 Welcome, you've joined me, Louise Young, chatting to two poets from Newcastle upon Tyne. One of these is the British Library and Newcastle libraries, along with Poet in the City, have joined forces. What we're doing is we have three poets from Newcastle, two of which are here today. They have been reacting and responding in various numbers of ways to an exhibition in the British Library called Unfinished Business, The Fight for Women's Rights. It's an exhibition about women's protest and all things like that. From Newcastle, there's Degna Stone, Ella Moran and Skye Hogan. Degna, unfortunately, can't be with us today, but we have got Skye Hogan and Ella Moran to explain their processes and what's been going on with it. So, you visited the exhibition in London, how did you find it? First on, how did you find it? Was there any surprises about things that you saw and how you reacted to them? Well, I saw the collection part of what was going to be in the exhibition previously and I read the book of the exhibition, which is brilliant. So, actually going and seeing it was brilliant because there was a lot of audio-visual stuff and tactile things and it just felt so great to be in the presence of all these big fanars and hearing diverse women's voices talking about the three main subjects of the exhibition, which are body, mind and voice. It was really a great experience to see it all. That's brilliant. And you, Skye? So, I haven't seen the final exhibition because when we first got commissioned to do this, it hadn't been formed so we got invited down and they picked bits that were going to be in the exhibition and we, so me, Dagnon, Ellen, had to respond to what we were showing. Okay, that's interesting. So, because you're seeing there was tactile things and it's immersive and stuff like that. In terms of you, to his poets, is this a new thing for you to have to go and do in terms of where you seek inspiration from? Would you usually be going to an exhibition and thinking, right, I need to find something to write poetry about? And it sounds like it's very object heavy, artefacts and things like that of women's protest. Yeah, is this different from your usual process of writing? Yeah, definitely for me. I'm not sure about Ellen, but for me it was. But also because we were told we would have to take whatever we kind of responded to, to the communities and introduce it to them in a way. So it was like, yeah, I've never done that before. It was an interesting process. Sort of, I don't know, I'm not a poet by trade. I feel like perhaps it's a bit of a lone ranger type situation. So this feels more, you have to take your ideas from a different source, from a collective source and then deliver it to another collective of people. Did that at all make either of you feel a bit vulnerable? It would make me feel vulnerable. Yeah, totally, absolutely. I think the community aspect of it was something that I had done before and that I felt comfortable with. But yeah, the responding to the objects and to the material culture of being a woman, that was really unique and new for me. And I felt quite inspired by a lot of the physical objects that I saw. So the banners and there was a piece of poetry written on toilet paper by Sylvia Pankhurst. There was so much, like you said, there was so much great stuff. And it was like, so what do you pick? What the hell do you pick? And I ended up picking the, and I wasn't sure about this, but it was what, you really got to just trust your good feelings and instinct on something and it had to be something that I felt for me to write about something you should always write about something you understand. Yes, yes. In a sense in something that you can share a story with or connect with and write your truth and not try and write somebody else's truth. So that's really quite difficult, especially when it's lots of women's stuff there. So I came across the spare rib magazine. This is just like kind of a cover, but this is like what I did for my poems. I presented my poems like a spare rib magazine. I haven't actually brought a copy of one, but when I looked at the magazines, I was like, oh my God, like why have I never read these magazines before? They came out when I was born in 1972. I'd never been introduced to it. I'd stopped reading mainstream magazines when I was like 21 because I was so sick of how I'd like, I'd feel all right before I read this magazine and by the end of the magazine I felt like rubbish. Do you know what I mean? Why would I read these magazines that make us feel rubbish? So I stopped. Like a bit of my own protest really. I stopped reading these mainstream women's magazines and I'd wished I'd been introduced to the spare rib, which had really interesting stories of women all around the world and protest and issues about women and stuff that was relevant to me, you know? And then I felt a bit of anger, and I thought this is what I need to get and I didn't know what I was going to do with it but I knew that I could relate to it and I could share my story of my own protest of not reading mainstream magazines so that is why I picked it because it was so much great stuff. So much great stuff. It's a brilliant thought. It's definitely something I've thought about before. We're seeing before that it's still prevalent and do you know what, it's still prevalent. It was prevalent when I was a teenager and I think it was like that for the next ten years and even now, the problems with how media shapes women's sense of body image, even it's sort of transcended now, it's just stuck on different