Women's Day Poet - Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949)

Biography of Sarojini Naidu
----------------------------

Sarojinidevi was a great patriot, politician, orator and administrator, of all the famous women of India, Mrs. Sarojinidevi Naidu's name is at the top. Not only that, but she was truly one of the jewels of the world. Being one of the most famous heroines of the 20th century, her birthday is celebrated as "Women's Day"

She was born on February 13, 1879 in Hyderabad. Her father, Dr. Aghornath Chattopadhyaya, was the founder of Nizam College of Hyderabad and a scientist. Her mother, Mrs. Varasundari, was a Bengali poetess. Sarojinidevi inherited qualities from both her father and mother.

Young Sarojini was a very bright and proud girl. Her father aspired for her to become a mathematician or scientist, but she loved poetry from a very early age. Once she was working on an algebra problem, and when she couldn't find the solution she decided to take a break, and in the same book she wrote her first inspired poetry. She got so enthused by this that she wrote "The Lady of the Lake", a poem 1300 lines long. When her father saw that she was more interested in poetry than mathematics or science, he decided to encourage her. With her father's support, she wrote the play "Maher Muneer" in the Persian language. Dr. Chattopadhyaya distributed some copies among his friends and sent one copy to the Nawab of Hyderabad. Reading a beautiful play written by a young girl, the Nizam was very impressed. The college gave her a scholarship to study abroad. At the age of 16 she got admitted to King's College of England. There she met famous laureates of the time.

During her stay in England, Sarojini met Dr. Govind Naidu from southern India. After finishing her studies at the age of 19, she got married to him during the time when inter-caste marriages were not allowed. Her father was a progressive thinking person, and he did not care what others said. Her marriage was a very happy one.

Her major contribution was also in the field of poetry. Her poetry had beautiful words that could also be sung. Soon she got recognition as the "Bul Bule Hind" when her collection of poems was published in 1905 under the title Golden Threshold. After that, she published two other collections of poems--The Bird of Time and The Broken Wings. In 1918, Feast of Youth was published. Later, The Magic Tree, The Wizard Mask and A Treasury of Poems were published. Mahashree Arvind, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru were among the thousands of admirers of her work. Her poems had English words, but an Indian soul.

One day she met Shree Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He said to her to use her poetry and her beautiful words to rejuvenate the spirit of Independence in the hearts of villagers. He asked her to use her talent to free Mother India.
Then in 1916, she met Mahatma Gandhi, and she totally directed her energy to the fight for freedom. She would roam around the country like a general of the army and pour enthusiasm among the hearts of Indians. The independence of India became the heart and soul of her work.

She was responsible for awakening the women of India. She brought them out of the kitchen. She traveled from state to state, city after city and asked for the rights of the women. She re-established self-esteem within the women of India.

In 1925, she chaired the summit of Congress in Kanpur. In 1928, she came to the USA with the message of the non-violence movement from Gandhiji. When in 1930, Gandhiji was arrested for a protest, she took the helms of his movement. In 1931, she participated in the Round Table Summit, along with Gandhiji and Pundit Malaviyaji. In 1942, she was arrested during the "Quit India" protest and stayed in jail for 21 months with Gandhiji.
After independence she became the Governor of Uttar Pradesh. She was the first woman governor in India.

She died on March 2, 1949. ..


HER POEMS:

1. Autumn Song


Like a joy on the heart of a sorrow,
The sunset hangs on a cloud;
A golden storm of glittering sheaves,
Of fair and frail and fluttering leaves,
The wild wind blows in a cloud.

Hark to a voice that is calling
To my heart in the voice of the wind:
My heart is weary and sad and alone,
For its dreams like the fluttering leaves have gone,
And why should I stay behind?

Sarojini Naidu



2. An Indian Love Song


He

Lift up the veils that darken the delicate moon
of thy glory and grace,
Withhold not, O love, from the night
of my longing the joy of thy luminous face,
Give me a spear of the scented keora
guarding thy pinioned curls,
Or a silken thread from the fringes
that trouble the dream of thy glimmering pearls;
Faint grows my soul with thy tresses' perfume
and the song of thy anklets' caprice,
Revive me, I pray, with the magical nectar
that dwells in the flower of thy kiss.

She

How shall I yield to the voice of thy pleading,
how shall I grant thy prayer,
Or give thee a rose-red silken tassel,
a scented leaf from my hair?
Or fling in the flame of thy heart's desire the veils that cover my face,
Profane the law of my father's creed for a foe
of my father's race?
Thy kinsmen have broken our sacred altars and slaughtered our sacred kine,
The feud of old faiths and the blood of old battles sever thy people and mine.

He

What are the sins of my race, Beloved,
what are my people to thee?
And what are thy shrines, and kine and kindred,
what are thy gods to me?
Love recks not of feuds and bitter follies,
of stranger, comrade or kin,
Alike in his ear sound the temple bells
and the cry of the muezzin.
For Love shall cancel the ancient wrong
and conquer the ancient rage,
Redeem with his tears the memoried sorrow
that sullied a bygone age.

Sarojini Naidu

3. A Rajput Love Song

Parvati at her lattice)
O Love! were you a basil-wreath to twine
among my tresses,
A jewelled clasp of shining gold to bind around my sleeve,
O Love! were you the keora's soul that haunts
my silken raiment,
A bright, vermilion tassel in the girdles that I weave;

O Love! were you the scented fan
that lies upon my pillow,
A sandal lute, or silver lamp that burns before my shrine,
Why should I fear the jealous dawn
that spreads with cruel laughter,
Sad veils of separation between your face and mine?

Haste, O wild-bee hours, to the gardens of the sun set!
Fly, wild-parrot day, to the orchards of the west!
Come, O tender night, with your sweet,
consoling darkness,
And bring me my Beloved to the shelter of my breast!

(Amar Singh in the saddle)
O Love! were you the hooded hawk upon my hand
that flutters,
Its collar-band of gleaming bells atinkle as I ride,
O Love! were you a turban-spray or
floating heron-feather,
The radiant, swift, unconquered sword
that swingeth at my side;

O Love! were you a shield against the
arrows of my foemen,
An amulet of jade against the perils of the way,
How should the drum-beats of the dawn
divide me from your bosom,
Or the union of the midnight be ended with the day?

Haste, O wild-deer hours, to the meadows of the sunset!
Fly, wild stallion day, to the pastures of the west!
Come, O tranquil night, with your soft,
consenting darkness,
And bear me to the fragrance of my Beloved's breast!

Sarojini Naidu

Words of London Poetry Contest 2006 Judge

Michael Symmons Roberts

Much has been said about poems that show up in poetry competitions. Judges are warned to look out for various pitfalls among the anonymous
verses. There’s the cynical poem that turns showy tricks to make it stand out from the crowd. Then there’s the
workshop poem with a great central idea but no heart. There’s even the rare but dangerous poem by a famous poet of the past sent in to be overlooked, and thereby to prove that contemporary poetry is in crisis.

I’m glad to say that the vast majority of poems I read for Poetry London were well worth the reading. Some were let down by a loose line or two, or could do with more drafts to sharpen the form. Some lacked fire, or ice, or failed to live up to their title or opening. Many others would sit comfortably in the pages of a good magazine, and that made the task harder than I’d expected.

Early in July, a huge parcel of poems – stripped of names but number-coded – was delivered to my door, and in the first week I read all of them to make some initial judgements. By the end of that process, the batch of poems was down to a quarter of its original size. I set them aside for a few days, then came back and read the surviving poems again, reducing the batch to about 50.

It took me two more stages (each getting harder as I had to ditch poems I liked) to get the batch down to a final ten from which to pick the three prizewinners and four commended poems. That final shortlist was made up of poems that wouldn’t leave me alone. Most of them had caught my eye at the beginning of the summer in the first sifting, and had grown stronger with each reading since.

The four commended poems included two impressive poetic sequences (one linked by narrative, one by theme), a quietly striking reflection on place and relationship, and a well focused telling of a captured moment in rural Ireland.

After much shuffling of the pack, I settled on three very different prizewinners. The third prize goes to a poem built on a striking idea and written subtly in the voice of a character from recent history. ‘Jacqueline Kennedy’s Guided Tour of the White House’ establishes its voice from the first line, and has telling (and sometimes chilling) details throughout. Recent history is hard to write about, but in this poem the former First Lady’s strong sense of her place in history, her role as a custodian, and the undertow of anxiety come through strongly.

Second prize goes to a poem that stood out a mile. ‘Happy Ending’ took me by surprise from its simple and strange first line. At different times it made me think of Stevie Smith, of the Ahlbergs’ stories for children, of Walt Whitman. It’s whimsical and surreal and deceptively straightforward. And it does have a happy ending too, and a lilting last line. This idiosyncratic lyric poem grew on me each time I read it.

In the end, the first prize went to a poem with a central image so strong that it struck me from day one – ‘Sunday at the Skin Launderette’. To sustain and develop that image with such richness and variety in a form as difficult as a sestina is a real achievement. Many sestinas run out of steam, or overstretch their subject. This one seems comfortable in its own skin (apologies), and wears its form lightly. I was struck by the juxtaposition of wonderful descriptions of this strange ritual – ‘fragile as sushi’, ‘her cobweb elbows’ – with the ordinariness of it. I felt – as a reader – that this bizarre scene had really been witnessed, that I could witness it myself any rainy Sunday in any launderette. Even the ordinariness of the rain was made extraordinary. I was even more struck by the delicacy with which the poem draws its characters. The painstaking stripping and washing of skins – which in other hands could be grotesque or comical – is made beautiful and moving.

