Look, in fairness to Jane (I can't speak to Eva's arguments in a text I have not read), what she has said about her experience with Horizon actually dovetails with what Dave sees with Lucid Rhythms, what I see with The Raintown Review (where I see the full slush pile and Anna sees a cull of it), and Anna Evans's experience with The Barefoot Muse. In other words, I don't think the main point is so much an accusation of active sexism in the selection of pieces, but rather an attempt to inquire into why the discrepancy exists.
This was, however, interpreted as an agenda quite quickly here, and I can see why Eva and Jane got riled up. There were (not universally, but in spots) assumptions being made about what they were saying that were simply not true. Neither of them (to my recollection) so much as intimated that the particular editors who weighed in were sexists--and indeed, Jane concurred with my general impression (albeit based on limited data) that the discrepancy is on the submissions rather than acceptances side. So, what's the argument about?
Well, it could be about whether or not this is, in fact, a problem. After all, an individual woman who sticks with it (again, going by very limited statistics from a few magazines) seems to have at least the same shot of acceptance as a man does.
But if fewer women are submitting, that can mean one of two things:
1. Women are, in aggregate, less "artistic" than men. Such a position, I hope, is clearly beneath contempt.
2. Women, in aggregate, face a greater number of pressures than men when it comes to artistic production, and, for that reason, tend to be less likely to write poems, or, having written them, submit assiduously. Of course, to accept this, we have to allow that gender inequality is a real thing, which seems quite evident to me.
My question, as a male associate editor at a journal helmed by a woman that tends to publish more men than women, is to what degree this can be redressed within the poetry community. It's doubtful that grant money will increase greatly in the next few years, and arts funding in the United States is a joke, anyway. Besides, we (the vast majority of active poets) have no control over what resources go where, anyway. And getting to the point where such questions even become relevant in an individual's artistic life require years of toil for very little public recognition or monetary reward.
The drop-off of women in poetry probably happens earlier--and, I suspect, is not necessarily or even mostly poetry-specific, but revolves around far more general gender patterns. And I wonder if we're seeking an editorial solution to a political problem.
Quincy
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