Hear! Hear! Please add my request to Clive's. There's only one way to change it.

Perhaps some of this is explained by the fact that it's a Full Moon.

Hear double hear - Jane and Eva, it's great to have you at Erato - and (let it be whispered) there's more to this site than polemical pingpong at GT. Your contributions will be very much valued on the poetry boards. I really hope to see you there,

All the best
Adam

Gee whiz aw shucks, thanks guys. (Peter, apologies. The joke got drowned out by a lot of other noise.)

But feminism ... gender equality ... these concepts would appear to be a serious threat, judging by the efforts made here to discredit them.

Being a long-time equity feminist, who helped raise a daughter to believe that she could accomplish anything she turned her talents to (which she has done and is doing), I am as interested as anyone here in understanding the reason why women poets have less representation in contemporary anthologies.

My daughter shows all the signs of becoming a fine writer (including poetry) and I would be fiercely against any social force which sought to restrain her and/or women like her.

And the reason for this discrepancy must be discoverable, surely.

The one thing I have trouble with is the hypothesis that there is any sort of conspiracy among male editors (and perhaps male poets) to keep women's work down or out of anthologies.

The editor-class (I am sure Clive would agree) tend to be the same class as full-time writers and professors - that is, the university educated intellectual class.

Now, as we know from recent reports, there is no current suppression of women in our universities, in terms of access and assessment, at least.

So why should there be such a problem with editors (or poets) when it comes to selection for anthologies? The same mind-set of accepted gender-equality is current across all members of this class, as far as I can see.

Also, given the reality (I believe) that editors are lovers of fine work, why should they be depriving their readers by rejecting valuable material merely because it was written by a woman? I really do have trouble with that one.

Can anyone explain how they could see this (editorial misogyny) being a real factor in this issue?

I don't recall anyone saying anything about a conspiracy or did I miss something? It's the status quo and these are hard to change as those in it defend their territory. And yes guys do tend to hang out with guys, and the social aspect has a bearing on the professional one. My unwilling participation in the sexual politics in editing a women's anthology is part of the infuriating part, since it is the challengers to it who are deemed to have a political agenda, whereas the status quo has one too, implicitly. I don't have time or space here to condense what I wrote in a 20 page essay, but it addresses so many of things being said here....

In doing this anthology and addressing the clear gender imbalance in "men's" anthologies (in all but name, a lot of the time) the aim is not to create a separate space but to call attention to the bias in so-called mixed anthologies. Furthermore and infuriatingly, space given to women's work somehow assumes that gender is her only subject, for example in the critical book I think I mentioned in which the (male) editors scrupulously had a section devoted to women writers, but whereas the male section included poems on politics and all kinds of subjects, the women's poems were all about.... being a woman. I mean, I don't write on women's subjects. Come to that, I have many other causes than this one I'd love to spend my time on but this does seem an important issue. Part of the problem is that it isn't seen as equally important to men which does lead one to think that some feel threatened, as was said here elsewhere.

Earlier written in haste and shows it. It goes without saying that most here ARE concerned with the issue but even here....

But in what way, Eva, does the mind-set behind a desire to maintain "the status quo" differ from a "conspiracy"? A sort of tacit or unconscious conspiracy, at least?

We have heard from a few male editors here (such as David and Paul) who swear that gender considerations never sway their choices. I believe them.

My difficulty comes with the proposition that some editors do let gender sway their considerations. I could only say that such editors would be complete frauds, masquerading as lovers of poetry when they are really tacit agents of the "status quo" of poetic male supremacy.

I know if I were an editor, poetic capacity ALONE would dictate my selections.

How about the possibility of making it an industry standard that ALL poetry submissions are blind? That every submission must anonymous?

I know it is probably impractical, but surely that alone could settle the matter once and for all - that only the BEST material gets selected.

I am talking about societal conditioning, which includes a lot of assumptions about what constitutes quality, aside from the what actually does. Blind submissions are a good idea, but not practicable. Firstly, poets recognise other poets' work. Secondly, a lot of major journals solicit work from poets or works is passed by friends or friends of friends: their students, someone deemed new talent. I've been on editing side of this.

(And by the way had a horrendous experience at teh hands of my co-editors, all men. I innocently had no idea I was the token woman when I was hanging around in pubs with them. Or rather was honorary male. On that subject too, I write exensively in my essay, but it's been said too and better by other writers such as Adrienne Rich.)

So, conspiracy? I'm not sure what we mean by this. And yes a lot of men STILL feel threatened by smart women, even those who profess to love them. What I've learned is that many men talk the talk but they don't walk the walk.

Who are these "many men"? I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but...many men are noble, many men are kind, many men are virtuous, many men are perfect husbands... Many women are wretched, many women are manipulative, many women are mean, many women make bad wives. But who are these "many women?"

It's time to start naming names. Start singling out these egregious editors. Let the writing be on the wall! These many men deserve to be harangued in public, if all of what is being said about them is true.

The overall fairness of the submissions process is certainly open to question, what with friends soliciting friends and editors receiving reviews of their own work from contributors or editors publishing judges of contests that editors also enter, etc. I'd guess that ambition and mutuality are probably the biggest corrupting influences among those editors (I hope not many) who allow themselves to be swayed by extraneous factors, and that these factors easily trump gender.

No, I'd look elsewhere for an explanation of the gender gap than to the prejudice of editors, or even to the taste of male poetry readers, most of whom, in my experience, count several female poets among their favorites. I'm not smart enough to know where to look, but there are many steps in the chain before anyone decides to write, decides what to write, decides to submit, decides where to submit, decides to edit, decides what kind of journal to edit, etc.