I was delighted to find, as I reached the final stages of the judging – having taken no notice of the code numbers on the poems – that another poem by the writer of ‘Sunday at the Skin Launderette’ had been in my final ten, and had just missed out on a place among the commended. That was a poem with a very different subject and approach, but clearly handled with the same skill and confidence. If those two poems are anything to go by, this is a poet with a strong voice, formally adept and with something to say. I, for one, will be watching with interest to see what she does next.


Michael Symmons Roberts has published four acclaimed collections of poems. His most recent, Corpus (Cape 2004), won the Whitbread Poetry Award - and was shortlisted for the Forward, Eliot and Griffin prizes. He is also known for his work on BBC Radio and for his collaborations with the composer James MacMillan. A first novel, Patrick's Alphabet, is published by Cape this year. Born in 1963, he lives in Cheshire.


Second Prize
rachel curzon
Happy Ending

Rachel Curzon was born in Leeds and now lives and works in Hampshire. She seems to be the only person who thinks she’s kept her accent. Rachel has had poems published in Mslexia and the MUP’s Watermark Anthology.

Read the poem >


Third Prize
victor tapner
Jacqueline Kennedy's Guided Tour of the White House

Victor Tapner’s poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies, including Bloodaxe’s The Honey Gatherers. Part of his prehistory sequence Flatlands was the bursary winner in the 2005 Writers Inc. Writers-of-the-Year Competition, and he won the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition in 2000. His poem Pocahontas Prepares for an Audience at Court was commended in last year’s Poetry London competition. He works in London as a journalist on the Financial Times.

Read the poem >


Commendations are awarded to

BA Humar for
'Newstead Abbey'

Michael W Thomas for
'Cows in a Corofin Field'

Alex Heald for
'The Magician Escapes the Mob, Disguised as Himself'

Kate Noakes for
'Iron'

Words of Poetry London Contest 2007 Judge

The large parcel of poems for judging was passed to me quietly, almost secretly like an exchange between spies, at a poetry reading in London in the first week of July. I sat listening to the (excellent) reader with only one ear, distracted by the package under my chair, wondering what was in there. When I finally came to open it, it was raining. In fact it seemed to be raining throughout the weeks I was reading through the contents of the parcel. Raining water outside and poems inside. But
the poems were good fresh rain. Growing rain, as I’ve heard it called. In the end they brightened things up because the overall standard was high, with more consistently good poems than in any other competition I’ve judged.

The quality of the poems made them a pleasure to read, like a giant anthology put together by someone with an eclectic and sometimes startling range of taste. But this made it harder than usual to sift through to my shortlist of twenty or so poems, from which I would choose the winners. The only way to approach the task was to reread all the poems, and then read them again. And again. Every time I judge a competition, I worry about the treasures which I may have missed – because I was tired reading the first time through, or simply distracted, or just not reading as well for a moment. However hard you try and however many readings you manage, it’s inevitable that something good will slip away. Because of the general high standard for this competition, I was even more aware of this possibility, which I tried to counter with as many readings of the big pile as possible. I carried sheaves of poems with me everywhere, popping a few in my handbag if I went out, to read on the bus.

Eventually my shortlist emerged. This group of around twenty by now dog-eared sheets became very familiar, and are all poems that I still think about from time to time and won’t forget. Robert Frost said that ‘writing a poem is discovering’. The three prizewinners and four runners-up which I finally chose all share this sense of discovery, of excitement in the language, and a useful tension in the line which never lets up during the downward momentum of the poem.

The four commended poems include: an exquisite sonnet, which is almost an elegy to smoking, to the old-fashioned romance of it which we hesitate now to mention; a daring double-bluff of a poem which pulls us into a landscape at the same time as deconstructing it as text; a psychological study of two people pulling each other too deeply into talking about death, with the harrowing image-world of the poem doing the real talking; and a surreal and startling encounter between doctor and patient.

Third prize went to ‘Wild Flowers’, a tightly realized villanelle. Within the strict parameters of the form wonderfully wild things happen. From the unexpected opening line, ‘I will be sober on my wedding day’, an almost gothic listing of matrimonial events follows. The poem is full
of exaggerated images of fecundity, and febrile sexual and religious ardour. At the back of all this hyperbole is a feeling that the frenetic dance masks the loss of so much; with the brilliant repeated line, ‘my tongue sleeping in her tray’, the silenced narrator lets us know the cost.

The fractured language of the second prize poem, ‘Syllable’, is brilliantly evoked to create a voice in stereo. The narrator peppers his/her own thoughts and responses to the hostile community with his/her own ‘translations’ of the voices he/she hears around. The poem holds up a mirror to contemporary western society, showing the inadequacy of understanding even for the most well-meaning of us, the ‘church boy’ and the ‘art girl’. The music of the fractured English is intense and strangely, shockingly beautiful.

The poem which won first prize was ‘Seven Weeks’. I was struck by the way the writer achieved the complex shape of the sestina with the minimum of staginess, making the form work for the poem. She has made the structure suit the circularity of bereavement, the heightened awareness of time passing, as the narrator counts the weeks since the death of someone close. The poem runs backwards, too, starting with the seventh Sunday since the death, every stanza representing a week, and each week a different character and colour of mourning, until the final short stanza which beautifully and solemnly evokes the moments immediately after a death.


Jo Shapcott is among the most influential and warmly admired poets in Britain. Her collections include 'Phrase Book' (1992) and 'My Life Asleep' (1998) which won the Forward Prize. 'Her Book: Poems 1988 to 1998' was published by Faber in 2000, and 'Tender Taxes', versions of Rilke's French poems, in 2001. She has twice won the National Poetry Competition, and teaches creative writing at the Royal Holloway College.

First Prize
Christine Webb

Seven Weeks


Seven weeks today. A July wind
is tousling the trees, rumpling the garden.
I have written five letters, washed the sheets.
A mistake somewhere – I’ve not finished
the crossword. Sit with the sounds of Sunday.
Thrashing leaves. Cows. Planes. My own breath.

All week the air has burnt: it is breath
from a lion’s mouth. No stir of wind
to brush the cheeks of the sixth Sunday:
silence quivers in the house, and the garden
shrivels, as if the season’s finished.
I sort bed linen. There are too many sheets.

A week leafed with letters. I scan these sheets
about you, half alert to hear your breath
until the words remind me that it’s finished.
So sorry to hear. Rain in the wind
hasn’t enough weight to nourish the garden.
Bells clang dryly. It is the fifth Sunday.

I wake in your presence the fourth Sunday –
not lying passive between your sheets
but laughing, striding in the summer garden
your mouth full of kisses, and your breath
sweeter and stronger than the June wind.
Why did I wake before the dream was finished?

Ready to go. I’ve nothing left unfinished
you told me once. But now beside a Sunday
river I want you here to watch the wind
curving sails, to feel the hauled sheets
as the boats put about, to taste the breath
of summer gusting down from every garden.

The second week I meet you in the garden
sitting under the oak where you once finished
fixing the swing-seat; not out of breath
but quiet and absorbed, reading the Sunday
papers, glancing up, rustling the sheets,
pinning one down that flutters in the wind.

I look out at the garden that first Sunday
when everything is finished. I smooth the sheets
and listen for your breath. There is only the wind.


Second Prize
Mick Wood

Syllable


here they speak now words
so i go round there and she give it some right grief
it like there no past
then he come in you think you big fuck man do you?
and no time to come
so i lamp him one in mouth and down he go twat

they in house or car or pub all of time they go
it too far for walk to town you fuck mug
we go we walk far each day it no mile for us

they pay man name jim to ride bike that go no where
walk on path that move

we sit out at night
the street for car or park in you thick mate or what?

we sing songs from home
stop that blood row i call filth i send hard man round

we ask learn their songs they go
i i i will all ways love you oo oo
they get drunk fight cry
you my best fuck mate sam bo how fuck sad is that?
we go our name are sunday innocent jesus solomon daniel

some time church boy come
christ love you
he like too thin
we feed him
christ save
he help us too much
tell us he cut his own flesh
christ love me
he think we not know the lord
christ save

some time art girl come
she want draw and write and tape us for
art out reach
she start dress like us learn our songs
we like her but she go

why you come? it all smile and laugh in your land
though poor you more peace and real than us
we tell her of kill and bad men she go
it all our fault i hate this blood place
i hate queen blair church pop beeb old
bill mum dad r and b
we go we hate gay

she not come more time
we miss her
we like smoke good weed and flirt with her

it rain it rain
we try walk to sea

there no path here no walk here
you up to no good we all need say so to leave path
this land it own by some one
not you

we ask where their land they go
own back yard
they laugh
but not with eyes
they not own own land

now they speak here words

we not want you in this town
this place just for us
we spell it out for you in words of one



Third Prize
Caroline Bird

Wild Flowers


I will be sober on my wedding day,
my eggs uncracked inside my creel,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.

I will lift my breast to pay
babies with their liquid meal,
I will be sober on my wedding day.

