Heartline Writers - Phenomenal Woman

Poetry, stories and singing for International Women’s Day 

Richard Wilcocks writes:

In Headingley’s Heart Centre, the Shire Oak Hall was full. A Powerpoint display was beginning on the large screen, ready to inform those present of the names of poets and their poems, and the now-traditional table of home-made cakes was in position at the back of the audience. This event is well-established, an essential part of the local calendar. Liz McPherson introduced the proceedings.

 

                                                                                                                  Photo by Richard Wilcocks

First image on the screen was of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist who was shot in the head by the Taliban for publicly advocating education for women and girls, but who fortunately recovered from her wounds to become world famous. Karen Byrne had her in mind when she read her poem Afghan, which is in the style of a letter of protest – ‘I have to hide my face/ I have to forget my dreams’.

 

Eileen Neil read two poems. She acknowledged that she had been influenced by Maya Angelou in writing The Call, which contains a list of legendary women from a range of cultures. It ends with ‘They are coming – the Rainbow Generation’. She was inspired by a violin concerto by Michael Daugherty entitled Blue Elektra to write a poem with the same name. Its subject is Amelia Earhart, mysteriously lost somewhere in the Pacific while trying to circumnavigate the world in 1937.

 

Cate Anderson gave us another true story entitled Refuge, which emerged from her extensive research. This was full of information (and reminders) about what it was like in 1971 in England, when people tended to make statements like ‘Marriage is the high point of a woman’s life’ while not doing much of a practical nature about domestic violence. Activist Erin Pizzey was mentioned as a pioneer, the founder of a domestic violence shelter in a two-bed derelict house in West London, which expanded and led to the establishment of many others.

 

Jackie Parsons’s poem Chocolate Cakes and Atom Bombs provided us with the fascinating image of the nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer sitting in a café in Los Alamos, his mouth full of the cake sold by the owner, Edith Warner. This was followed by Woman, a memoir poem about her beloved nan.

 

Bill Fitzsimons presented us with his poem Greta, about the famous environmental campaigner. Her surname, according to Bill, should be ‘Thunderberg’. His other poem was Universal Mother, about what mothers have to endure: ‘the price is paid by woman’.

 

Marie Paule Sheard took us to India for her fact-packed Story of Mrs Phule and Fatima Sheikh. These were two nineteenth-century campaigners who challenged ancient beliefs and customs connected with Caste and religion, when ‘the only value of women was the dowry and the siring of boys’’.

 

                                                                                             Photo by Richard Wilcocks

Acapella group Harissa (pictured above) then stepped forward, ten well-rehearsed women. In amongst folk songs, they sang a beautiful madrigal composed by John Wilbye in the late sixteenth century. That must have taken some special rehearsing! With an excellent balance of high and low voices, it was fit for a queen, as it had to be four centuries ago.

 

Linda Marshall, well-known to Headingley LitFest and to poetry groups far and wide, appeared on the screen as she was unable to be present. The Coat was about seemingly ordinary women who are really extraordinary, and The New Housekeeper is an amusing account of a rebellious woman who causes havoc, changing the locks and ‘calling up her cavalry of cutlery’.

 

Barbara Lawton presented an account of the life of Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, born in Whitechapel, London in 1836. She was faced with all the usual prejudices when she was wanting to become a doctor, but she eventually made it, founding a hospital for women staffed by women near Euston Station.

 

Myrna Moore’s poem Nanny of the Maroons, about a key rebel woman in Jamaica’s history, begins with the line ‘She grabbed a cudgel’ and ends with ‘She likkle but she Tallawah’, an expression which can be used for the island of Jamaica as well. Tallawah is patois for strong. The second poem was Bertha, the ‘mad woman in the attic’ in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, who was brought to England from the Caribbean. Her actual name, according to Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel The Wide Sargasso Sea is Antoinette, and the poet adopts her voice to describe her life with Rochester ‘guarded like an escaped prisoner’.

 

Dru Long took us to Iran in Woman Life Freedom, mindful of the brave women there who resist their theocratic government’s harsh laws about wearing head coverings. She connected the women who have died at the hands of the ‘morality police’  with famous suffragettes of the early twentieth century who died for the cause, like Emily Davison in 1913.

 

Malcolm Henshall was influenced in writing his poem Mother and Child by his professional life as a Special School teacher before he retired. Many of the parents he encountered were single mothers. He admitted worrying about his ability to write poetry, but he needn’t have, because his play with the words tears, fears and cares was terrific, the rhymes and repetitions working well. His Angels, a short piece about nurses, drew plenty of applause: ‘applause don’t pay the bills’.

 

Liz McPherson returned for the final reading. This is Reconstruction was a moving poem about her grandma, remembered as ‘clicking her teeth like knitting needles’. The second poem Vade Mecum was like a book of memories, rather confessional but ‘not just about me’. She revealed that she has not been to actual confession for fifty years. I can only gasp.

 

Harissa came back to finish off an enjoyably mind-stimulating morning show with Girls just wanna have fun. Surely we don’t have to wait another year for something like this.