Carole Satyamurti
Carole
Satyamurti is
a poet and sociologist, who lives and works in London. Until
recently, she taught at the University of East London, and at the
Tavistock
Clinic, where her main academic interest was in the relevance of
psychoanalytic
ideas to an understanding of the stories people tell about themselves,
whether
in formal autobiography or in social encounters. She contributed to,
and
co-edited, with Hamish Canham, a collection of essays on the
connections
between poetry and psychoanalysis, Acquainted
With the Night: psychoanalysis and the poetic imagination (Karnac,
2003)
She
has been awarded
a number of prizes. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1986,
and
received an Arts Council Writers’Award in 1988. In 2000, she
received a
Cholmondeley Award, and she was short-listed for a Forward Prize in
2007. Her
poetry has been published in a wide range of magazines, and has been
extensively anthologised.
She
is an
experienced reader, competition judge and workshop tutor, and teaches
for the
Arvon Foundation and for the Poetry School. With Gregory Warren Wilson, she runs poetry
courses in Venice and Corfu, and has a particular interest in the links
between poetry and visual art. She
has
been writer in residence at the University of Sussex, and a visitor in the Creative Writing
Program at the College of Charleston, South Carolina.
Carole
Satyamurti published
three volumes of
poetry with Oxford University Press, of which the first and third were
Poetry
Book Society Recommendations: Broken Moon (1987), Changing the Subject (1990) and Striking Distance (1994). Following the
termination of the OUP
poetry list, her fourth collection, Love
and Variations was published by Bloodaxe in 2000. Her latest book, Stitching the Dark: New and Selected Poems,
appeared from Bloodaxe
in 2005.
Ourstory
Let us now praise women
with feet glass slippers wouldn’t fit;
not the patient, nor even the embittered
ones who kept their place,
but awkward women, tenacious with truth,
whose elbows disposed of the impossible;
who split seams, who wouldn’t wait,
take no, take sedatives;
who sang their own numbers, went uninsured,
Knew best what they were missing.
Our misfit foremothers are joining forces
underground, their dusts mingling
breast-bone with scapula, forehead
with forehead. Their steady mass
bursts locks; lends a springing foot
to our vaulting into enormous rooms.
© Carole Satyamurti
(Vice-President of Ver Poets)
