Sorry, Andrew, I expressed myself very poorly if you got the impression that I thought you and I were not basically on the same side of the gender question.
We agree that the mystical, altered-consciousness tradition of poetic expression includes both men and women. We also agree that Alicia Stallings and Rhina P. Espaillat--and many formalists of both sexes--tend not to write in that particular tradition (although Rhina has done many lovely translations of St. John of the Cross, who certainly did).
I do, however, also share Susan's view that the types of subtle philosophical explorations that Stallings and Espaillat engage in through their poetry tend to be missed by more male readers than female readers.
The reason for that may be as simple as what Nemo keeps emphasizing--that poetry allows readers to experience the presented images and scenarios firsthand. Those things have very different emotional resonance depending on the reader's personal history with them; and that emotional resonance, or lack thereof, sometimes affects the reader's willingness to look past a metaphorical vehicle's outer surface for deeper layers of meaning.
You were talking about something else, though--"the visionary and hermetic" approach vs. "the practical and skeptical"--and I went off on a tangent, so I'm sorry for the confusion. My bad. Readers' unwillingness or inability to empathize with certain kinds of narrators and protagonists is one of my hobbyhorses, so I never miss an opportunity to hop aboard.
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