Having read Dave's essay, I think it is not about "Which poets are getting published these days and why?" but "What is the imagination capable of?" I suspect that the answer to the latter question must include "It depends on the poet." All poets have blind spots when it comes to imagining the experience of people whose lives are very different from their own. Someone like Shakespeare, for instance, does a much more convincing job of inhabiting female characters, for example, than Milton does, even though Milton is a very great poet. But we don't expect even Shakespeare to tell us as much about women's lives as a woman writer could, because he would have no way of knowing all aspects of what it means to be female. A woman writer's work will be different, though, both because she is a woman and because she is not Shakespeare. Her writing may be more accurate in some ways, while not being as great as a piece of writing. We need women writers and minority writers and writers of every other background, just as we need Shakespeare. If we get enough writers from every kind of background, they can help to expose one another's blind spots and fill in the missing pieces of experience, so that we all know more fully what it means to be human. Only a tiny number of those writers will be great writers, but one can pick up great insights even from writers who themselves are not great writers.
Dave's essay made me think about my own practice in writing persona poems. I've written quite a few of them, but I notice that I almost always write from a female persona, and most often I am adopting the persona not of a actual person but of a character from myth or literature. Usually what triggers the poem is some connection between the character's experience and my own experience or my interpretation of the character's experience. But there is a freedom to dealing with fictional characters that is not true in the same way of real people. Unless I am writing satire, I hesitate to exaggerate the behavior of real people. But I am not laying that down as a rule that other writers should follow, just as a personal choice. Writers are different from one another; what works for one is not always what others should do.
Susan
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