An Inspirational Women's Voice

As we were thinking about how we could continue from our last blog about the success of the Inspirational Women's Voices event that was part of the International Women's Day programme 2010 at Exeter Phoenix, we contacted another of the performers who featured in the line up of inspirational female artists from the South West region. Liv Torc is a very successful, award winning stand-up poet and the new bard of Exeter!

On the night of Inspirational Women's Voices, Liv performed a selection of her poems that were both hilarious and poignant, with themes of her experience and discoveries of womanhood. We contacted Liv asking her about what the International Women's Day event meant to her as a female performer on reflection. She told us that for her, the event was a brilliant example of female artists doing exciting and diverse work that reaches and entertains both men and women.

Somewhat amazingly, she has generously offered us one of her own poems as a very special treat for the blog!

So with great pleasure I share with you this;

Tits and Artist by Liv Torc

As a woman artist once bombarded with menstruating muses
And silent monologues about masculine abusers
I ran screaming in the face of feminist art
The kind that pulls the male and female genitals apart.

Equal to me meant I did not have to continuously point out
What being a woman was all about.
Screw the sugar coated puppy dog tails

I wanted to reach for the guts and nails of alpha males
Write poetry not about the fall or rise of femininity

But the joyful twists of human inanity

Live a reality close to the brink of blissful insanity

Stand on a stage with a comical war to wage

Fight from the page the suppressive depressive rage

That comes when men and women judge themselves too much

I wanted to talk about life and love and touch and touch.

As I got older I realised I must be a feminist after all

Because every time I pick up a mic

And stand alone upon a floodlit floor

I am responding to some bright but distant inner call

That says woman don’t have to be silent anymore.