With my hands I’ll part the hay,
nest inside the golden reel,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.

I’ll dance with cows and cloying grey,
spin my grassy roulette wheel,
I will be sober on my wedding day.

I’ll crash to my knees and pray,
twist the sheets in tortured zeal,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.

Church-bells shudder on the bay,
fingered winds impel the deal:
I will be sober on my wedding day,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.





© Copyright of this poem remains with the poet: please do not download or republish without permission.

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Commended Poems

Emily Berry

The Incredible History of Patient M


I went swimming with the Doctor;
he wore his stethoscope and listened
to the ebb and flow.

The water is drowning! he cried;
I feigned innocence. It’s news to me, I said.
I hid the stones in my pockets.

I’m in training with the Doctor. He can’t
work out why I’m so heavy. He takes
my pulse every hour. My blood pressure.

He straps his velcro cuff to my bicep
and pumps it till I’m breathless.
You need to breathe more, he says.

On Thursdays the Doctor examines me
on all fours. He wears a white coat
with too-short sleeves. This is as big

as they come, he explains, shrugging,
making the sleeves shorter. His wrists
are great hairy chunks, and he wears no watch.

Time is nothing, says the Doctor.
He’s unconventional. Time is nowhere,
like a dead bird in a cave. Let’s take a look inside.

I’d never opened up before. The Doctor
has a scalpel. And I’m not afraid to use it,
he told me. He calls it his shark’s tooth.

The Doctor has a bite that dimples my arm,
leaves a mark like the fossil of a sprung jaw.
He slapped my face with his penis.

To get you going, he said. My heart is now
on red alert, apparently. If it stops,
he reminds me, you’re dead.





© Copyright of this poem remains with the poet: please do not download or republish without permission.

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Matthew Caley

The Bluff


Apparently, the lights are in scatterfall above the bluff,
its incline serrated by firs
into dark-green saw teeth,
thence a slither of wortleberry and scree to where

the bay bulges into the ocean like a breathalysing balloon,
dotted by a single dhow or skiff
-from here it’s not quite clear- which is where our guts go airborne.
Barely tethered to the wild, green globe itself

the skiff is held by only a fraying lily-rope
to a spar of shingle –as if either might drift off–where, under a wind-tugged tarp
The Great Master is trying to map

the unmappable auroras. He must depend, fences not being enough,
on these few illegible scribbles holding off
the scatterfall of evening. And therein lies the bluff.





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Christina Dunhill

Romance


There is the lovely fug of it, the cloak
to shake and swirl around yourself, disguise
a darker thought and slip into a haze
of otherness. Here’s how my mouth will make
its little nothings into wisps of smoke –
a ring, a ‘no’, a ‘yes’, an ‘oh’, a kiss.
There’s absolutely nothing to express.
Instead we stretch our silence like a lake,
breathe signals over it like children’s boats
that glide across, then wobbling, start to lean.
Ghost boats that start to show a flag, then hide:
they never make the crossing from our throats.
Your smoke and mine - our breath, our screen –
Is this enough mist to undress inside?





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Linda Chase

Dare


Let’s talk about death, she said.
You first.

And he began with an oak tree, a glade
a blackbird and rain
then he nodded to her

and she began with ribbons on lapels
scissors and Hebrew prayers
then she nodded to him

and he went on with winter
leaves decaying, breath and emptiness
and he nodded to her

and she went on wanting to tear
her clothing to shreds
then she nodded to him

and he went on staring through branches
trying to count the few leaves left
then he nodded to her

and she went on with the fear of
unravelling threads, looser and looser
and she nodded to him

and he went on standing in the doorway
with the mourner’s book in his hand
and he nodded to her

and she went on with her ripped blouse
hanging from her shoulders, shaking

and he went on with his bare hands open—
as she fell against him he held her up.

Let’s talk about death
she said

and he closed his mouth and arms
and shoulders around her, refusing.


Second Prize
Mick Wood

Syllable


here they speak now words
so i go round there and she give it some right grief
it like there no past
then he come in you think you big fuck man do you?
and no time to come
so i lamp him one in mouth and down he go twat

they in house or car or pub all of time they go
it too far for walk to town you fuck mug
we go we walk far each day it no mile for us

they pay man name jim to ride bike that go no where
walk on path that move

we sit out at night
the street for car or park in you thick mate or what?

we sing songs from home
stop that blood row i call filth i send hard man round

we ask learn their songs they go
i i i will all ways love you oo oo
they get drunk fight cry
you my best fuck mate sam bo how fuck sad is that?
we go our name are sunday innocent jesus solomon daniel

some time church boy come
christ love you
he like too thin
we feed him
christ save
he help us too much
tell us he cut his own flesh
christ love me
he think we not know the lord
christ save

some time art girl come
she want draw and write and tape us for
art out reach
she start dress like us learn our songs
we like her but she go

why you come? it all smile and laugh in your land
though poor you more peace and real than us
we tell her of kill and bad men she go
it all our fault i hate this blood place
i hate queen blair church pop beeb old
bill mum dad r and b
we go we hate gay

she not come more time
we miss her
we like smoke good weed and flirt with her

it rain it rain
we try walk to sea

there no path here no walk here
you up to no good we all need say so to leave path
this land it own by some one
not you

we ask where their land they go
own back yard
they laugh
but not with eyes
they not own own land

now they speak here words

we not want you in this town
this place just for us
we spell it out for you in words of one


Third Prize
Caroline Bird

Wild Flowers


I will be sober on my wedding day,
my eggs uncracked inside my creel,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.

I will lift my breast to pay
babies with their liquid meal,
I will be sober on my wedding day.

With my hands I’ll part the hay,
nest inside the golden reel,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.

I’ll dance with cows and cloying grey,
spin my grassy roulette wheel,
I will be sober on my wedding day.

I’ll crash to my knees and pray,
twist the sheets in tortured zeal,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.

Church-bells shudder on the bay,
fingered winds impel the deal:
I will be sober on my wedding day,
my tongue sleeping in her tray.












© Copyright of this poem remains with the poet: please do not download or republish without permission.





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Words of a poetry competition Judge

You agree to judge a competition not because you want to sit in judgment, or ‘discover’ an unknown talent, but to find out what’s going, what the prevailing fashions are. What you receive is a sort of windfall tax on contemporary poetry.

But you have to choose winners. Soon enough a snow of rejects covers the floor. Then you ask – what is it I’m looking for? If I don’t know, how will I know when I find it? But you do know. What you look for, feel for – what you end up longing for – is a piece of work with an inner urgency. I don’t mean loud or fast. I mean any sense that the poem required to be written, and may have surprised its author. Perhaps ‘urgency’ is not the word. Maybe ‘necessity’ is a better. Or ‘self-willed’. A poem which arose out of necessity. What I sensed was many entries had been built from ‘ideas for poems’ and very probably in the context of a workshop or writers’ group. This gave them a stilted feel. Also, I sensed many had been written for the competition – which never works. Write the poem that wants to be written, then wait for a competition to happen along.

Where do poems come from, if not from ideas? – yes, that’s the question. From scraps of wild energy, from images that snag in the mind, from odd phrases that cohere with those images, from – as I say – some agenda of their own. I suspect an ‘idea’ is already too set in its ways. You want a pre-idea.

Having got the nagging feeling, the energy, the image, the scraps of words, what then? Then, of course, comes the craft; the growing, shaping and forming. The most common fault among the entries was the writer’s failure to hear a line. When I’m asked what is the difference between poetry and prose, I reply the status of the line. Lines that were both controlled and breathed, that listened to language, that revealed and slowed... or raced and paced – these were hard to find.

The three prize winning poems were those that stuck most in my mind, and brought me a species of joy. Perhaps I mean relief. All are richly imagined, unexpected, and as it happens, constructed in three different ways, which just proves that ANY structure is better than none. ‘Sisters in a Wood’ is a quiet, melancholy and tender sonnet, nicely judged, quite without pyrotechnics. ‘Hello, I’m visiting the area…’ dreams a believable, complete, if slightly tilted world with long loping rhythmic lines, which by rights ought to fall apart, but don’t.

‘The Canal Road’ is a poem where, in rhyme, and with gloriously old-fashioned poetic inversions, we are addressed by a worn-out sandal. I loved it the moment I read it. I don’t know what ‘murram’ is and don’t know if the poet is from the Subcontinent, but I kept returning to the poem, grateful to be taken far beyond myself.


Kathleen Jamie has published several acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Queen of Sheba and Jizzen. Her most recent, The Tree House
(Picador), won the Forward Prize for best collection in 2004. She has received numerous other honours, including the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Prize. As well as poetry, Kathleen writes for radio, especially travel scripts, and has published a travel book Among Muslims. She lives in Fife and teaches at St Andrews.

OBAMA INAUGURATION JAN 20, 2009 NEW YORK TIMES

Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2009. The son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, he was the first African-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.


He was also the first new president since terrorists attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the first to use the Internet to decisive political advantage, the first to insist on handling a personal smartphone while in the White House. So striking was the novelty of his rise that he embraced it himself: as a candidate he called himself “a skinny kid with a funny name” and the theme for his campaign was “change.”

