I think Julie has a very good point--maybe women are being bolder about getting their work out. Maybe we're just part of a general wave--male and female--of excellent poetry (if indeed it is excellent--I hope so). I certainly think there is a generation of younger-ish folks working in form, male and female, who have some similarly high and fluent levels of mastery--Geoff Brock, Bill Coyle, Josh Mehigan, Christian Wiman, David Yezzi, Amit Majmudar, etc. to name just a few among the men.
I guess I am just really leery of sweeping gender statemenst regarding the arts. People go into art for such idiosyncratic reasons, and "poets" is such a statistically small sampling, that it seems to me individual aesthetics and temperament are likely to be as strong or stronger factors than groupings such as "female poets writing in form". Sure, some subject matters and experiences will tend to show up in one gender rather than another, but hardly exclusively. There are male poets too writing about pregnancy and miscarriages and small children--male poets who, as it happens, have families. I think that men are writing about these things more has to do with the fact that men of this generation as a whole tend to have a more active role in child-rearing nowadays.
Not to say that there are no differences--women still tend to be primary care-givers, and that is something a number of female poet friends of mine and I feel affects us strongly--mostly in terms of time and energy, and a vague worry, perhaps, that were we male poets, we would prioritize our work differently.
There may be masculine or feminine sides of the imagination, if we want to define them thus, but I think a lot of poets have a gender-opposite type imagination--male poets tending to be more "sensitive" and introspective or what have you than many men, female poets tending to have "bolder" or more aggressive imaginations than many other women.
And sure, we haven't produced a Frost or a Wilbur. But--as has been pointed out--men haven't produced a Jane Austen or a Plath or a Bishop. (A lot of the verbal genius of women has historically been focused in prose or fiction rather than poetry--which has to do, I think, with 19th century education, and the ranking of genres. Now that fiction probably ranks higher than poetry, a lot of that genius is going into poetry. Go figure.) Also, our poetic inheritences do not come down chromosomal lines of xs or ys. A significant chunk of my major influences are gay male poets. Nearly all my influences were childless. Each of us owns the entire tradition, or we ought to.
Nonetheless, I think it is great too to celebrate the inspiring and strong work of women in our midst!
[This message has been edited by A. E. Stallings (edited November 06, 2008).]
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