"Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse ed. Kenneth Allott – 5 women/90 men; New Penguin Book of English Verse ed. Paul Keegan – 16 women/81 men; British Poetry Since 1945 ed. Edward Lucie-Smith - 7 women/90 men; Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse ed. D.J. Enright – 3 women/37 men; 101 Sonnets ed. Don Paterson – 13 women/87 men (this book seemingly culled from Phillis Levin’s superb Penguin Book of the Sonnet ); The New Poetry ed. Al Alvarez – 2 women/26 men; Poetry 1900-1965 ed. George Macbeth – 2 women/21 men; New York Poets ed. Mark Ford – no women; New York Poets II eds. Mark Ford & Trevor Winkfield – 2 women/9 men; The Forward Anthology of Poetry for the years 1993-2006 consistently features many more men than women; critical books are similarly lop-sided. Ad nauseum. I could bore us all to kingdom come.
The anthologies The Firebox ed. Sean O’Brien (34 women/91 men), Emergency Kit eds. Jo Shapcott & Matthew Sweeney (41 women/116 men) and The Anthology of 20th c. British and Irish Poetry ed. Keith Tuma (31 women/87 men), with the fairer acknowledgements these figures imply, nevertheless hit the proverbial glass ceiling, with women poets comprising roughly 1/3 of the total, occasionally a smidgeon more; turning hopefully to Andrew Duncan’s Poetry Review article on this last volume, we find that his 30 regretted omissions - poets from the 1950’s-1990’s - include not a single woman. The anthologies Last Words eds. Don Paterson & Jo Shapcott (33 women/55 men) and The New Poetry eds. David Kennedy, David Morley & Michael Hulse (17 women/38 men) all have a “healthier” balance; Bloodaxe, the publisher of this latter, boasts a consistently better record when it comes to publishing women. Carol Ann Duffy’s Hand in Hand and Adrienne Rich’s The Best American Poetry 1996 are the only two anthologies I could find comprised of more women than men. Here, it’s worth quoting extensively from Germaine Greer vis a vis the so-called “arbitrary” nature of coincidences:
'It is not easy to imagine a male poet objecting to appearing in an anthology of men's poems, as most anthologies have been, though the fact is not highlighted in their titles. The Amis Anthology, to cite the most doggedly laddish, does not separate work by gender, but women would have been better served if it had; out of 242 poems, eight are by women. One, by Elizabeth Jennings, is included because Amis published it when he was at Oxford in 1949; another, by Felicia Hemans, because his class translated it into Latin hexameters when he was at school; one by Christina Rossetti is accompanied by a sneer, and another by the unknown Teresa Dooley is used to caricature all poetesses. Laura Riding was doubtless happy to be one of the select company of nine women poets represented in The Rattle-Bag, compiled by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes in 1982.'"
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