Gracias, Leslie! This is going to be fun!
As for what makes women's poetry tick--when it does--I suspect it's the same factors that make the poetry of guys tick, when that does. But I also think we've been at it longer--at least lyric poetry, anyway--and all of that very personal, plangent early stuff by Anonymous supports that notion.
I'm thinking of the "Mother, I cannot mind my wheel" kind of thing that turns up not only in English but in just about every language, in which women--often nameless--engage in "trouble talk" about the guy who ran off, or the guy away at war, or the child who died, or the cruelty of rules and traditions that curb personal ambition, or the pregnancy that will now have to be explained to stern parents....so forth and so forth.
I've been reading a wonderful collection titled "Women Poets from Antiquity to Now," edited by Alike Barnstone and Willis barnstone. The section on Spain alone is worth the whole book, but there are also poems from various African languages, the Middle East, Asia, and all of Europe.
Of course a lot of it has the sound of women's "trouble talk" today, because that's part of what our lives have always given us. It's not that women are "built that way," but that our circumstances have encouraged those precise
preoccupations. It will be interesting to see how--if-- the poetry of women as a group changes now that some of us are CEOs and prison inmates and candidates for high public office, among other things.
The other point to remember is that theme and subject are not the same thing. A writer's subjects--the pots and pans or test-tubes or weapons or flowers that comprise his/her metaphors--may be limited by the circumstances of that writer's life, but the themes are not necessrily so limited. Any poet may use an entire range of subjects, drawn from almost any context, to evoke very different
themes. Think of all the poems--by both men and women--that pretend to be about trees but are really meditations on memory, or the relationship between human beings and the rest of nature, or the passage of time, or...the list goes on.
Whether you use a steamshovel or a garden trowel or an old spoon, it's all digging, and it's the same earth.
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