Dead [Women] Poets Society are a collective of women and non-binary poets passionate about resurrecting the work of their predecessors through live events and literary seances.
After beginning their UK tour in Sheffield this January, the Coronavirus pandemic forced them to postpone upcoming events until later in the year. However, this delay has not succeeded in putting out their creative fires and I was able to catch up with co-founder Jasmine Simms about what D[W]PS have got coming up in the pipeline, as well as a little look back at how the group started and their journey to where they are today.
I wanted to start off by asking you about what the coronavirus crisis has meant for Dead [Women] Poets Society and how you are dealing with it creatively. I read up about the virtual seance you launched on your website, so I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about that.
We’ve had to postpone some of our upcoming tour events, but we still wanted to be interacting with people during this time so we’ve come up with the idea of a virtual seance. I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s going to be an interactive permanent fixture on our site made up of responses from our followers to a few call-outs. We’ve already put out the first one where people send us audio recordings of themselves reading their favourite poems by dead women and non-binary poets – something we always have as part of our open mics. Our next call-out is going to be something around illustration, and then it will all be launched with a virtual seance event. It’ll be like a version of our usual tour events but hosted online, so hopefully people will be able to tune in.
You mentioned integrating illustration into your Virtual Seance event. Have you always been interested in going beyond poetry in your creative practice, or is that something you’re learning to integrate now?
We’re interested in doing more and more interdisciplinary stuff, and we’ve done quite a lot in terms of responding to dead women poets through music and through song. This idea of interdisciplinary collaboration is big for us; we want people to be discovering the dead women poets through other mediums, not just through reading them.
What we are trying to do is create poetry events that don’t feel like typical poetry events. A huge chunk of our audience is made up of people who have never been to one before, so we try to package them to be more accessible and feel a bit different. We always have a poetry lucky dip when you arrive, and a shrine near the entrance. It’s supposed to feel like a seance with the poets performing resurrections, and a big part of it is finding new ways of responding to the dead woman poet.
How did the group members originally come together, and what made you want to create a Dead [Women] Poets Society?
We’re almost five years old now, amazingly, and when we first set it up as undergraduates at Durham we were all quite angry about the fact that there were just no women on our syllabus, so a big part of it was just about uncovering the female canon.
Sometimes it feels like we are discovering poets from the canon that nobody in the room has really heard of before, and sometimes it can feel more like we’re hearing poets that we thought we knew but looking at them with new perspectives. We’re adding more and more women and nonbinary poets into our collective, either for a commission or as a guest poet at an event, and each time we bring someone in we don’t stipulate anything to them about who they resurrect. Basically as long as they’re women or non-binary and as long as they haven’t been resurrected before, they’re fine. At this point most of the big names like Plath and Sexton, they went quite early on, so people are getting more resourceful. Very often now when we have an event we’ve got people hosting poets I haven’t heard of before.
How do you think things have changed since you started in 2015? And have any social changes influenced the way that you relate to poetry through your events?
One thing that I can say has definitely changed is that when we founded the organisation in 2015 it was the Dead [Women] Poets Society and it was about resurrecting dead women poets, and now it’s about platforming and resurrecting women and non-binary poets. We tried to move with the times and be more expansive and inclusive about how we think about gender, which is something I would like us to do more of. We’ve talked about having gender expansive events dedicated to looking at dead poets who are transgressing the gender binary, and likewise a lot of the poets we work with now are trans and non-binary. So that’s one thing that I can say has been a definite shift, which I think reflected a cultural shift between 2015 and now.
Since starting out as young undergraduates five years ago, have you learnt anything since then about what makes a successful poetry event? So much. We learn from every event, and each one we come away from I think about what worked or what didn’t. The importance of the open mics as a space to hear some unheard voices has been coming up a lot. Initially, not all our events had open mics, but now we would never consider doing an event without one. In terms of promotion as well, we do have a brand that we capitalise on a bit, which is maybe not so common in poetry – it’s kind of a brandless sector sometimes. We’re also really lucky to be Arts Council funded right now and we’ve had the opportunity for some brilliant partners on our tour – The Writing Squad, which I’m on the board for, The Poetry Society and Spread The Word.
Having attended one of your most recent events in Sheffield a few months ago, I wanted to ask why you begin every event with the poem ‘We Shall Not Escape Hell’ by Marina Tsvetaeva?
It’s probably my fault that we do that – she’s one of my favourite poets of all time and one of the main inspirations for the whole project. I just remember discovering Marina Tsvetaeva and thinking ‘wow’. She’s huge in European poetry; she’s like the Russian Sylvia Plath, and I remember thinking how have I done most of an undergraduate degree and not heard of this poet before! She kind of ticks a lot of boxes in terms of common experience, and she had all this trauma but was writing this incredible, beautiful poetry. You get the sense that she had the feeling that she wasn’t writing for the present, that she was writing for the future; that someday someone will read this poem and understand the perspective she was speaking from. A lot of stories about abuse and violence come up in our events, and maybe this is the time that she was talking about; the time has come where people are ready to hear the perspective that she was speaking from and writing from and to understand it.
And we just love the poem ‘We Shall Not Escape Hell’. We think it kind of encapsulates a lot of what we’re about, and there’s a little bit of “fuck it” spirit to the poem too, you know. We wanted to have some kind of ritual that we would perform at the beginning of every event, and that’s the poem that we settled on.
And finally, seeing as you clearly know a lot about female poets of the past, if you were hosting a dream dinner party which dead women poets would you invite?
I think Stevie Smith would actually be hilarious to have at a dinner party – she’s really really witty. And maybe to counterbalance that I would have Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘cos I imagine her to be kind of heavy. And then as a third poet… maybe Mary Oliver. She only passed recently, but I feel like she’s definitely a poet for these times. I found myself re-reading some Mary Oliver this past week, and she gets a lot of stick; I think because there’s the stigma attached to women writers who write about things like relationships and wellbeing and being in tune with each other. The simple stuff of life. But I feel like she would be a nice person to have around.
