Kate Potts on the inspiration behind her Wise Women Poetry Workshop

When I started teaching poetry in universities a decade ago there were still module courses which consisted almost entirely of poetry written by men, with occasional appearances by Sylvia Plath or Carol-Ann Duffy. ‘Women’s poetry’ could be still its own separate category, an option rather than core curriculum.

In 2013, a few years after I’d published my first poetry collection, Welsh poet and academic Deryn Reese-Jones interviewed me for ‘A Dog’s Own Chance’, a book chapter she was writing on the body and subjectivity in contemporary women’s poetry: ‘Anxieties about the body are pervasive, and still sit at the centre of the difficulties our culture has with poetry written by women,’ Reese-Jones argued. When I started writing poetry, I told her, I’d initially avoided writing anything too ‘stereotypically feminine’, too ‘pretty’ or ‘over the top.’ But now I was less concerned with this, determined to be unconstrained in terms of style and subject-matter. Nevertheless, in my poetry there was, Reese-Jones noted, ‘a distinct absence of the body… and if the body does appear, it is ungendered.’

This autumn I’m teaching a new 10-week workshop course for Dialect focusing on, and celebrating, contemporary poetry by women. I’m energised by this prospect: a group of women and nonbinary people gathering together to study and share the ways we might craft the raw material of our minds and lives into new poetry. Why do I want to teach this course? The task of explaining this feels a bit overwhelming. Perhaps I’ll begin with the body.

The ways I experienced sexism and misogyny growing up are not at all unusual. Cat-calling and other unwanted sexual attention, sometimes shifting towards physical violence, starting well before I’d hit puberty. I felt a lingering sense of danger, guilt, and powerlessness. This pattern was repeated in many of the books I read, and the programmes I watched on TV. In these narratives, women tended to be secondary, absent, cardboard cutouts there to help or illuminate male protagonists. Women – as with other oppressed and marginalised groups – were very often ‘othered’, stereotyped as silly, unintelligent, impractical, overemotional (‘hysterical’), needy, desperate, hypersexual – or saintly and ever-giving. It’s not surprising that, as Deryn Reese Jones pointed out in ‘A Dog’s Own Chance’, women poets have had complicated relationships with the idea of the body, navigating histories and cultures thick with stereotypes and shame. As the narrator of poem 6 in Kim Moore’s All the Men I Never Married says ‘…I both agree and disagree with this statement/ …being our bodies in public is a dangerous thing’.

I started my undergraduate degree in 1996, just as I was recovering from, predictably, an eating disorder, because my young, growing body had felt like too much to carry. In my second year I took an optional module course on North American Women Writers. The work we studied was wonderful (Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Leslie Marmon-Silko, Louise Erdrich…) but the framing of it was tricky. Outside the classroom we were at the peak of ‘ladette’ culture and The Spice Girls’ ‘girl power’, both limited forms of liberation. Our lecturer was an essentialist feminist who spoke in binaries. Women’s thinking and creative work was grounded in circularity, cycles, softness, nurture, the rhythms of nature. Men’s thinking and work was grounded in ideas of linearity, succession, technology, weapons, violence and war-making. All this was innate. A friend nicknamed the seminars ‘period class.’ My essays were bad parodies in which I used the phrase ‘circular and cyclical’ so often it was absurd. This way of thinking seemed, to me, like a trap. To denote an essential identity for all women, and for all men, was another attempt at power and control via blunt categorisation. And one that left little space for hope, or change.

Now that I’m middle-aged, I know the reality of all human bodies is that they are messy, leaky, unpredictable, mutable and, ultimately, mortal. They do not conform to notions of neat, linear inheritance, or ‘purity’ and control. Our bodies, particularly in reproduction, divide, contaminate and are contaminated, contain multiples. I think our (often unconscious) fear and horror of the procreative body, and of the human body’s power and vulnerability more generally, is a huge part of what drives sexism and misogyny.

My poetry and I have travelled a long way in the last decade or so. Learning to understand and use my physical voice through voice training has been important for me, as have running and yoga – ways of being [in] my powerful body that feel grounding and reassuring. I’ve also, of course, been guided and enlightened by the work of some brilliant, inspiring poets.

I wanted to study, discuss and be guided by the work of contemporary women poets in my Wise Women Poetry Workshop not because I think all women are essentially the same, but because women and nonbinary people tend to live and wrestle with some similar issues, concerns, and histories, particularly around gender and the body. The work we’ll be studying looks at sexism and misogyny; sex and desire; childbirth, miscarriage, and childlessness; prejudice, migration and homemaking; parenting, not parenting, and caregiving; education, enculturation and inheritance… ‘I think of feminism as poetry’ writes Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life; ‘We hear histories in words; we reassemble histories by putting them into words.’ Poetry, I think, can give us permission to speak. Speaking out, through crafting poetry, can be a means of thinking things through – our experiences, imaginings, frustrations, sadnesses, joys, hopes, dreams – and bringing them into the light.

Find out more about Kate’s Wise Women poetry workshop and sign up here. The course will take place in person in Stroud, Gloucestershire. Starts Wednesday 18th September.

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