social media. It's the same because exactly what you've described there is when I'm scrolling on certain social media and I go this is making me feel terrible about why am I doing it and you have to physically ask yourself why am I doing that? Stop looking at it because every time I'm looking at it it's making us feel terrible about yourself. So it's the same, it's just something. It's on the internet now and it's moving from magazines to, I mean a lot of young people don't read magazines as much as they used to kind of thing but they've got it all on like there's tick tock, there's everything because there's all that social media and it's just everywhere. Everywhere on screens, on billboards, on advertisements. So that was what I chose to look at and take to the community. So I designed workshops around getting women to look at how, and for me it felt like oh am I just doing a cliche but it's actually cos it is like we've just said so relevant it's actually worse now than it was when I was younger but looking at how images and the words used around women in the media impact us and make us feel about our bodies and I started the process off with looking at all the negative stuff that's said to us what's said to you by your family, what does your partner say to you, what are these knockdowns that are said to us and what do we hear all the time and then towards the end of the workshop it was about them, I wanted them to look at what is it our bodies do, like why do we always focus on what we look like, why can't we focus on how amazing our bodies are in the things that they do and that's like one of the poems which are called Our Bodies, Our Rules which was put into the collection. Now I originally had wanted to use, I only got to work with one group of women and I'd originally wanted to get their voices in this poem in each line so I had my voice in and then I'd put theirs in but because I couldn't get the groups to work with that's just the nature of community work it's not always easy to get a whole group and then COVID set in so that like I had some groups set up and then COVID came in so I couldn't work with them but I did work with one group of Slovakian women which was really interesting because they didn't have any issues and when we looked at why that was we kind of came to the conclusion it was because they had been raised under communism where there wasn't these kind of magazines and there wasn't all these advertisements so we related it down to capitalism and how about buying stuff and objectification so that was interesting but anyway one of my main poems was called Our Bodies, Our Rules and that would be a poem that I'll share and would be interested whoever will be watching this I'd like them to think maybe when they hear the poem what line would they contribute about their bodies Our Body, Our Rules These hands have written letters with pens, pressed stamps sealed envelopes with this tongue whilst posted in the mouth of a letter box These hands have typed enough essays to earn a space for my name on a degree certificate These hands have held back people to protect others from attacks held strangers to soften the harshness of government policies held books whilst eyes absorbed words the same reading as knowledge and knowledge as power These hands have struck dogs and cats and horses and pigeons and rats filled hot water bottles changed car tyres and this nose smells flowers These fingers have typed texts to tell a friend to stop giving herself such a hard time dug earth whilst planting seeds and have picked a thousand raspberries These hands have strummed guitars banged on drums glided over piano keys held a face between their palms whilst these lips kissed each eyelid closed These hands have written poems that have healed injured hearts and painted art held back her hair while she was being sick in the toilet carried bags of shopping made meals to feed families These arms have carried protest banners in streets of Newcastle, Manchester, London swung from arms of trees gathered branches to build fires make cups of tea These arms have held onto necks whilst piggybacking home held someone up whilst they were too drunk to get safely home These legs have danced through streets and high heels and still dream of being a ballerina These legs have hiked up hills rested on top of these breathed out sunsets These legs have run to save my life These feet have skipped over stepping stones played hopscotch in dirty back lanes and these lips have smiled at strangers on metros and the tube These legs have walked and walked and walked to people and places and for peace Six miles along Durridge Bay back in the 80s to protest nuclear power these legs have done ridiculous spin classes swung naked in rivers dangled off the edge of piers stepped on and off greyhound buses These legs have wrapped themselves around his back to hold him close to let him know it's him the trust and this womb makes humans These eyes and ears work together shared untold stories This brain shapes data more impressive than any computer This heart pumps blood These tree-like lungs breathe in and out and in and out and this skin that cuts heals in time and still I hear, taste, smell and feel it's what we look like that matters I find that fascinating actually about how the cultural experience was different for the Slovakian women in terms of body image how did you find that? I imagine when you went into this you had a sort of idea of I've got these ideas and I'm going to find out A, B and C but to find something completely different No, totally, that