It was a theme with deep resonance for a country enmeshed in what was widely believed to be the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Abroad, many challenges loomed: the war in Iraq, the worsening conflict in Aghanistan, the repercussions from Israel's broad assault on Gaza, the threat of terrorism and the increasing signs that the economic woes that began on Wall Street had spread across the global economy.

Mr. Obama arrived at the White House with a resume that appeared short by presidential standards: eight years in the Illinois State Senate, four years as a senator in Washington. He had managed to wrest the Democratic nomination from a field of far more experienced competitors, most notably Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he outlasted in what became an epic primary battle. And he defeated Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona, by an electoral margin of 365 to 173, while outpolling him by more than eight million votes.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama laid out a set of large promises that were solidly within the traditional agenda of the Democratic Party, with plans to offer health insurance to all and reduce carbon emissions at the top of the list. At the same time, he proposed moving toward what was sometimes called a post-partisan landscape, appealing to voters of all stripes to come together. As he took office, voters seemed cautiously optimistic, with high hopes for the Obama presidency mixed with a sense that complicated problems would take years to resolve.

Republicans attributed Mr. Obama's victory primarily to a dismal trifecta: the cratering economy, an incumbent president, George W. Bush, with near-record disapproval ratings and a series of stumbles by Mr. McCain's campaign. But even his opponents acknowledged that Mr. Obama had run a remarkable campaign, highly disciplined in its message, relentlessly focused on building a field organization that was second to none and unprecedentedly successful in fundraising, particularly over the Internet.

In the weeks after the election, the Obama team tried to bring the same level of focus to the transition, moving rapidly to name a large roster of nominees to posts large and small. He dipped deeply into the pool of Clinton-era officials, beginning with his former rival, naming Mrs. Clinton to be his secretary of state. While he resisted calls to involve himself publicly in many of the pressing issues of the moment, declaring repeatedly that "we only have one president at a time," Mr. Obama began negotiations with congressional leaders on a massive economic stimulus package and hit the road for campaign-style events to build support for the $825 billion bill introduced by the House on Jan. 15, 2009.


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CHILDHOOD TO CHICAGO

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Barack Obama conjures up an imagined meeting between his white Kansas-born mother and his black Kenyan father that could have come straight out of the iconic, if hopelessly dated, 1960s movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

In 1960 such a meeting took place in Hawaii, where his mother’s parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, prepared to meet their daughter’s beau, an African student reaching toward Phi Beta Kappa, whom she had met in Russian class.

The parents, Barack Obama’s beloved “Gramps” and “Toot,” were wary. Although Hawaii was a place of rich ethnic blends, racial tensions were still simmering, like those evident in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” where white liberals like the couple portrayed by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn nonetheless cringed over the prospect of a black son-in-law.

The Dunham’s new son-in-law-to-be, Barack (meaning “blessed”), was from the small village of Nyang’oma Kogelo near Lake Victoria. Now an economics student with a polished British accent, as a boy Barack had helped tend his family’s goats and his school was a small shack. If the Dunhams were unsettled by the match between Barack Sr. and their daughter, 18-year-old Stanley Ann (her father had wanted a boy and she was named for him), Obama’s family in Africa was apoplectic over the prospect of their blood being “sullied by a white woman.” (“Dreams from My Father,” p. 126.)

In 1961, the short-lived marriage produced a son, also named Barack. But the father soon abandoned his young family to attend Harvard, and then returned to Africa. The son would see his father only once again, when he was 10. Barack Sr. had a new life, wives and children back in Kenya as well as new demons, including depression and alcohol. One crippling car accident was followed by another, this time fatal, his short life ending in Nairobi at age 46 in 1982.

When, as her son became a young adult, Ann tried to explain his father’s life to him, “she saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she tried to help the child who never knew him see him the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry out over the distance.” (“Dreams From My Father, p.127.)

After divorcing Barack Sr., Ann had remarried, another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, of Indonesia, who was attending the University of Hawaii. After Mr. Soetoro’s student visa was revoked, the family moved to Jakarta, where Barack was joined by a half-sister with whom he remains close, Maya. He attended an Indonesian school, although campaign attacks suggesting it was militantly Islamic were patently false. To make sure her son kept up his English, Ann would wake him hours before school began to study a correspondence course. When Barack balked at her 4 a.m. home-schooling program, she replied, “this is no picnic for me either, Buster.”

Soetoro bought Barack boxing gloves and taught him how to fend off bullies. Ann began bringing home books and records by great black Americans, being a flower child who viewed every black man, including her son, as the next Thurgood Marshall.

But this blended family, too, soon cracked and Ann returned to Hawaii to be near her parents. Through his boss, Barack’s “Gramps” had arranged for him to enter fifth grade at Punahou, an elite prep school founded by missionaries. His grandfather saw the school as his grandson’s meal ticket and Barack said he told him “that the contacts I made at Punahou would last a lifetime, that I would move in charmed circles and have all the opportunities that he’d never had.”

Barack’s sojourn at the school, where there were few other blacks, including learning the folkways of the American elite, grounding that would be helpful at other academic proving grounds, like Columbia University and Harvard Law School. He excelled on the basketball court, with a jump shot that earned him the nickname “Barry O’Bomber.” When his mother returned to Indonesia to do field work for her degree, Obama remained with his grandparents to finish his studies at Punahou.

In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama writes candidly about the struggle for identity that defined his boyhood. At school he heard a coach use the word “nigger,” and his own beloved grandmother “Toot” (his rendering of an abbreviation for “grandparent” in Hawaiian), would occasionally utter “racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe,” Obama recalled in his campaign speech on race. He had a pack of close friends and exhibited behavior, including drinking and smoking marijuana, typical of male teenagers. His mother and grandparents worried that he was lackadaisical about his studies, but Barack had begun a habit of disappearing behind his bedroom door to read for hours, shuttered with Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Malcolm X, and “there I would sit and wrestle with words, locked suddenly in desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I’d found it with the terms of my birth.” (“Dreams From My Father,” p. 85.)

His quest for identity continued at the small California liberal arts Occidental College, known for its diverse student body, and also at Columbia, where he transferred after two years. On his first night in New York City, Obama spent the night curled up in an alleyway, waiting to move into his apartment in Spanish Harlem. The precariousness of his place in the world, the sense that his life could have easily slipped into the stereotype of black male failure, pervades “Dreams From My Father.”

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.” (“Dreams From My Father,” p. 93.)

Interestingly, when The Times investigated Obama’s use of drugs during this period of his life, the paper found that it seemed to be less of an issue than Obama portrayed in his book.

He said he used drugs to help numb the confusion he felt about himself and described partying, smoking “reefer,” and doing a little “blow.” But Amiekoleh Usafi, a friend from Occidental, said the most she saw Obama indulging in were cigarettes and beer, and others interviewed had similar accounts.

During his Occidental and Columbia years, Obama became far more aware of politics, becoming involved in student anti-apartheid groups. After Columbia, he had difficulty getting hired as a community organizer, the job he wanted, and worked for a year at a business where he wore a suit and could have started down a path toward money and status.

But in 1985, Gerald Kellman, a community organizer in Chicago’s tough South Side, interviewed a young applicant who “challenged me on whether we would teach him anything,” Mr. Kellman recalled. “He wanted to know things like ‘How are you going to train me?’ and ‘What am I going to learn?’” With a $10,000 salary and $2,000 Mr. Kellman gave him to buy a used car, Obama began a three-year stint as a grassroots organizer in Chicago’s projects and churches.

It is a period that looms large in “Dreams From My Father,” where Obama recounts the frustrations and triumphs of getting asbestos removed from the apartments at Altgeld Gardens and learning the political skills needed to mediate anger and deal with urban poverty. In the book he vividly recounts his disappointment with himself when he was unable to control a group of residents whose anger boiled over at a tense meeting with city officials. But the job, he wrote, was “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School.” On the streets of Chicago’s South Side, Obama came to terms with his place in black America.

THE MOST FAMOUS LAW STUDENT IN AMERICA

“Dreams From My Father” ends with Barack Obama’s first journey to Kenya, where he went after receiving his acceptance letter from Harvard Law School. He met his half-brothers and half-sisters, forging new relationships with his father’s African family, including his step-grandmother, Sarah, who helped raise his father in the same way his grandmother, Toot, looked after Barack.

He was older than the other first-year students at Harvard and at the end of the year he won a coveted slot as one of about 80 editors of the prestigious law review, the most influential in the country. That summer, he worked as a summer associate at Chicago’s Sidley & Austin, where he met and fell in love with another young Harvard Law grad, Michelle Robinson. They continued a long-distance courtship.

The next year, in February 1990, after a deliberation that took 17 hours, he won the law review’s presidency with support from politically conservative students. Weeks before the voting he had made a speech in favor of affirmative action that so eloquently summarized the arguments against it that conservatives believed he would give their concerns a fair shake.

Mr. Obama sometimes joked that the presidency of the Harvard Law Review was the second-hardest elective office in the country to win. He was the first black elected in its 104 year history and the election made him an instant celebrity, including a profile in The New York Times.

From Harvard he returned to Chicago, where he worked on a voter registration drive, started work at a small law firm specializing in civil rights cases and teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. In 1992, he and Michelle were married.

A Harvard Law connection, Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge who had been impressed by Mr. Obama’s editing of an article he wrote at Harvard, put him on the path to a fellowship at the law school, which provided an office and a computer, which he used to write “Dreams From My Father.”

