Once asked what initially drew her to country music, Taylor Swift replied: “I was infatuated with the sound, with the storytelling”. Even if the acoustic guitars and pedal steel are long gone in her latest album 1989, Swift’s ability to weave a compelling narrative remains the last vestige of her country roots.

This is the main reason why country music fascinates me: look past the Southern small-town clichés, and country songs are, at heart, all about real life experiences. Often what makes the lyrics so powerful are their autobiographical undertones – Miranda Lambert’s despairing plea “Dear Sobriety/Please come back to me” becomes more vivid in the light of her publicised drinking problems. Gretchen Peters’ latest album, Blackbirds, is a heart-breaking muse on death as the celebrated singer-songwriter approaches her 60s. Even mundanities can have autobiographical purpose, as Angaleena Presley captures the oft-dashed but still fragile hope of the queue in the grocery store – the “aisles of the American dream” – from her own observations as a Walmart cashier.

These female songwriters tell the stories of ordinary girls and women. The kind of girls in the Pistol Annies’ paean to womanhood: “Girls like us/We don’t mess around/We don’t tie you up/Just to let you down/Don’t girls like us make the world go round and round?” This same band, who until their “indefinite break” featured the astonishingly talented line-up of Lambert, Presley and Ashley Monroe, also confronted the bitter reality of a wife stuck in a loveless marriage in their song ‘Unhappily Married’. The lines “We’ll both play our part in this disaster/I’ll be the bitch and you’ll be the bastard” perfectly convey an atmosphere of resigned acrimony. Another talent to watch is Brandy Clark, who, on her debut album 12 Stories, records the struggles of domestic life, from infidelity (‘What’ll Keep Me Out of Heaven’), prescription drug addiction (‘Take a Little Pill’) and alcoholic husbands (‘Hungover’).

The women that emerge from these accounts are far from the passive objects of so many recent “bro-country” songs. (Bro country: a phrase coined by music journalist Jody Rosen to describe the hit single ‘Cruise’ by Florida-Georgia Line. Stereotypically, the songs feature country boys driving big trucks with obliging females in tow. See also Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean and Sam Hunt.) Recently, female duo Maddie & Tae ridiculed these stereotypes in their hit single ‘Girl in a Country Song’. But their light-hearted satire hides a more insidious reality.

The broadcaster Keith Hill provoked outrage this year when he told a country magazine that country radio needed to “take women out”. He continued “they’re just not the lettuce in our salad. The lettuce is Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and artists like that. The tomatoes of our salad are the females.”

Female singers have long spoken out about gender discrimination on the country music airwaves, which is evident from any cursory glance at the Billboard charts. A track by a solo female or written by female songwriters was on top of the Billboard chart for only 17 weeks this year. This is all despite the fact that the talent of female singers and songwriters is at an incredible high: eminent artist, producer and Nashville grandee Vince Gill has praised female singer-songwriters for “making much more… interesting records… saying more things I’d prefer to hear, lyrically and song-wise”. 

Right through country music history, female artists have written songs about ordinary life – witness Dolly Parton’s classic ‘9 to 5’ or Loretta Lynn’s ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’. Perhaps it’s now time for female artists to take country back to its roots. 

The Oxford University Poetry Society has a long history of hosting open mics: dynamic spaces where both written- and spoken-word artists can share their work and, often, their lives. This term, in an attempt to broaden our thematic and aesthetic bounds, we held both our open mics as collaborative efforts, seeing these sessions not only as fundamentally co-operative but also co-creative.

Our first open mic was co-hosted with the Experimental Theatre Club and the production team of DART, a dramatization of Alice Oswald’s poem which ran at the Burton Taylor Studio in mid-November. 18 poets and a sizeable audience of friends, colleagues, and passers-by filled the ground floor of Jericho Coffee Traders, swapping its regular brew of coffee and conversation for the headier air of wine and verse.

The second, held on Advent Sunday in Turl Street Kitchen, was hosted by the Oxford Book Club, and jointly run by the Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group and Oxford Student PEN in support of Flight, an upcoming anthology responding to the refugee crisis, will be released in Hilary, and features writing from Oxford alongside translations of Arabic poetry, led by Yousif Qasmiyeh. Both open mics saw a truly impressive display of linguistic skills and styles, from the well-loved to the experimental. At the same time, both saw a range of true and vulnerable voices that filled their venues at once with the restless, almost implacable sense of the real.

I found myself remembering the first Michaelmas in Oxford when, numbed by cold and lengthening nights, I discovered that I was unable to write. I was acutely conscious of my voice: how my flat, Singaporean consonants sat uneasily alongside the Scots, Scouse, and Somerset of my first friends in College. Though we spoke the same language, I always felt less readily comprehensible, an accent from elsewhere. I began describing things twice, slowly, in other words; became used to explaining how English, a colonial tongue, had come to be Singapore’s first language. But writing, which requires bending and breathing into a language as if it is one’s own, continued to elude me.

It was through the Society’s open mics that I found my voice again. The community I found at these events was accepting, quirky, and friendly, disarmingly so. We talked about our music, politics, new tutors. And when the time came for us to share our poems (I read, fitfully, a piece I had written before leaving for Oxford, half-expecting blank stares at all my Singaporean references), there was nothing but the most genuine laughter and applause.

I like to think of the open mic – the improvised soapbox, the unfilled spotlight – as a place of warmth, community, and respect: a truly open space. Opening the stage, after all, is a gesture of welcome that says your voice belongs here, you belong here. In this embrace, the audience plays an equal role to each reader. Let us gather around the fire of your words.

Writing now in the afterglow of the term, several voices from our open mics remain particularly vivid. From the DART open mic, Rosalind Peters’ tender evocation of the Welsh landscape came alive in the mind’s eye despite my upbringing on a densely-built island, hemmed by two oceans. Jemma Silvert delivered an electrifying love-poem that was as powerful in its imagery as it was in delivery, while first-time reader Stephen Durkan’s brutally funny piece on the conundrums of modern life swiftly established him to be a natural.

The Flight open mic kicked off with a set by Oxford-based poet Dan Holloway which included ‘Dead Poets’ Society’, his searing attack on the ‘classics’ and set-texts of the English canon. The mood quickly shifted as poets began to focus more closely on experiences of migration, with Miriam Gordis’ haunting meditation on “a list of things that fly”, in particular: “the sky is full of thousands of birds / caged ones can still feel the tremor in their wings”. Nikolaos Erinakis’ piece brimmed with the undercurrent of his native Athens, while April Elisabeth Pierce’s evaluation of ‘whiteness’ provided a fitting, hard-hitting conclusion.

This year, the Poetry Society turns 70. It is a difficult time for poetry in this country: a shrinking market and funding cuts have meant that even well-structured organizations like the Poetry Trust are facing indefinite closure. Such setbacks mean fewer opportunities for poets and their audiences to hold each other close, fewer occasions for honesty and welcome. As far as we can, our Society – established in 1946 amidst post-war uncertainty – will endeavour to promote poetry as a way to find, and reimagine, community. We ask only for you to join us: to listen to, and participate in, something that’s older than Oxford, on a stage we all share.

Theophilus Kwek reads History and Politics at Merton College, and is President of the Oxford University Poetry Society. Submissions for ‘Flight’, an anthology responding to Europe’s refugee crisis, are currently open. Please send no more than 3 poems, of no more than 40 lines each, to [email protected] with ‘Flight’ in the subject line.