Interview with Jeanette Winterson: happy or normal?

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:01:23 GMT

I've just come across a unique blog called Le chateau de vent by Madame Finistère that has some eye-opening posts. I couldn't resist stealing part one of an inspiring Jeanette Winterson interview she'd found - you can view parts 2 to 5 on her why be happy when you can be normal post. I listened to another Jeanette Winterson interview via a BBC World Service podcast earlier this year, and apparently her adopted mother had a heart attack and died whilst watching the TV sex scene of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit! Can you imagine...

Adrienne Rich - Poet

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 19:22:56 GMT

Adrienne Rich (born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an America feminist, poet, teacher and writer. Her work covers a broad range of subjects, although I am most drawn to her writing about lesbian desire. I've included one of her poems below. As of 1999, Rich was living in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, novelist, poet and academic Michelle Cliff. The two have been living together since 1976.

from Twenty-One Love Poems

I

Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseperable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

II

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carried the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

III

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time
for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp
in time tells me we're not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?
did I lean from any window over the city
listening for the future
as I listened here with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.
At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever.
At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.
I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Imaginative Women - Exploration Blog of Lesbian Fiction & Lesbian Drama: Lesbian/Bisexual Writers

Interview with Jeanette Winterson: happy or normal?

Adrienne Rich - Poet