He taught three courses, the most original of which was as much a historical and political seminar on racism and the law. He refined his public speaking style. He was wary of noble theories, his students said. He was, rather, a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

Religion had begun playing a role in his life before he went to Harvard, and he had joined Trinity United Church of Christ, led by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who later presided at the Obamas' marriage. One of the pastor’s sermons had inspired both the title of Mr. Obama’s second book and his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “The Audacity of Hope.” The ties between the young couple and the sometimes incendiary pastor would causean unanticipated firestorm during the 2008 presidential primaries.

POLITICS

Politics was very much on his mind as Barack Obama cemented his ties to Hyde Park, the Chicago neighborhood with a long history of electing reform-minded politicians. A tight-knit community that runs through the South Side, Hyde Park is a liberal bastion of integration in what is otherwise one of the nation’s most segregated cities. At its heart is the University of Chicago, where Mr. Obama also began cultivating connections to the city’s white legal elite, including Democrats like former U.S. Judge Abner J. Mikva and the former chairman of the F.C.C., Newton Minow. “He felt completely comfortable in Hyde Park,” said Martha Minow, Newton’s daughter and Mr. Obama’s former law professor and mentor.

In 1992, Mr. Obama led a successful registration drive that added nearly 150,000 black voters and helped elect Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat and the first African-American woman in the U.S. Senate. Judson Miner, the lawyer who hired him, was also active in Democratic politics. In 1995, Obama kicked off his candidacy for the Illinois Senate at the same Hyde Park hotel where Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, had announced his candidacy.

He did not fit the profile of the typical black politician. For one, he had not grown up in the traditions of the American black church and he was younger than the generation of civil rights leaders for whom Birmingham and Selma were defining moments. He had thrived in white institutions with a style more conciliatory than confrontational, more technocrat than preacher. Like other members of a new class of black political leaders, he tended to speak about race indirectly or implicitly, when he spoke about it at all.

In a state where the Democratic machine still dominated local politics, he was an independent progressive. But once in the Senate, he learned to straddle all of these worlds. He found a mentor in an old-style boss, State Senator Emil Jones Jr., a black leader of the older generation. Mr. Jones made sure to give Obama headline-grabbing issues, including ethics reform and an issue important to the black community, legislation forcing the police to tape interrogations. He played in a regular poker game with other legislators.

However, the legislative footprints he left in Springfield were hardly deep. During the presidential campaign, his record of voting “present” 130 times, rather than casting an aye or a nay, was criticized, although Obama insisted that he did not use those present votes to duck taking controversial stands. And in 1999, he made a rare political miscalculation.


Despite warnings from friends like Newton Minow, he decided to challenge an incumbent Democratic congressman and former Black Panther, Bobby L. Rush. Mr. Rush enjoyed deep loyalty in the black community and trounced Obama. “He was blinded by his ambition,” Representative Rush said later, but he nonetheless endorsed Obama for president.

In 2002, as Washington prepared to wage war in Iraq, Obama contemplated making an antiwar speech, something unusual for a state legislator. He consulted David Axelrod, a prominent national political consultant, and the speech he gave managed to carefully thread the political needle. He called the war in Iraq “dumb,” while carefully pointing out that he was not opposed to all wars. His early stand against the war gave him a defining issue in his run for president.

Unexpectedly, a seat in the U.S. Senate opened up in 2004. This time, Obama was careful to get the blessing of Representative Jessie Jackson Jr., who was thought to have his eye on the seat but had decided against it. The winds were running strongly in Obama’s favor. For one, he had been selected to give the keynote speech at the Democratic convention and he managed to set the place on fire with his youthful energy and lilting rhetoric.Then, his two most serious opponents self-destructed. He won the election with 70 percent of the popular vote.

So by the time he was sworn into the U.S. Senate, he was already a megawatt celebrity.

He did not fall in love with Washington. He was 99th in seniority and in the minority party for his first two years. At committee hearings he had to wait to speak until the end.

Although he won a seat on the coveted Senate Foreign Relations Committee and maintained a solidly liberal voting record, he disappointed some Democrats by not taking a more prominent role in opposing the war. In 2006, he voted against troop withdrawal, arguing that a firm date would hamstring diplomats and military commanders in the field. His most important accomplishment was a push for ethics reform, but as the legislation was reaching the Senate floor, Obama was criticized for not working harder to prevent the bill’s collapse.

During the 2006 mid-term elections, Obama was his party’s most sought-after campaigner and he raised money for many of his Democratic colleagues. In a matter of days, he raised nearly $1 million online, a glimpse of the fundraising prowess to come.

And he was running for president even as he was still getting lost in the Capitol’s corridors.

THE PRIMARIES

It was Michelle Obama who kept questioning a run for the presidency. She worried about the disruption of their family life and about her husband’s safety. Over a Christmas vacation in Hawaii in 2006, the couple visited his grandmother, Toot, and took long walks to talk about Barack’s political future. Finally, a decision had to be made and the couple holed up in the office of Mr.Axelrod, a sad-eyed former newspaper reporter, with a few of his lieutenants and trusted friends like Valerie Jarrett.

Michelle wanted assurances on a number of points. Were the Clintons really vulnerable? Would the money be there for a national contest that would drag on for 21 months? And then, after hearing the pros and cons from their six closest political advisers and trusted friends, she turned to her husband.

“You need to ask yourself, Why do you want to do this? What are you hoping to uniquely accomplish, Barack?”

Her husband sat quietly for a moment and then responded: “This I know: When I raise my hand and take that oath of office, I think the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently.”

The nucleus of the campaign was a group of Chicago political professionals, Axelrod and one of his younger partners, David Plouffe, who would manage the campaign. Neither man had ever worked on a winning presidential campaign. The core team also included those closest to the Obamas, like Michelle’s brother, Craig, a nationally respected basketball coach.

The initial campaign plan aimed at dealing Hillary Rodham Clinton, the frontrunner, a devastating blow in the Iowa caucuses in early January. Positioning Clinton as a consummate Washington insider, the plan called for harnessing the newest technology to build grassroots enthusiasm, raise record sums of money and build an organization of volunteers across the state. The core theme, from which the campaign never wavered, was change.

An announcement was set for Feb. 10, 2007, a day so frigid that Obama was forced to wear an overcoat and scarf against the cold. He stood before the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill., where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, and invoked Lincoln’s famous words, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

In Obama’s words, it was the poisoned atmosphere in Washington, a government hobbled by cynicism, petty corruption and “a smallness of our politics,” that now divided the nation. “The time for that politics is over,” he said “It is through. It’s time to turn the page. ”

One of Obama’s aides later asked him how he had prevented his teeth from chattering in the cold. It turned out that a heating device had been positioned at his feet, out of the audience’s view.

After an initial burst of interest and enthusiasm following the Springfield announcement, the campaign floundered. In October 2007, Obama told his aides, “Right now we are losing, and we have 90 days to turn it around.”

Plouffe made good on his pledge to build a first-rate field organization on the ground and opened 37 offices in Iowa. The money came in. Using the Internet to draw in new donors, the campaign hauled in an impressive $24 million during the first quarter of 2007, just behind the Clinton money machine. Then, using his oratorical talents and story-telling ability to the hilt, Obama brought the house down at the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines.

One striking anecdote from the speech quickly became a YouTube sensation. In it he recalled a lonely campaign rally in Greenwood, S.C., on a miserable day. Edith Childs, a single voice in the meager crowd, began shouting encouragement. “Fired up! Ready to go.” Soon she had everyone else chanting, too.

Then, pacing back and forth as if marching to the chant, Obama, his voice raised to a spirited shout, asked the crowd, “Are you fired up? Are you ready to go? Fired up! Ready to go!”

The audience was electrified and some had tears in their eyes as Obama left the stage saying, “Let’s go change the world.”

Hillary Clinton said his liberal message was naïve, his Senate record too scant. He seemed cowed, especially when at one early debate he was waiting to shake her hand and say hello and she turned her back. But it turned out that Iowa Democrats were fired up and ready to go and Hillary had a disappointing third-place finish. It was on to New Hampshire.

Addressing voters in a Manchester theater the Sunday before the primary, Obama was unmistakably a candidate tasting victory. “In two days time,” he intoned, they would be making history. Back-to-back wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, two overwhelmingly white states, would put to rest questions over whether a black candidate could be nominated. But a casual debate put-down, in which Obama muttered to Clinton that she was “likable enough,” backfired. Clinton, meanwhile, was able to shed her icy frontrunner persona and even shed tears at a New Hampshire coffee shop, or came close enough. She seemed to find her voice as the heroine of the struggling working class and New Hampshire responded. Obama came in second.

“I guess this is going to go on for awhile,” Obama said when aides delivered the disappointing results.

With North Carolina’s John Edwards a perpetual also-ran, Obama and Clinton split states on Super Tuesday. Despite the millions it had raised, the Clinton campaign had not really planned to fight beyond that lollapalooza of primaries. Money was running out and there was internal squabbling among top staffers, problems that bedeviled the campaign through June. Axelrod and Plouffe, by contrast, had created a “Feb. 5 and Beyond Room,” where money and organization were meticulously allotted to most of the primary and caucus states. Even as Clinton regained momentum in some big states, winning Ohio and Texas, Obama kept pulling out victories in red states and smaller caucus sates, building up a steady count in delegates. Money kept flowing in ever-larger streams from the Internet.

