Phenomenal Open Mic

Part of last month’s International Women's Day event at the Women's Hall in Billingshurst was open mic. The theme for this session, appropriately enough, was ‘inspirational women’ and the session did not disappoint.

One of the very best readings was of Phenomenal Woman. Carol Hayton, our treasurer, read Maya Angelou's, poem which includes these most powerful of lines:

Now you understand
Just why my head's not bowed.
I don't shout or jump about
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my heels,
The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand,
The need of my care,
'Cause I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,is
That's me.

Sara Loewenthal, who runs our social media, also read from Maya Angelou's incredible collection of work, delivering an emotionally charged  performance of, Still I Rise, a poem which remains an anthem for the oppressed and ends with these inspirational words:

Pauline Howley’s heart-shaped pebble

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Other members of the audience read poems they had  previously written, including Pauline Howey, one of our community poets, who read, ' Virginia Woolf's Heart' an astonishing  poem which recalls picking up, ' a heart shaped pebble' while ' walking on the bank where she (Virginia Woolf) drowned'.  

Kathryn Attwood, founding member of the Lights and Bushels theatre company, and who had previously written the play, Mad Shelley,  returned to the Shelleys once more, but this time with a bittersweet poem offering a view of life from Mary Shelley's perspective: Mary Shelley, Italy 1819.

Caroline Berry reads The Greatest Woman

Caroline Berry who was the winner of the Sussex Cup in 2024 (best entry from a Sussex based poet in the Shelley Memorial Project International Poetry Competition) performed The Greatest Woman,  a poem written especially for the occasion. The poem  is a celebration of womanhood and confirmed that all of the women sitting in the room are the greatest of women.

The event  was brought to a perfect conclusion by our hosts Ted Gooda and Liz Barnes who read from their collections.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the Open Mic - it was a fabulous and fitting second half to our IWD event.