George washington jane shore biography

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Jane Shore is the author of six books of poems: Eye Level, winner of the Juniper Prize (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977); The Minute Hand, winner of the Lamont Prize (University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); Music Minus One, a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award (Picador USA, 1996); Happy Family (Picador USA, 1999); A Yes-or-No Answer (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), winner of the 2010 Poets' Prize; and That Said, New and Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The Norton Anthology, The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Slate, and Ploughshares (where she has twice served as a guest poetry editor). She is a Professor of English at The George Washington University. See her profile on the Poetry Foundation's website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/jane-shore.

When Ms. Shore's volume of new and selected poems, That Said, was published in 2012, the poet Stanley Plumly responded as follows:

Jane Shore's That Said, New and Selected Poems represents the idiom of a recovery, a reconstituting of a personal past in a collective of fully realized, richly addressed moments, beautifully and indelibly spoken in its larger claims on the quotidian, ranging in insight from playing the good child-mother to "Thumbelina" to being the bad child to her own mother, calling her, "under my breath," "Mrs. Hitler." Shore's poem-narratives have long been praised for their juxtapositions of wit with quiet wisdom. Yet her poems of these past three and a half decades also speak through a Talmudic knowledge as ancient as the archetype. Her work is deep because its small worlds become so whole, exacting, and inclusive.

As a reviewer in Poetry magazine wrote, Shore writes poems that are "memorabilia; they cultivate the leisure and faceted pleasure of retrospection; they favor the miniature and the artifactu

By Mark Mastromarino

George Washington (1732-1799), the most celebrated person in American history, was born on 22 February 1732 on his father’s plantation on Pope’s Creek in Westmoreland county, Virginia. His father, Augustine, a third-generation English colonist firmly established in the middle ranks of the Virginia gentry, was twice married. He had two sons, Lawrence and Augustine, in 1718 and 1720, before his first wife, Jane Butler Washington, died in 1728. In 1731 Augustine married Mary Ball (1709-1789), and George was born a year later. Five other children followed Samuel, Elizabeth, John Augustine, Charles, and Mildred (who died in infancy). About 1735 the Washington family moved from Westmoreland County to Augustine, Sr.’s plantation on Little Hunting Creek, and lived there until they moved to a farm on the Rappahannock river opposite Fredericksburg in 1738.

Surveying the Land: An Early Career for Young Washington

George Washington became the “Father of his country” despite having lost his own father at an early age. In 1743, when George was eleven years old, Augustine Washington died and left the bulk of his estate to George’s half-brothers. Lawrence inherited Little Hunting Creek plantation (which he later renamed Mount Vernon in honor of Admiral Edward Vernon under whom he had served in the War of Jenkins’ Ear), and Augustine, Jr., inherited the Westmoreland County plantation where George was born. George himself inherited the more modest Rappahannock River plantation where he lived with his mother and siblings, but this was not enough to maintain his middling status in the Virginia gentry. His half-brother Lawrence suggested that George enter on a career in the British navy, but George’s mother rejected the proposal. Instead, he was trained as a land surveyor, a profession of considerable importance in Virginia, where colonial settlement was pushing rapidly into the Shenandoah Valley and other pa

Jane Shore

BUYING A STAR

An ad on the radio says that you can buy a star.
Call the toll-free number, charge it
to your credit card, and they'll send you
a parchment certificate of authenticity
and constellation chart with your actual star circled,
mapping your province of gaseous darkness, fire and ice,
over which you can rule, like the Creator.
The summer we got married, remember the night
we wrapped ourselves in blankets
and lay on our backs on the hood of our Toyota,
watching the meteor shower?
For an hour, we lay so still--
a husband and wife side by side
atop the stone lid of a medieval sarcophagus.
Beneath us, the damp grass
shivered with crickets and, above,
quick as eye blinks,
meteors streaked across the sky.
Every few seconds we'd see one die.
There! there! in the upper-right-hand-corner--
no martgage, no upkeep, no perpetual care--
there we are! buried in darkness, flashing,
then out.

For Howard