Seven ordinary English words are hiding the same secret. You are going to find it, and then you are going to make something out of it.
One
Before you open any of them, say out loud what you think these seven words have in common. Then tap them one by one.
One more, for free. A spinster was once simply a woman who spins. Nobody ever needed a word for a man who spins.
Two
Each group is given a first line. Nobody in this room wrote it, and for now you are not going to know where it comes from. It is the thread you pull.
How to weave. The first person reads the zero line and writes their own line underneath it. Then they fold the paper so that only the line they have just written is visible, and pass it to the person on their right. Everyone writes seeing one single line: the one immediately before theirs. Nobody ever sees the whole poem. Go round twice.
Nobody signs a line. When the poem is finished there must be no clue left as to who wrote what.
Write in English. Your line can be any length and it does not have to rhyme. If you get stuck, do not look for an idea — name something you can see, hear or touch.
Group number
Three
Open the fold and read the whole poem out loud for the first time, exactly as it is. Do not correct anything. Then copy it here, one line per row.
If your group wants to read it to the rest of the class, tell your teacher: the button below puts the poem on screen with the zero line marked in red above your own.
Four
You have just written something together that nobody can now claim line by line. You know what that feels like. Now look at whose thread you were given.
341 years
The post of Poet Laureate — the official poet of the United Kingdom — was created in 1668. For three hundred and forty-one years it went to men, and only to men.
The first woman appointed was Carol Ann Duffy, in 2009. Women did not start writing in 2009. They started counting in 2009.
The obstacles change shape from one century to the next, but they repeat with a suspicious regularity. Books signed with men's names so that they would be read at all. Editors who tidied a woman's punctuation until it sounded like everyone else's. Lists, anthologies and syllabuses that simply left her out, or took her out after a complaint. And when none of that worked, because the writing was too good to ignore, there was always the last resort: remember her for something else. As a sister. As a recluse. As a memoirist. As an Instagram account.
It is not that they did not write. It is that their names came loose from the cloth while the lines stayed in it. Your poem has just repeated that operation, in miniature, in twelve minutes.
And to finish
Judge tenderly — of Me
Emily Dickinson, last line of This is my letter to the World, written around 1862 and printed four years after her death.
Dickinson wrote that line at the end of a letter to a world that had never written to her. She did not ask permission to write it and she was not given any. She wrote it anyway, and it reached you a hundred and sixty years later.
The five women whose lines you have held today wrote under other people's names, under editors' pencils, under complaints, under labels. Not one of them waited to be told she was allowed.
That is what the Día de las Escritoras is for: to tie the names back onto the lines. Give your poet hers. And keep what you found out today — that you can write a line, that twelve minutes are enough to make something that did not exist before, and that nobody needs permission to start.