was I was like oh my god that's thrown us so that's what made us explore it more I've actually included the poem in it and what was interesting was it was quite sad really was because they came over here the poem is called so-called choices and it's an acrostic poem so so-called choices are written down and each line begins with that letter because they came over here enticed of the words freedom capitalism and freedom and all that and then what they found is like their kids have been absolutely devastated by and all had body image problems that they never experienced so I had to include that so I did write a little poem that kind of capsulates that That's fascinating The postcard of so-called choices Slovakian women stated we do not care what we look like our lives under communism curved images of women could only wear three items of clothing and we came to England lured in by the prospect of a better life look now at our children enveloped by capitalism dolls, brats with pountain, lips, miniskirts, heels computer games strutten unrealistic body ideals how now it affects our boys' expectations our lives under communism curved images of women in school there were both called fat capitalism creffitied our wall with words of freedom enticed us in with choice Slovakian mother states my girl is only eight starved herself to be thin So Ellen how did you find it I am intrigued with this whole thing of having to bring work into a community sphere and then you sort of regroup with yourself and have to make sure that you're incorporating other people's voices I'm guessing so what you exhibit is reflecting the community that it's couched in Yeah absolutely and I was really lucky to be working in a community that I know well in the east end of Newcastle round Biker and it's a place that I care really deeply about it's where my ancestors are from it's a part of me and so the east end library that opened up there around about the same sort of time in September 2019 was really important to me as well because I knew that that was going to be an important place for the community to go so I was really pleased to be working with the east end Newcastle library and with a group of women who are just down the road called Tyneside Women's Health and the whole experience was just exactly what I dreamed of when I first heard about this and when I first saw the collection the things that I was inspired by in my research business were like Sky said things that related to me and my life so protest is a massive part of my life I've made protest banners for years I've stood outside banks I've stood outside housing authorities I've demanded justice with people in my community and that is something that I truly believe is one of the most important things that I've ever done and will ever be done in my life so those banners spoke to me as a part of something really personal to me in my life and I was really pleased to go to the west end library with Sky and Degner and meet a lady called Penny Remfry who has a collection of local and actually international protest posters from the women's liberation movement we sat with her and she showed us scans of these incredible protest posters and it basically made me go away and make my own I took it to Tyneside Women's Health and started a conversation with them about breaking rules and together we talked about breaking rules about our personal protests about our larger community protests national protests that would have been involved in not just to do with our bodies and being women but our beliefs and as a result of that we made the women themselves made their own posters which I think are really beautiful and some of them are quite dark and quite painful but they're also full of joy as well which is what I think the women's liberation movement is all about That's brilliant and so the posters I'm guessing would have then fed into the poetry that you ended up writing Yeah absolutely there like a kind of a textual example of the conversation in the same way that a poem that I wrote called Enough is that's a spoken word piece which basically I wrote it because I wanted to be really clear about exactly what rules these women told me they were breaking because I found it quite astounding at first how small the actions were like you know I went into that as a practitioner of nonviolent direct action who wants to like change all these massive big things and what I found was a lot of these working class women were talking about how not speaking to their dad was really important or not smiling at a man who was coming onto them in the street quite personal small things not doing the dishes these kinds of things and the religion the cultural aspects of those personal protests really spoke to me so I wrote this spoken word piece to express exactly what those things were and to hopefully show that when you put them all together it's enough to make a difference This poem is called Enough Sometimes it's enough just to break a man's silence to exist listening in his world for so long that just whispering is your defiance Sometimes it's enough to say no to refuse a hug to say no to an unwanted intrusion and ask someone to go Sometimes it's enough to not go to confession to stop speaking your sins and start asking your own questions Sometimes it's enough to join the congregation to worship and be faithful to be graceful, patient and grateful Sometimes it's enough to ask for what you owed stop carrying someone else's load shed your burdens and stay composed Sometimes it's enough to pipe up to interrupt to defy expectations