Every day up until our What Is Feminist Poetry? event we are collaborating on with Threads Equality Agency, we will be sharing a poem which exemplifies feminist poetry in one way or another – to celebrate these voices and start exploring the ideas and experiences they raise. Who writes feminist poetry? What is it about, and what kind of language does it use?
And remember – our event will include an open mic segment so please do bring along (or comment below!) any poetry you’ve written which you think explores or illustrates your experience of your gender, or poetry by anyone else (living, dead, celebrated, anonymous or otherwise) which you think deserves to be shared, discussed, or heard.
It may seem odd to think of something as simple and wholesome as friendship as radical, but Katherine Philips’s poem ‘To My Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship’ was fairly unusual at the time. The 17th century saw an era of much writing that celebrated friendship, but that friendship was often assumed to be exclusively the province of men. But here, laid out in language that balances between assurance, passion and tenderness, Philips argues that women are intellectual and emotional beings of equal or greater sensitivity who can form strong and powerful bonds of friendship too.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50445/to-my-excellent-lucasia-on-our-friendship
