[Jane Holland]

John W., could I just correct you on something? You say Mslexia doesn't pay for poetry, but that is not the case. They certainly do pay; I have been in the magazine on a number of occasions and received my cheque without any problems. However, it may well be that they wouldn't pay YOU. Especially after noting your intention to submit work under a female pseudonym to a women-only magazine.

On behalf of myself and Annie Finch, who is not available at the moment, many thanks to everyone here for wishing us good luck with our new website, Poetic Justice. It's wonderful to see such support, especially from male members of the poetic community.

I'm particularly pleased by your response, considering our immediate disadvantages as women - such as those evinced by E. Shaun Russell with his insightful comment that 'women are less interested in seeing their work in print than men,' and Mark Allinson, whose well-judged observation that 'The great fact of the matter is that men - for profound emotional and psychological reasons - TEND to be more driven to create THINGS (of all types) than women' really hit the nail on the head for me. Indeed, this last remark reminded me of my six year old twin boys, who TEND to like nothing better than creating CHAOS, while their older sister is trying to read.

On balance, judging from the response so far on this forum alone, I feel thoroughly justified in my decision to accept Annie Finch's invitation to join her in this venture. There was a time when few men would have felt comfortable making such lazily fatuous and sexist remarks in public, but that day has passed, largely due to a generation of women who thought - wrongly, as it happens - that the battle for equality had been won, that we could all safely put on our bras again and 'have it all'.

That mistaken assumption has gradually led to the current situation where feminism - the F-word - is denigrated high and low by both sexes (largely because of ludicrous media depictions of feminists as hairy, motorcycle-riding lesbians who hate men) while unreconstructed idiots continue to rant openly about how women are neither ambitious nor creative and should accept that having a family means an end to their leisure time unless they happen to be Superwoman or are well-heeled enough to afford domestic help - in which case they apparently prove the point that women should stop whining that their husbands never help with the kids or the housework, because it is perfectly possible to do EVERYTHING, and still have time to write a dozen new poems and post them off to that benign male editor who's just desperate for more women to send him work.

I do hope some of the ladies here will join Poetic Justice. We're hoping to set up a supportive Knit Yourself a Poem self-help group, which should be fun! First I have to go and tackle a mound of washing ...