshire where her father, a teacher, inspired in her a love of reading and the countryside, and she set her novels there. They have been called ‘soil and gloom’ books – typically, a tragedy unfolds among simple farming folk – and are brilliantly mocked in Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm.
Why? / Green Rain are here and here.
Anna Wickham (1883–1947)
Born Edith Alice Mary Harper, Anna moved between Australia, France and the UK – her pseudonymous surname inspired by a Brisbane street. Her possessive husband tried to put an end to her singing and writing career, which led to a breakdown and a brief spell in an asylum. Anna published several collections of poetry which were hugely popular, especially in America, and she had many literary friends, including Katherine Mansfield and H.D. Those friendships, however, were sometimes tempestuous: she was rumoured to have once thrown poet Dylan Thomas out of her house during a snowstorm.
A Poet Advises a Change of Clothes is here.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919)
Born to Wisconsin farmers, Ella wrote to support her family. Her mildly steamy poems were hugely popular with readers, though critics snobbishly included her poems in some anthologies of ‘worst poems’. During the First World War, Ella believed that her husband instructed her from beyond the grave to visit the Allied Forces in France to boost morale, which she duly did, reciting poems to the troops.
Protest is here.
Helen Maria Williams (1759–1827)
Helen supported the abolition of slavery and praised the French Revolution – both controversial views at the time. She braved the journey to Revolutionary Paris alone, but was imprisoned there for her political writing during the Reign of Terror and, later, by Napoleon, who declared her ‘Ode on the Peace of Amiens’ to be treasonous.
To Mrs K., On Her Sending Me an English Christmas Plum-Cake at Paris is here.
Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855)
Dorothy was the younger sister of poet William Wordsworth and they were extremely close. There were limited options for unmarried women at the time, so, after a miserable period housekeeping for a relative, Dorothy moved in with William and his wife, who was also a friend of hers. She wrote children’s stories and helped William with his poems, but most of her own poetry was only published after her death.
Address to a Child During a Boisterous Winter Evening is here.
Index of First Lines
A poem in which I am growing
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A scholar first my love implored
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A silent room – grey with a dusty blight
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Always rain, September rain
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As a teenager, fencing was the closest thing
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At day’s end I remember
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At lunchtime I bought a huge orange
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At twilight she is still sitting with the book in her hand
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Baby you look tired, where have you been?
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Before I leave the stage
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Before the sun goes down
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Behind Me – dips Eternity
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Between here and Colombia
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Beyond the bars I see her move
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Bobby Riggs, tennis champ
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Brown girl chanting Te Deums on Sunday
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But then the thrushes sang
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Can anyone teach me how to make a homeland?
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Cerulean night-sky
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Dear to my heart as life’s warm stream
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Don’t lay me in some gloomy churchyard
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Every day is a fresh beginning
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Everyone who terrifies you is 65 per cent water
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Forest could keep secrets
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Four be the things I am wiser to know
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From our low seat beside the fire
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From the top of the Shard the view unfolds
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From time to time our love is like a sail
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Give me the long, straight road before me
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Greatly shining
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Green leaves. Wind kissed
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Hail, Conversation, soothing power
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High waving heather, ’neath stormy blasts bending
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His beautiful clatter turns heads
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‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers
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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
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I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions
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I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
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I cannot hang damselled in the night sky for you
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I care not for my Lady’s soul
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I climbed up the karaka tree
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I go down to the edge of the sea
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I have known only my own shallows
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I love my red shoes
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I miss you in tiny earthquakes
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I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong
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I remember
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I remember . . . Momma scrubbed my face
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I was strolling sorrowfully
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I will take my trouble and wrap it in a blue handkerchief
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I will tell you how it was
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I’m a riddle in nine syllables
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If ever two were one, then surely we
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If once you have slept on an island
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If ye went tae the tapmost hill, Fiere
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If you take the moon in your hands
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Imperious fool! think not because you’re fair
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Into my lap, a great star will fall . . .
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Into the scented woods we’ll go
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It showed how friendship doesn’t end
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It was the autumn’s last day, when the roof
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Just like as in a nest of boxes round
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Last year, I held a glass of tea to the light
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Legs!
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Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten
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Let us remember Spring will come again
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Like a fawn from the arrow, startled and wild
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Like your father
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Molly Pin Li McLaren
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My body is the garden I grew up in
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My heart is like a singing bird
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My roots spread tap and spur from Portugal
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My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
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‘Never,’ said my father
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Nobody heard him, the dead man
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Not a red rose or a satin heart
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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
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Now in the radiant night no men are stirring
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Now that I have your face by heart, I look
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Now that I’ve nearly done my days
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Often rebuked, yet always back returning
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Oh honeybunch, they’re not big
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Oh never weep for love that’s dead
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On foot
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One face looks out from all his canvases
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Outside the sky is light with stars
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possum descending a stairwell ) a stepladder
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Pretty women wonder where my secret lies
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Record this you say and I’m left
