Hear Serena Williams read Maya Angelou’s 'Still I Rise' in the video below, recorded before Serena won the 2016 Wimbledon Women’s Tennis final and in the process, her 22nd Grand Slam, equalling Steffi Graf’s all-time record.Ī true national treasure and one of Britain's most accessible and beloved poets, Wendy Cope’s poetry is perhaps best known for its humour.

’You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.’ In 2017 her life was celebrated in the documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, which featured interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Hilary Clinton, Quincy Jones and Maya Angelou herself. 'Still I Rise' is an inspiring poem for women everywhere. The incredibly prolific and inspiring American poet, author of seven autobiographies, actress, civil-rights activist, producer and director passed away in 2014, leaving behind a huge volume of work celebrating black beauty, the strength of women, and the human spirit. Taken from She is Fierce: Brave, Bold and Beautiful Poems by Women She is now considered a major American poet. Her inspiring poem 'Hope is the Thing With Feathers' is one of her most-loved. Although she was a prolific poet, fewer than a dozen of her poems were published in her lifetime, and it was ony after her death that the breadth of her work became known. '‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers' by Emily DickinsonĮmily Dickinson spent much of her life in isolation, corresponding with friends almost entirely by letter. Is love not this? – gripping a fence in the sky.

I don’t think I’ll identify with a brown son.Ĭontorting myself three ways in the toilet mirror,īack in our borrowed bathroom, I throw up rose foam,Ī blade of grass. The razor clams arrive in straight lines. The poem is both a memorial and a door to understanding oneself, before and after - through the lens of being that in love with someone else. ‘Hotel Art, Barcelona’ is the first poem in the collection because it is about a time most like a cusp, a state of being all-consumingly in love, holding your breath all the time (remember that?), me neither, not completely (except through this poem, poems often know and remember things better than you do). It’s about desire and disappointment, not getting ‘what was meant to be in the bag’, but ending up with something else, something unexpected but actually kind of beautiful. My Darling from the Lions is a collection of poems about girlhood, home, hair, sex, shame, race, class and Barbie doll men in fast cars. Here, she introduces My Darling From the Lions, and the first poem in the collection, 'Hotel Art, Barcelona'. She was shortlisted for Young Poet Laureate for London in 2014 and her work has been featured in The London Magazine, Magma, & Filigree: An Anthology of Contemporary Black British Poetry. Rachel Long is a poet and the leader of the Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour, which was formed in response to the lack of inclusivity and representation in the poetry world. If Nature is vulgar, let us too be vulgar in this body. Something that sounded the carnal song of the Jamaican countryside, where nothing grows politely. One night, longing to return to the paradise of my body, I began to imagine the voice of Eve-or was it the snake? I aimed to nurse a new poetics of the tropics. I wanted this poem to inhabit the vulgarity, to find beauty in it. “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda” began with historical fact: that Victorian women were prevented from practising Botany, because men thought the cross-sections of flowers too closely resembled female genitalia that our anatomy was thought to be too vulgar. ' Cannibal is an exploration of home, Jamaican womanhood, linguistic exile, and a decolonization of The Tempest, by interrogating what it means to be “savage.”Īudre Lorde believed that poetry is not only firmly rooted in a kind of feminine erotic power, but that poetry, in its most fundamental sense, is always primal. Below, watch Safiya perform one poem, 'Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda', and read more about the collection as a whole and Safiya's inspiration behind this poem in her own words, here. 'Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda' by Safiya SinclairĪ Guardian most anticipated book for 2020, Cannibal is Safiya Sinclair's thrilling debut.

Anaconda lyrics poem