Obama and Clinton went out of their way to point out their foreign policy differences, with Clinton portraying herself as a hawkish Democrat and defending her decision to vote in favor of the 2002 resolution that President Bush later considered an authorization to use military force against Saddam Hussein. (Later, she said she fully expected Bush to use diplomacy first — and was shocked that he did not.)

On domestic issues, both candidates advocated turning the government onto roughly the same course — shifting resources to help low-income and middle-class Americans, and broadening health coverage dramatically. Clinton criticized Obama’s health care plan for not covering all Americans, though her own plan had become less grandiose than the infamous Hillarycare maze of government-paid coverage she had proposed during her husband’s first term. She now favored allowing citizens to choose their plans.

Many voters were impressed by Clinton’s résumé and her depth of knowledge about America’s biggest problems. But Obama built an exciting campaign around the theme of change. There were some missteps. Obama was caught by a blogger describing some white, working-class voters as “bitter. ” And the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ’s more outrageous sermons almost upended his candidacy (see below.)

But the numbers were the numbers. Although Clinton kept winning primaries to the end, Obama’s early delegate lead proved insurmountable. It was a long slog, but going toe to toe with Clinton on so many battlegrounds actually toughened Obama and made him a better candidate. She had previewed all of the arguments the Republicans would launch: he was too eager to deal with rogue dictators; his stands on the issues offered too little substance; most of all, he lacked experience. But he had stood up to her and won.

On June 3, the final day of the long primary season, he secured the delegates necessary to be the presumptive nominee. Almost immediately, talk centered on whether he would choose Clinton as his running mate. She played coy. Although a Clinton restoration was no longer possible, the great Barack-Hillary soap opera would continue through Inauguration Day.

GENERAL ELECTION

While Barack Obama projected youth and change, John McCain, the Republican nominee who turned 72 during the campaign, was running on his distinguished biography and experience. A former P.O.W. in Vietnam, the Arizona senator was admired for his straight talk and independent stands on contentious issues, such as torture of detainees, campaign finance and immigration reform. And he should have enjoyed one tremendous advantage.

After a decisive win in New Hampshire, he wrapped up his party’s nomination in early March, leaving Mr. Obama and Mrs.Clinton to slug it out over a long, divisive spring. But Mr. McCain found himself tethered to an unpopular incumbent president,and an even more unpopular war. Mr. McCain not only supported the war in Iraq, he insisted the United States was winning the war. Mr. Obama, of course, had promised to end the war.

But national security was not the dominant issue in this election. All spring and summer, the economy had faltered. By the fall, the bursting of the housing bubble had become a four-alarm financial crisis, requiring an emergency federal bailout of the country’s leading financial institutions. The political environment for Republicans went from challenging to downright sour.

The only strategy that seemed to make a win possible under such circumstances was to go heavily negative against Obama, but McCain was reluctant.

In late July, Mr. Obama toured Iraq, the Middle East and Europe on a trip intended to make him appear presidential, but the trip also showcased him as a political rock star.

The McCain campaign pounced. After Mr. Obama appeared before a huge crowd in Berlin, the McCain team began airing an attack ad portraying him as “the biggest celebrity in the world,” juxtaposing the Berlin speech with pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Money helped insulate the Obama campaign from the attacks. The candidate had made a fateful decision to forgo $84 million in federal election funds for the general election in order to raise donations outside of the limits of the Watergate-era campaign finance strictures. The campaign ended up raising $750 million, more than George W. Bush and John Kerry combined had raised in 2004 and hundreds of millions more than McCain. One of McCain’s signature issues was campaign finance reform and he railed against Obama’s hypocrisy for going back on his early campaign pledge to live within the federal limits. But voters didn’t seem to care, and while McCain struggled to fund a national advertising campaign, Obama had buckets of money.

Clinton’s supporters continued to press her vice-presidential claims leading up to the Democratic convention in Denver. Obama had promised his supporters that he would announce his selection in a mass e-mail (which had the dividend of giving the campaign millions more contacts for getting out the vote in November). The pick was not Clinton but another one of the Democrats Obama had vanquished in the primaries, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. He was a safe choice who brought decades of experience in foreign affairs, helping to parry McCain’s attacks that Obama was too light on national security.

The Democratic convention featured the soap opera of whether the Clintons would fully embrace Obama and Biden in Denver. Bill Clinton could still explode in rage over the way he and his wife had been portrayed during the primaries. But in Denver, he gave a gracious endorsement that betrayed no lingering ill will. Hillary Clinton, too, gave a warm speech and rushed to the floor of the convention hall to make Obama’s nomination unanimous on the eve of his acceptance speech.

For the final night of the convention, the campaign had decided to move everyone, delegates and all, to Mile High Stadium, where 80,000 people, some waiting in line for nearly a day, celebrated the new Democratic ticket. The stage, draped with flags and lined with Greek columns, was meant to evoke the White House but some found the whole thing over the top.

“With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States,” Obama began, the culmination of a marathon political carnival that bore little resemblance to any convention finale that had come before. The speech was being delivered on the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and Obama movingly referred to the throngs who had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear “a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.”

McCain seemed to gain ground after the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn. His choice of a young female governor, Sarah Palin of Alaska, energized the conservative G.O.P. base. But the Obama strategist David Axelrod and others deemed the choice a disaster because it undermined McCain’s major campaign theme, experience. Palin had been in office only a few years and before becoming Alaska’s governor she was the mayor of a tiny town, Wasilla, and was a self-described Hockey Mom. After rejoicing over her strong convention acceptance speech, in which she relentlessly attacked and mocked Obama, the McCain campaign kept her closeted from the national media. Then, after overcoaching her, interviews with the network anchors were scheduled. Her performance during an interview with Katie Couric, in which she stumbled repeatedly over relatively simple questions and spoke in almost comic non sequiturs, went viral on YouTube and became fodder for a barrage of brutally comic skits on “Saturday Night Live.” A $150,000-plus spending spree on clothes financed by the Republican National Committee tarnished her image even more.

Once the campaign turned to party against party, the dynamics changed. Unlike in the primaries, where Obama and Clinton had agreed on more issues than not, Obama and McCain had extremely divergent worldviews.

Their most profound differences were over the war in Iraq. McCain still spoke of “victory” and opposed setting dates for extracting American troops. Obama was an early opponent of the war in Iraq, and he presented a military and diplomatic plan for withdrawing American forces. He also warned that until the Pentagon began pulling troops out of Iraq, there would not be enough troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He blamed President Bush for taking his focus off defeating Al Qaeda and becoming distracted by Iraq.

They differed over government’s proper role in people’s lives. McCain was an economic conservative who railed against wasteful government spending and appropriations called earmarks. In his convention speech in Denver, Obama said: “Government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads, and science and technology.” He favored raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation.

Both candidates denounced torture and were committed to closing the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But Obama went further and promised to identify and correct the Bush administration’s abuse of executive power. McCain promised improved protections for detainees, but he had helped the White House push through the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which denied detainees the right to a court hearing and put Washington in conflict with the Geneva Conventions.

They differed sharply on the kinds of justices they would appoint to the Supreme Court. Obama favored abortion rights, McCain opposed them, and McCain promised to continue the court’s tilt to the right.

In this campaign, McCain abandoned his earlier, moderate positions on climate change and immigration reform. Obama presented himself as an environmental protector who would strictly control the emissions of greenhouse gases. He endorsed some offshore drilling, but as part of a comprehensive strategy including big investments in new, clean technologies.

Right before the first debate, the economy cratered. Lehman Brothers collapsed, a harrowing indicator of the coming financial crisis and a reminder that the presidential campaign was turning into a referendum on which candidate could best address the nation’s economic challenges.

Speaking at an almost empty convention center in Jacksonville, Fla., on Sept. 15, McCain was trying to show concern for the prospect of hardship but also optimism about the country’s resilience. “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” he said, words that some believed doomed his candidacy.

At the McCain campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va., at almost the same moment that morning, McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, looked stricken when his war room alerted him to the comment. Within 30 minutes, he was headed for a flight to Florida to join McCain as they began a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to recover.

McCain’s inartful phrase about the economy that day, and the responses of the two campaigns, fundamentally altered the dynamic of the race. But the episode also highlighted a deeper difference: the McCain campaign team often seemed to make missteps and lurch from moment to moment in search of a consistent strategy and message, while the disciplined and nimble Obama team marched through a presidential contest of historic intensity learning to exploit opponents’ weaknesses and making remarkably few stumbles.

From there, McCain staggered forward. He announced he was suspending his campaign to return to Washington to help solve the financial crisis, suggesting he might skip the first debate. Then, after he arrived in Washington, Republicans balked at approving the bailout plan. When McCain could not mediate the impasse, the debate was suddenly back on.

After this wild ride, Obama’s calm performance in their first debate made him appear presidential. While McCain jabbed at him during the debate, he did not look at Obama once during the 90-minute debate, despite rules that encouraged them to speak directly to each other.

