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Unread 06-05-2009, 08:18 PM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Plum Island, MA; Santa Fe, NM
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Annie Finch makes many points about the preponderance of male poets being published in anthologies and elsewhere, frequently citing a two-to-one ratio.

I checked the first two pages of threads in TDE and Metrical. 68 poems were posted by men, 14 by women. That's close to a five-to-one ratio, determined only by the intent of the poet. Golly! Could that possibly point to a reason for the disparity? Could more men appear in anthologies, and get published in general, because more men are writing and workshopping poetry? (To provide other experience, my Powow group is about two-to-one male, and the WCU attendance tends to be majority male, although probably more like 55/45 or 60/40.)

Does Ms. Finch provide any analysis along those lnes? Ah, yes - she points out there are more women in the total US population than men. And cites, "the great numbers of women writing and publishing poetry today...", but makes absolutely no attempt to compare that to the number of men. It almost leads one to conclude that Annie Finch has an agenda.