The argument about quality can never be won, because who in the end is the final arbiter of good taste? If women are discriminated against in other areas of life (one topical example in the UK is the low rate of convictions for rape), it stands to reason they will be discriminated against in the poetry world, along with all the other groups that get discriminated against, including – if John is right – readers of the Telegraph! I have to nail my colours to the mast: I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual, Guardian-reading male, so I have absolutely no grounds for complaint that I struggle to get my poetry accepted. But I persist in believing my poems are good, if perhaps unfashionably formal, and what audience I do have is very encouraging. The best poets, I believe (call me naïve if you wish), will always get noticed. It’s what happens to the rest of us that seems more open to debate. A woman may have to work twice as hard to get her work recognised, but we now have a female Poet Laureate in the UK and we did have – if only briefly – a female Professor of Poetry at Oxford (a whole separate can of worms, I know), and whether or not you get asked to join the club may have less to do with gender these days and more to do with the kind of poetry you write. For example, I had an interesting correspondence with one editor of a poetry magazine about finding a home for middlebrow poetry (which is how I define what I write, following an article I came across by Nick Hornby in the Poetry Review many moons ago lamenting the absence of more accessible poetry, akin to the sort of middlebrow fiction he himself writes) and there seems to be a certain expectation a poem should either be high art or purely for entertainment (as in performance poetry). I understand why even successful poets who also happen to be women complain that men still predominate; I’m just not sure it’s the most pressing issue when poetry itself is ignored by large numbers of literate people (including most of my university-educated, art-loving friends) for being too obscure or not being about anything they can relate to.
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