In part one I mentioned that the seed of inspiration for these blog posts was the quickly approaching tenth anniversary of my first poetry performance. Since then, I have read at open mics, poetry slams, and exhibitions, but my love for performing poetry began at Shrewsbury Museum in 2012. This post is going to look at the different types of poetry performance, while also paying tribute to some of my favourite memories and people.
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Editing and I were not friends when I started writing poetry. I wrote the poems and posted them to my blog without much concern for going back to quibble over word choice or line breaks. I was writing poems like the ones I had read, which at that time, was not very many. My exposure was limited to the GSCE English Literature anthology, and a few ‘poem for every occasion’ collections. I was an avid reader when it came to fiction, and later non-fiction, but I didn’t start picking up collections of poetry until I graduated from university.
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2022 marks ten years since I first read my own poetry in front of a live audience. I was lucky enough to be invited to respond to the displays at the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery in Shropshire. My poem ‘The Boats’ was perhaps one of the shortest pieces on the launch night, and I was also horribly late due to a misread signpost, but it was a fantastic experience and one that pushed me towards open mics. I will not sure share the bio that I wrote for the Shrewsbury Museum, as quite honestly, I reread it and cringed. I was far more confident as an eighteen-year-old than I am at twenty-eight, which raises the question of what else may have changed about me and my poetry since then. What have I managed to learn over ten years of writing, performing, and publishing? More importantly, would it make a good series for my blog? Somewhat wonderfully, I have poetry on display in a museum again this year, this time in Nantwich, Cheshire. It seems like a very good point to pause, and take stock.
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Good morning lovely readers. It’s been a while since I wrote a chatty post, hasn’t it? Months, in fact, so with the year coming to an end, I thought I should crack out the virtual ink and let you all know what I’ve been up to. At first glance, I wasn’t sure I’d managed to do that much, but then I delved a bit deeper and it turns out that 2021 was really quite good.
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Today’s history blog is about the fantastic Mrs Macaulay, Britain’s First Female Historian, and an advocate of Women’s rights and education.
Born Catherine Sawbridge on the 23rd March 1731, she gained an informal education in her father’s library alongside her brother at their family home in Kent. She moved to London in 1760, upon her marriage to Dr George Macaulay and three years later published the first of her extensive eight volume History of England that spanned from the succession of James I to the Revolution. Part way through the third volume of her history, her husband passed away, leaving her widowed with a single daughter (Catherine Sophia) from the marriage. She remained in London for a while, before moving to Bath in 1774 where she met her second husband William Graham. The marriage caused scandal. As the brother of her physician, son of a saddle maker, and only a mere Surgeon’s Mate1, William was considered beneath Mrs Macaulay. They remained together until her death on the 22nd June 1791 at the age of sixty at their home in Binfield on the Thames, near Windsor. In her memory, William dedicated a memorial to her in the local parish church nearby.
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Carol J Forrester 
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