[Carol Trese]

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...rum/#more-3250

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[Mark Allinson]

Sorry, girls, but I just don't buy this stuff about suppression of female poets.

I don't doubt the publication figures, but there are other interpretations available other than sexist suppression.

Quality is quality is quality, and I don't care what the gender of the writer is.

And I don't believe that the majority of editors think any differently.

If something truly fine comes along, I do not believe that editors ask - "is this poet a woman?" before approving of it.

When I see stuff by Dickinson, or Sylvia Plath or Gwen Harwood, I can SEE and HEAR immediately that it is excellent. And I know that the majority of currently practising male poets cannot hope to match that quality.

I really don't believe that really fine poetry is being overlooked on the basis of the gender of its author.

But I also realise that some folks will NEVER believe this.

Get real, girls - get good or get out of the game.

[Richard Epstein]

When I see forums devoted to poems by and about women or by and about people of color or by and about gay poets, my reaction is always pretty much the same: How would you feel if you encountered a forum called Poems by Men, White Poets, or Heterosexual Poets? If your answer is, I'd be offended (or outraged), I think you got some 'splainin' to do. It's wrong, or perhaps merely silly, to pigeonhole poets by gender, color, sexual preference, height, weight, or facial hair; and this doesn't change just because you take the side of the minority presence (even if that is what women are, a somewhat dubious proposition). Some one of the places I read posts a link to Women Formalist Poets, and I never notice that w/o wondering how much indignation would be ginned up over a site called Male Formalist Poets and why such a site would be either better or worse.

RHE

[Mark Allinson]

And it's not as if I don't know what it's like playing for the other team.

As Richard E. can tell you (hi from Zoe, Richard!) , I posted under a female identity on a po-board for nearly a year, just to get a sense of the sociology of gender in the po-world. I realise that most people think that this is a terrible thing to have done, but I found it interesting. I must say that I discovered no entrenched online gender discrimination.

Actually, I do believe that you need a certain degree of androgyny (psychologically, at least) to make poetry.

[Michael Cantor]

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.

[Mark Allinson]

I checked the first two pages of threads in TDE and Metrical. 68 poems were posted by men, 14 by women.

Well, the issue regarding these figures, Michael, will become: Why are women feeling discouraged from posting on TDE?

All you have done is to provide more evidence of the gender war in po-land.