and be abrupt Sometimes it's enough to demand to be heard to command, to assert to speak regardless of hate Sometimes it's enough to discuss splitting up stop committing back off, plaster yourself up Sometimes it's enough not to smile or give your number cross the street to repeat I don't have a boyfriend I'm just not interested in every man I meet Sometimes it's enough just to mention the cleaning stop feeding and sweeping stop believing it's okay sometimes it's enough to fall in love circumvent arrangements others made for you and be your own judge Sometimes it's enough to back up a mate Sometimes it's enough to stay out late Sometimes it's enough to walk away There's all these tiny rules women are breaking every day All these lasses sit and telling each other actually it's okay All this male aggression mountain up and getting in the way All these women getting worried and hiding themselves away it can feel like it's never enough it can start to test your patience it can get relentless it can end up in frustration but when you lie in bed and you think of all the things you did and said know that one day it will be enough for our liberation I love that, I really love that I love how it is tiny little things not smiling back to a creepy man in the street it sounds like very small but if you can't be bothered that day it's a big and you can get like a hostile reaction if people are just doing these tiny tiny things all the time just breaking the sort of small bones of this horrible world that we live in but no that's absolutely wicked yeah I like I was reading more about your sort of what the role that you went down with your poems and stuff I just like the idea that you sort of even to protest in a kind of in a man's world essentially you get hit with patriarchal institutions and systems and things like that like if you could get arrested for protesting and like roughed up and stuff in a way that's unnecessary probably and it's just really struck as it's not just the small things there's other things that people can go through where it's like yeah you get sort of you have to go through a system that is it's built for men yeah absolutely and one of my biggest influences in my life is Sylvia Pankhurst and seeing her poetry written on toilet paper in the exhibition inspired me to write a piece of work on toilet paper which I sent in the post to the producer on the deadline day and that's about a really personal experience about the the things that you face when you go up against power and yes it's the patriarchy it's a heteronormative society it's it's all of those things but at the end of the day it's just power and I wrote a pair of poems that I thought encapsulated how I found my own power in speaking to these big institutions yes I think that what you just said there about how it's not if you really want to boil it down it's power right and people this is just my personal thoughts on this people could turn around and go what's the point of doing poetry what's the point of doing all this you have to sidestep everyone just being obsessed with power and money and the only way you're going to one of the ways you're going to do that is through art and through things like poetry and that's why this is important and that's why it's important to bring to bring things into regional areas where that message might not be vocalised as loud that's sort of my personal what I'm getting from speaking to yous I think but I imagine that you have had quite personal journeys with this with this experience in total yeah God I think this is one of well the collections of poems that I've wrote it's definitely my proudest collection of writing that I've ever done because I read so much as well around like I did a lot of research around reading because I wasn't able to work with a lot of the groups I just read loads and loads of stuff so I kind of really like reminded myself of like oh my God you know like for myself and what and living in kind of patriarchy and how it impacts us it's just like a white noise in the background that you just kind of just get used to so I found it really empowering the collection of poems I work I had an existential crisis doing them because I foolishly read Ellens and Dagnos because they did those before me I'm always late in everything and I read that I was like no I was finding that really inspiring and they were so good I mean honestly blew me away and then I went there oh my how am I going to do it I can't I'm not going to I can't I literally had a breakdown but the process kind of really pushed us to write better my link into it was being I mean it's probably creative in a sense anyway but once I thought of putting it in a magazine and I drew pictures and I did some artwork and I did it and I just got really creative with it but it really pushed us I produced the best work but that was because being part of such a great project really in a sense I know Dagnos not here because they were so great I just thought I've got to be better absolutely I did it and I'm proud of it but yes just it's something that poetry becomes part of you and it is I've made myself from poetry when I found poetry I found my voice a long time ago and this is why it's incredibly important I think to take it to communities where people haven't had access or they don't feel poetry's for them it really is You're completely right there and it's a lesson I don't want this is not about me this talk this is a personal lesson along those lines with the art that I do which is comedy I was getting to the point where I just because it starts