The second and third debates were really no better. McCain tediously repeated the phrase “My friends,” as the overture to his answers and, in the third, he endlessly invoked Joe the Plumber, a middle-class Everyman who McCain insisted would see his taxes balloon under Obama’s economic plan. In various polls, Obama was deemed the winner of all three debates. Well-prepared and commanding, if not exciting, he had come across as a plausible president.

The negative tone of the McCain campaign and the murmurings about Obama being a Muslim had a powerful impact on one disgusted Republican, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. During an appearance on “Meet the Press” in late October, Powell broke with his party and endorsed Obama

With plenty of money still flowing into the campaign during the final month, Obama bought a half-hour of national television time for a glossy infomercial. A smashing ratings success, the commercial proved to be more popular than even the final game of the World Series — or last season’s finale of “American Idol.”

Now all the campaign needed to worry about was overconfidence.

VICTORY

When Senator Barack Obama stepped from his plane on the final ride of his presidential candidacy and loped to the bottom of the stairs, he did something he had not done at the end of any of the thousands of miles logged on this journey.

He saluted.

A group of his campaign workers had gathered at Midway Airport in Chicago to watch him arrive from his last trip, a short hop from nearby Indiana. Given the day, as Mr. Obama raised his hand to offer his gratitude, it looked a lot like a gesture from a commander in chief.

In the final hours of a 22-month campaign, he quickly moved on to an Election Day tradition that is rooted in a sweaty superstition: basketball. Twice in his primary fight with Hillary Rodham Clinton he skipped his afternoon game on the day ballots were cast. And both times he lost.

So at 2:45 p.m. Mr. Obama arrived at a gymnasium on the West Side, aptly named Attack Athletics. For two hours, he ran up and down the court with Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who had become a good friend, along with a close group of Chicago pals who assembled to help take his mind off the other events of the day.

When he went to vote with Michelle and their two daughters on Tuesday morning, he had narrowly missed another familiar face at his polling place. Bill Ayers, the former member of the radical Weather Underground who became a central figure in the attacks from John McCain and Sarah Palin, had dropped by to vote a few minutes earlier.

By nightfall, thousands of his admirers streamed into Grant Park for the celebration. At a nearby hotel, he took one more pass through his speech, while commentary about his future played on television sets in the background.

Celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, gathered in a tent to await the candidate.

As Ohio was called for Mr. Obama, a roar sounded from the 125,000 people gathered in Hutchison Field in Grant Park. It was the last state needed to put Mr. Obama over the top. But the networks waited to make their calls until 11 p.m., Eastern time, when polls in California and on the West Coast closed. The candidate waited to watch Mr. McCain's gracious concession speech, in which he praised the president-elect as a fellow American and paid homage to the racial barrier just fallen.

“This is a historic election, and I recognize the significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight,” Mr. McCain said, adding, “We both realize that we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation’s reputation.”

Finally, looking a bit exhausted, Mr. Obama stood at the lectern, looking over a vast undulating sea of screaming humanity of all races, waving American flags. “What a scene, what a crowd,” he said, shaking his head. “Wow.” He took a long drink out of the water bottle inside the lectern.

With a bank of flags at his back, he told the screaming, dancing crowd, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

“It’s been a long time coming,” the president-elect added, “but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.”

Not only had he captured the presidency, but he also led his party to sharp gains in Congress. This put Democrats in control of the House, the Senate and the White House for the first time since 1995, when Bill Clinton was in office.

Spontaneous parties erupted on streets across America. At 2 a.m., about 20 revelers from Times Square congregated outside The New York Times’s new headquarters on Eighth Avenue, waiting for newspapers to mark the historic occasion. When a senior editor appeared with a bundle of early editions, the crowd went nuts and began taking her picture holding the newspaper with the simple headline that captured their joy: OBAMA.

Oceans away in Jakarta, a young Indonesian student, attending the same public school where Mr. Obama’s mother had sent him, was hoisted aloft on the shoulders of his joyous schoolmates, waving his shirt in the air. It was a picture repeated elsewhere around the globe, especially in Kenya, where some members of Mr. Obama’s more distant family made plans to attend the inauguration.

At Obama headquarters in Albany, Ga., where as a part of the nascent civil rights movement she had been beaten back with tear gas and billyclubs, Rutha Mae Harris could not hold back her tears any longer, the emotions of a lifetime released in a flood.

“Glory, glory, hallelujah,” she sang.

THE NEW TEAM

Throughout November, the financial tsunami was gaining such ferocity that virtually every large institution, from investment banks to insurers to companies like Citigroup, was approaching Washington for federal funds. Help couldn’t wait.

Although Barack Obama kept reminding people that the United States only had one president at a time, he knew the world expected him to get to work to help stabilize the teetering economy. That meant the quick announcement of an economic team and a fiscal stimulus plan, perhaps one as large as $700 billion, equivalent to the financial bailout plan approved by Congress before the election.

For his first staff announcements, the president-elect turned to two old Clinton hands, Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and John Podesta. Neither was considered a practitioner of the “new” politics, but both were respected for their effectiveness and Washington-savvy.

The captains of his economic team, similarly, were both disciples of Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. The new Treasury secretary was Timothy F. Geithner, the young president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers was to be the director of the National Economic Council in the White House, the president’s principal economic adviser and policy coordinator. Both men believed in the pillars of Rubinomics, including free trade, deregulation and fiscal discipline.

The severity of the economic crisis created an opportunity to act on many of the issues Obama had emphasized in his campaign, including cutting taxes for lower- and middle-class workers, addressing neglected public infrastructure projects like roads and schools, and creating “green jobs” through business incentives for energy alternatives and environmentally friendly technologies.


For his national security team, Obama also went long on experience. The biggest surprise was Hillary Rodham Clinton for secretary of state. Although they had disagreed about the Iraq war and during the primaries Clinton had portrayed herself as more hawkish than Obama, she opted to accept the chance to play on the world stage once again. Although his campaign nickname was “No Drama Obama,” the choices meant an Obama White House that would brim with big personalities and far more spirited debate than occurred among the largely like-minded advisers who populated President George W. Bush’s first term.

Obama asked Bush’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to stay on; and picked Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant, to be national security adviser. Another former rival for the Democratic nomination, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, was chosen for Commerce secretary, although he withdrew because of an investigation into his political donors. Another Western governor, Arizona’s Janet Napolitano, was selected as secretary of Homeland Security.

By the end of the process, the 20 members of the Obama cabinet included two Republicans and four African Americans, two Asian Americans. three Latinos and two white women. The nine white men in the Obama cabinet were to be, as they were in the Clinton administration, a minority.

Critics of the Iraq war particularly rejoiced over the choice of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, seeing the appointment as a second chance for a brave truth-teller. Shinseki had been denounced by senior Bush administration officials for prewar testimony in which the general said hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to stabilize Iraq, predictions that proved accurate.

The mainly centrist cabinet choices angered some liberals, who worried that the team might not deliver the change Obama had promised. But some predicted that the locus of real power would not be cabinet meetings but the meetings of the senior White House staff, working under the leadership of Emanuel, renowned for his tough tactics and language. The staff also included campaign hands like David Axelrod, who would keep his portfolio on message and Robert Gibbs, who was chosen for press secretary, and Chicago loyalists like Valerie Jarrett.

The president-elect finished his Cabinet appointments by announcing his intelligence team, led by another veteran of both Congress and the Clinton White House, Leon Panetta, the nominee for director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although a few Democrats complained about not being informed beforehand of the choice, and others worried that Panetta, a vocal critic of the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods, did not come from inside the intelligence community, it seemed that he and the rest of Obama’s nominees were likely to be confirmed, even the disclosure that Mr. Geithner, the Treasury nominee, had failed to pay some personal taxes in earlier years, appeared to be more of an embarrassment than a stumbling block.

The only real controversy was the continued ethical mess swirling around Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor, who was arrested in December and charged with trying to sell the right to be appointed to take Mr. Obama’s seat in the Senate. The Obama camp responded with an internal review that showed that Mr. Emmanuel had held discussions with the Mr. Blagojevich, but that there had been no sign of any favors being traded to secure the choice of a nominee.

Mr. Blagojevich then turned the Senate in knots by filling the seat with a former Illinois state official, Roland W. Burris. Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at first said Burris should not be seated because Blagojevich was not fit to make the appointment. But they changed their minds, in part because Senate Democrats needed Burris’s vote. Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus also supported Burris, who would be the Senate’s only African-American. In the meantime, in early January, Blagojevich was impeached by a vote of the State House of Representatives, setting the stage for a trial in the State Senate.

Still, these matters appeared as mere distractions, considering the deteriorating state of the economy. In January, as the Obamas returned from their holiday in Hawaii, the nation’s jobless rate rose to a 16-year high of 7.2 percent. Obama enlarged his stimulus proposal to $775 billion over two years, saying it would save between three and four million jobs. Some Democrats criticized the plan for not being bold enough and others worried that Obama should not have proposed tax cuts to offset opposition from Republicans, some of whom railed about the government going into so much debt. But with the country rallying behind him, Obama had the upper hand. National polls showed that 65 percent of the country supported his leadership, a much higher approval rate than other president-elects enjoyed. Congressional leaders promised to act on the stimulus package in February.

