Poems from the heart

Phillippa Slinger introduces
the Speakeasy event

To mark International Women's Day, I visited the Speakeasy at the Left Bank Centre in Hereford today for a women's poetry celebration - and what a celebration. It was run under the auspices of the Ledbury Poetry Festival and saw an enthusiastic audience and some excellent readers. We are only too aware of the difficulty many women had in finding their voices in the past, and we were reminded of the sometimes greater difficult they had getting them heard once found. Look at the vast majority of older poetry anthologies for the evidence, where most woman writers were outnumbered at least ten to one by their male counterparts. But, whilst things may slowly be changing, so many women have still to find their voices today. Encouragement and safe spaces in which to do so remain vital but in the current financial climate many projects, including one of Ledbury Festival's own (the wonderful Women4Women group), are threatened. Given their potential to change lives, I'm convinced that they need fighting for every inch of the way.

Today's event opened with Maya Angelou's great poem "Still I rise" and then the floor was open to the young women of SHYPP, the Supported Housing for Young People Project. Their contributions, co-ordinated by their mentor Toni Cook, covered everything from the Suffragettes to what they'd say to their younger selves, from the realities of living in half way homes to dealing with estrangement from families. In July they'll be reading at the Ledbury Poetry Festival and their place in such an august line-up is richly deserved. SHYPP's mission is to "inspire homeless young people to dream more, learn more, do more and become more"; you can't doubt that poetry is helping these young women to do so.

Other contributions followed the SHYPP poems. One that particularly caught my attention was read by Lesley Ingrams; in addition to a very moving piece of her own, she read a poem by Meg Cox which appears in the "Me Too" anthology (Fair Acre Press) that's launched today. Inspired by the "Me Too" campaign, it has contributions from Pascale Petit, Kim Moore, Liz Lefroy and many other powerful writers wanting, as Emily Dickinson put it, to "tell the truth but tell it slant". I haven't yet managed to get a copy, though I've got one on order and I'm really looking forward to reading it.