off very personal like a journey with words which is the same as comedy as poetry and I was finding that I was getting to the point where I was just doing jokes on stage like what's the point for some reason the last few gigs have been very stag and hen heavy because there's a backlog they've been rowdy gigs and they've been tricky and they've been a certain crowd so they've been like that and I've had messages and I've felt out of place even on the stage and like oh I'm very funny but it's messages from people after from women or gay people or whatever saying oh it was really nice to have some representation people want to be people want to know that they've also got the floor to have a voice and that's what this sounds like to get straight into because the British Library doesn't sound like a place where someone who's in Biker is going to go to see an exhibition at the British Library there needs to be things like this that make people realise that all of this is for them as well so should be it's ridiculous that we live in a world where that's not just common knowledge so this is important and because of Covid and we're not being able to have that kind of grand finale thing what I would have had and I don't know if it can happen next year it'd be great if it can but I want to share about our body I would have had me there performing it alongside the women if they wanted to to stand with me and share their lines in the process and it would have been a chorus of us it would have been really really powerful and that would have been exceptional to get to the next level of writers get on the stage you know what that's like pretty scary it's traumatised that I've never been to you since yeah that's awesome and personal I'm sure doing stuff about protest would have led you on some personal realisations and things like that as well yeah I think it kind of it helped me to put a lot of the things that I've done in a context like the small things and the big things and and to reflect on like the history of protest here especially in Newcastle as well and I did a lot of reading about that and I think trying to fit my own personal experiences into that history was really helpful so it was like thinking about suffragettes thinking about the suffrage movement and representation in parliament for women the North East was just like amazing leading the way we had some incredible women here and I think it's part of our identity as Geordi women to be a little bit rage and to get the job done and to make demands to people in power and I know that Sky's one of them it's just totally who we are isn't it part of our voice really we can be quite abrasive we can be quite abrupt but I do think that that's what you need when you're trying to change things so I wrote a poem which kind of reflected that personal history in my family but also in the North East starting with Ellen Wilkinson led the Jarrow March led the charge amazing well and you know all about it but basically she led a bunch of men down Westminster on a pretty long march actually it's not it's a canny way to walk no gorn sorry I'm getting excited cos you're talking about Ellen Wilkinson another red Ellen like me yes two red Ellens and she went down there and led those men and it was out her words and her passion that inspired them to go on this march and facilitated that organised that to get what they want to get better working conditions to be acknowledged by Parliament the levels of child poverty in Jarrow at that time were unfathomable I wish I could say that that was a thing of the past but unfortunately it's not the North East has some of the highest levels of child poverty in Europe by no means over what they were fighting for back then we're still fighting for similar things now and it's women like us that are going to lead the way cos people are going to listen to us cos we've got a way with words so that poem starts with her and it kind of travels through my personal family history and my relationship to women and the metaphor of the poem was inspired by the women of Tyneside Women's Health who made a suffragette model out of their leftover fabric scraps and what they'd done is they'd cut the fabric around their hands and layered them on the dress to make a dress of fabric hands so that's where the name of that piece comes from lovely Ellen Wilkinson must have had fabric hands thread fingertips and pincushion palms and wrists releasing silk banners scrolled with demands with each word she wove Workman's mines embroidered closed down shipyards blanketed the workhouse without walls wrapped the malnourished in patchworked cotton women and war kept the yards open shipbuilders uniforms split frayed edges of thick melt and wools screeched when caught on scraps of steel so it was lucky that my grandma too had fabric hands felted tough fabrics to withstand North Sea spray repaired donkey jackets with nimble loops used pianists fingers to knit hats and scarves peeled patterns from magazines to adorn children in 1960s lace trims when I fell and broke my skin my mother buttoned me back up her hand cream softness silked over exposed tissue caressed my baby cheeks as I reached for the cared for cuticles of her fabric hands my tiny digits grasped at hers she unthimbled me showed me the supple potential of loose strands fingers like cords clutching spoons and pens fluttered at home and work decorating and designing templates to help my hands become more elastic she handed me a thread that I followed down to the river I found women there holdin' my hands mending broken bones and