On foreign policy, as the conflict between Israel and Hamas raged in the Middle East, Obama continued to stress that there was only one president at a time and left diplomacy to the Bush administration. But on the economy, he stepped fully into the role of president before his inauguration. He met with congressional leaders and, in a somber but commanding tone, gave a major economic address at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. “For every day we wait or point fingers or drag our feet,” he warned, “more Americans will lose their jobs, more families will lose their savings, more dreams will be deferred and denied, and our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.”

The idea was not to wait but to build public support by mapping out a series of events to explain his economic approach, including long, televised interviews.

The Obamas had moved into a suite at the nearby Hay-Adams Hotel, so that Malia and Sasha could begin school after the holiday break.There was one more announcement before the family move into the White House: Marian Robinson, Michelle’s mother and a mainstay for the girls all through the campaign, said she would move in with the First Family after all, putting aside, for now, her worries about losing touch with her friends and beloved Chicago. And the closely followed saga of which breed of man’s best friend would share the Obama White House narrowed to two, Labradoodle and Portuguese water dog.

Hide

This article was adapted from "OBAMA: The Historic Journey,'' which was written by Jill Abramson, the managing editor of The New York Times in collaboration with the reporters and editors of the Times who covered Mr. Obama's campaign. The book will be published on Feb. 16 by The New York Times and Callaway.
Highlights From the Archives
Obama Elected President as Racial Barrier Falls
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, as the country chose him as its first black chief executive.

November 5, 2008U.S.NewsIn the Magazine
Is (His) Biography (Our) Destiny?
By JAMES TRAUB
Barack Obama says his experience gives him a guide to making a “post-post-9/11” foreign policy. Whether Americans will relinquish their fear is another question.

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Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | Next >>
For Some, Business Almost as Usual
By IAN URBINA
Washington workers commuted around road closings, train cancellations and crowds of tourists.

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In Washington on Inauguration Day
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
The sound of a simple chant O-ba-ma! calmed even the most restless crowds on Inauguration Day.

January 21, 2009Op-Ed Contributor
Free the Blue Room
By DEBORAH NEEDLEMAN
To revive the spirit of Camelot in decorating the

Obama's Inaugural Poet

Bill Clinton chose poetry for his inaugurations; George W. Bush did not. What does Barack Obama's selection of a poet say about his inauguration?

Meghan Daum
January 17, 2009

This time last year, on the snowy campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hillary Rodham Clinton took a swipe at her opponent Barack Obama with the quip, "You campaign with poetry, but you govern with prose."

As it turns out, the president-elect's first day of governing will include some poetry. Following in a tradition (of sorts) started by John F. Kennedy, who invited Robert Frost to write and recite a poem at his presidential inauguration, Obama chose Elizabeth Alexander, a 46-year-old poet, essayist, playwright and Yale professor, as his inaugural poet.

Alexander, who's known for blending historical and cultural themes into language described as both intellectual and jazz-inspired, was notified of her selection in mid-December.

That gave her about a month to come up with something worthy of the occasion and accessible (or at least not mystifying) to the estimated 1.5 million people who will converge on the Capitol, and the billions who may watch and listen worldwide.

And you thought writing a toast for your friend's wedding was stressful. Percy Bysshe Shelley concluded his 1821 essay, "A Defence of Poetry," with the oft-cited line "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

But what do acknowledged legislators know about poetry? In some cases, more than you'd think. Bill Clinton, who chose Maya Angelou for his first inauguration and fellow Arkansan Miller Williams for his second, is an avid poetry reader.

Three volumes of verse, including Seamus Heaney's "The Cure at Troy," a poetic translation of Sophocles' "Philoctetes," were on his list of favorite books compiled in 2003 for the opening of the Clinton Library. George W. Bush, for his part, chose not to include a poet at his inaugurations, but Laura Bush may have inspired more poems than all the presidential administrations put together.

In 2003, the first lady canceled a White House symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice" when too many of the invited poets wrote works protesting the war in Iraq. The resulting firestorm gave birth to Poets Against the War, an archive of more than 20,000 antiwar poems, an anthology and several ancillary peace organizations.

But what of Obama and poetry? His gift for language probably has been remarked on with more frequency than his affinity for foreign or domestic policy, so it's no surprise that he opted for an inaugural poet.

(Being a Democrat isn't the test; Lyndon Johnson is rumored to have told aides, "Don't bring me any poets," after one arrived at the White House and griped vociferously about Vietnam.) But why this one?

Kennedy's selection of Frost had the trappings of a preppy love-fest, and Clinton's choices suggested sweeping populism (Angelou) and Southern esoterica (Williams).

What does Alexander say about Obama? Carol Muske-Dukes, the new poet laureate of California, calls Alexander "serious, grounded, immensely gifted" and an "entirely appropriate" poet for the occasion -- not least because she reflects a choice that seems personal and carefully considered rather than obvious or expected.

"They're saying this is not about laureates or rock-star poets," Muske-Dukes said. "They're saying this is the kind of poet and poetry we want speaking for us."But what about the mood and sensibility of the nation?

Would it be more "democratic" to feature, say, a rap artist? Or the ultimate symbol of democracy du jour, an "American Idol" winner?

Mercifully, it seems not. And as arcane as the genre has always felt to some, poetry happens to be enjoying a renaissance.

"Back in the 1970s, if you broke 1,000 copies, that was good," said Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. Not so these days. According to an editorial executive at Penguin, the sales tracker Bookscan (which generally captures only about 70% of sales) shows that Billy Collins' "Sailing Alone Around the Room" has sold about 220,000 copies; Robert Haas' "Time and Materials" has sold 13,650 copies; and Mary Oliver's "New and Selected Poems," from 2004, has sold more than 100,000 copies.

ut in Swenson's view, poetry's popularity "goes beyond the sales issue. Americans want to connect not with poetry as a genre but with a single poem.

People are looking for something that, without resorting to cliches, translates very powerful human feelings into powerful words."And what might Elizabeth Alexander be thinking about now? Perhaps that inaugural phrase that applies to so many situations: "So help me God."mdaum@latimescolumnists.com

Unimaginable food that helps shed the Pounds

courtest yahoo.com

The 7 Best Foods for Weight Loss
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Losing weight is not about starving yourself and subsisting on seltzer.

Eat too little and the only place you'll feel lighter is your head.

Plus, research shows that any pounds you lose will likely come back--plus more.

One of the healthiest ways to shed pounds for good is to eat power foods that are naturally filling, nutrient-packed and, yes, proven to help you peel off pounds.

Pile your plate with these prize possessions! Steak

Women on a diet that included red meat lost more weight than those eating equal calories but little beef, according to a study published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

One reason: The protein in lean cuts of steak helps you keep muscle mass during weight loss, and muscle incinerates more calories than fat, so you will shed more stubborn pudge.

Try it: Grill or broil a 4-ounce serving of top round or sirloin; slice thinly to top a salad, or mix with veggies for fajitas.

Eggs The breakfast staple can trim off inches all over. Research from the Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge found that women on a low-calorie diet who ate an egg with toast and jelly each morning lost twice as many pounds as those who had a bagel breakfast with the same number of calories but no eggs.

Turns out, egg protein is particularly satisfying, so you liikely eat less during the course of the day.Try it: Enjoy a morning omelette or frittata, or top your lunchtime salad with hard-boiled eggs.

Lentils These beans can help banish belly bloat and reduce your belt size. Chock full of protein and soluble fiber, lentils can stabilize blood sugar levels and prevent insulin spikes that cause your body to create excess fat, especially in the abdominal area.

Try it: Toss lentils in soups, salads or pasta sauce. Or try this delicious Lentil Pilaf with Turkey Sausage.

Pomegranates Low in calories, this fruit gets high marks for taste and nutritional content, thanks to a healthy dose of folate, fiber and disease-deterring antioxidants.

Try it: Skip the juice and snack on the seeds instead. Toss them into salad in place of nuts. Or try these Pomegranate and Cranberry Bellinis from Giada DeLaurentiis (one of her holiday faves).

Chiles Some like it hot, and for good reason. Eating spicy numbers will spike your metabolism, courtesy of a compound in chiles called capsaicin, which helps the body burn extra calories for 20 minutes after you eat them.

Bonus: It can be downright painful to inhale a plate of chiles, so you'll eat slower, allowing your brain adequate time to register that it is full and prevent overeating.

Try it: Sample the savory entree that chef Nigella Lawson shared with SELF.QuinoaIt might be hard to pronounce (it's KEEN-wah), but eating quinoa offers a simple way to ward off the munchies.

The grain is teeming with fiber (2.6 grams per 1/2 cup) and protein to keep you humming and hunger-free for hours.

Try it: Replace the rice in stir-fries with quinoa. ParmesanSay cheese! Women who had one serving of whole milk or cheese daily were less likely to gain weight over time, a study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds.

Dieters who ate low fat varieties of dairy did not experience the same benefit. Why? Whole dairy may contain more conjugated linoleic acid, which could assist in the fat-burning department.

And since Parmesan is so flavorful, you only need a few sprinkles to gain maximum flavor without compromising its pound-shedding power.

Try it: Grate Parmesan over veggies such as broccoli or asparagus, or pair a 1-ounce portion with an apple. For more recipes and fat-fighting foods, log on to Self.com and check out 20 Superfoods for Weight Loss. Then sign up for our Jump Start Diet plan to help you shed pounds the healthy way for good!