brains with pinpoint accuracy meshin' together stories and problems by fusing scraps of linen in a bigger and bigger pieces binding with zigzag lines their love and anger knotting chunks of nylon fear and mohair hope to entwine tightly a net of women a net of women a net of women a net of women a net of women's work I'll plat myself inside it anchor myself in with a piece of string let my ribboned hair merge with the wind and when I walk I'll be pulled by crocheted waves made by women before me I'll fold into them because I wear a dress made of fabric hands so we're currently sat in Newcastle City Library in quite a nice sort of vestibule of it really the seagull circle and quite aggressive so have you done much work in the library and from the library as part of this project? Yeah well in the before times March 2020 International Women's Day we had a big event here where we're invited women from across the region keynote speakers and just anyone who wanted to come along really to sit and talk about the issues that were being raised and we had some incredible talks there and the library facilitated that space to kind of bring people together to talk about the history of feminism on Tyneside specifically and a lot of it was about the women's liberation movement in and around Newcastle in the 1970s and then famous figures from the area but we talked a lot about more of our personal responses to the items in the collection as well Actually yeah in one of my poems which is probably my favourite poem out of the whole collection stemmed from that because I wasn't working with as many groups I was like whatever I was hearing little lines I was desperately gathering to get a prompt for a poem and there was something that was said because I'll share the poem so I won't give the line away now but there was something that was said that a police officer had stated at one point to a woman and it was really quite shocking but what I did was I incorporated it from the poems called internalised gossip and I lived on a council estate and raised my son on this council estate and had like the biggest gossip of the estate living in across the road from us not into poetry years and years ago because I wrote a poem about her and so I've kind of brought her into it but it's also like the sadness and sometimes why people do gossip if there's nothing much else going on in our life it's that element of but also yeah so it's just yeah internalised gossip she was always shouting over the garden fence claiming words for facts she'd picked up like disregarded sweety wrappers in the streets newspapers, magazines social media but even she was shocked when she heard a policeman's state if you're flirting drunk or dressed outrageously do not complain if you're raped once when I had a cup of tea with her she shared with me how inside she felt like a deserted house a heart, a smashed window her head a set of tattered curtains blown through the broken glass how the word she'd found had helped fill the cracks how now if she could should burn all the dirty linen should cast So what's next for the project I know that there was meant to be a grand finale that happened obviously we could see the poetry but that got postponed with Covid and it's been it's postponed and so what's happening with that Ellen is the So will word you have a grand finale event here in Newcastle in I think June or July 2020 but obviously that didn't happen we're now looking at relaunching in September this year Exeter libraries are joining us as well so there's three poets have been commissioned from Exeter and they're working with libraries down there to respond to the exhibition as well and then Newcastle and Exeter will have a grand finale event in March 2022 where we'll have a really creatively produced event to bring our poetry back to the communities where we worked and beyond so people can look out for that then awesome So the exhibition was called Unfinished Business The fight for women's rights and I suppose Unfinished Business what does that mean to you Well it means it's still going after all these years and there's so much more for us to do and it's imperative that we'll keep working writing about these issues and fighting against them obviously my work is all about protest and I want to continue writing about this topic because it's really topical more than ever we've had a lot of the kill the bill protests recently in Newcastle in every major city in the UK and I see that as being something that could be really inspiring to write about but I want to capture that moment and I want to make sure that we've got the ability to keep fighting for our rights and sometimes that might need to be on the streets and sometimes it might be a little bit noisy and how about you Sky Well God yeah just what Ellen said really I mean I need to be this has radicalised me and I want to get out protesting more and hopefully we can but I've always come from an element of the personals political and sharing stories of women's lives and that's what I do and I write a lot about women's lives in my own life and I will continue to do so Thanks for joining and thank you as well to Newcastle Library for letting us sit here thank you to the British Library and thank you to the ports as well who've been involved in this project If you look out on social media for her story events there's the grand finale event happening in Newcastle around March of 2022 and remember as well you can see the unfinished business exhibitions in libraries around the UK Thank you very much for watching and keep an eye out