[Mark Allinson]

That should quieten things down.

Yes, I know what you mean, Mike.

Any un-PC reference to NATURE having anything to do with our lives and minds is usually met with shrieking, white-knuckled rage.

But Camille knows:

"Women have conceptualized less in history not because men have kept them from doing so but because women do not need to conceptualize to live ... Conceptualization and sexual mania may issue from the same part of the male brain [yes, sorry ladies, as science is now proving, male and female brains are different from the womb, and not as a result of social conditioning]. Fetishism, for instance, a practice which like most sex perversions is confined to men, is clearly a conceptualizing or symbol-making activity ... Projection is a male curse: forever to need someone or something to make oneself complete. This is one of the sources of art and the secret of its domination by males. The artist is the closest man has come to imitating woman's superb self-containment." Sexual Personae, pp 20-28.

These are the forces from Nature which lead to the imbalance in the figures for poetry.

[A. E. Stallings]

I think exasperation more than rage, Mark. Sure, there are statistically significant differences of female and male brains overall in Nature--but there are also individual differences that are larger on a case by case basis than these generalizations. Poets are individuals, not just a random statistical sample of the general population. There are men not driven to "create" anything, and women whose creative urge is towards art as much as/more than bearing children... Surely this is obvious.

[Maryann Corbett]

Jill, there's always the possibility of waiting until the children are grown, as happened with me. There's plenty of life left After Children. But make good notes.

I remember reading in the first issue of Poet's Market I ever bought that women submit less than men. I thought that was a given. It was presented there as a confidence issue.

So guys, how much do YOU submit? I tried for a long time to get a packet of three poems out every week, and that worked while I was submitting exclusively to places with quick turnaround. With the print mags that take six months and more to respond, it doesn't. I can't crank poems out weekly any more, and I don't get them back fast enough, and keeping track of simsubs and withdrawals will drive me nuts, even with Duotrope.

Mike Alexander once wrote about reading for a journal and getting a packet of poems from Lyn Lifshin. As I recall, he complained that the ten poems seemed to have been aimed scattershot at anything, not chosen with any consideration of that particular publication. But she's the queen of the little magazines, so maybe that method works!

But now, back to the overtime work I'm supposed to be doing.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by Maryann Corbett

So guys, how much do YOU submit? I tried for a long time to get a packet of three poems out every week, and that worked while I was submitting exclusively to places with quick turnaround. With the print mags that take six months and more to respond, it doesn't. I can't crank poems out weekly any more, and I don't get them back fast enough, and keeping track of simsubs and withdrawals will drive me nuts, even with Duotrope.

Maryann -- for my part, I usually spend a few hours on a Sunday morning putting submissions together. I haven't been as avid about it for the past couple months, but a typical month would see about thirty poems / ten submissions from me. Some months, double that. Some months I'll only send out two or three. I don't actually track my work via Duotrope, though -- I keep a running Word document with all the assorted information. It's a 38 page document now, mind you...

Janice -- I agree that there's a difference between reading Erato for fifteen minutes and polishing a poem, but I hope you know I wrote that particular sentence tongue-in-cheek. I still stand behind my point, though, insofar as one can MAKE time for art. If it matters to you enough, you have to make the sacrifice of half an hour a day...or a couple of hours on a weekend. Look at Anna Evans -- she is a wife, a mother, editor of TWO poetry journals, and still finds the time to submit her work to various venues. A quick look at her blog shows that she hasn't jettisoned any of the requisite family stuff, though she has doubtless made some concessions in that regard.

Ultimately, the point is that I can't see any conspiracy among editors to subjugate women poets. Rather, I think it's more common to see women subjugating themselves by not sacrificing for the art.

[Roger Slater]

Are you saying that women are less willing to sacrifice for art than men are?

As far as keeping track of submissions is concerned, I suggest setting up a very simple spreadsheet on google documents, then bookmark it. That way, you can pull it up from any internet computer. Just make a column for the publication, a column for the name of your poem, a column for the date you sent it out, a column for the date you got an answer, a column for the result, and a column for notes and comments. I also add a column that tells me how long the poem has been out or how long it took to get a response. I am not at all adept at spreadsheets, but even I could do that.

Another alternative is using wordshustler.com, which is pretty much just an online secretarial service -- you retain complete control over where to send your work, but you give them a relatively small amount of money and they print it up, enclose a SASE (and reply postcard if you like), put it in an envelope, and send it out for you. They will even be your address for responses, though you are free (and I think wise) to use your own address so responses come directly to you. For a 4-page submission, they charge only a dollar, I think.

[John Whitworth]

To sacrifice WHAT for Art, Roger?

[Roger Slater]

I was referring to Shaun's comment directly above mine. Shaun's last line was "Rather, I think it's more common to see women subjugating themselves by not sacrificing for the art." Read what he wrote for the context.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Janice -- I agree that there's a difference between reading Erato for fifteen minutes and polishing a poem, but I hope you know I wrote that particular sentence tongue-in-cheek. I still stand behind my point, though, insofar as one can MAKE time for art. If it matters to you enough, you have to make the sacrifice of half an hour a day...or a couple of hours on a weekend.

Right Shaun, we're cool.

Every writing woman know that you have to pay more attention to polishing the poem than to polishing the windows. That's an easy sacrifice and that's how she makes time.

Sorry if it seemed all of my previous post was directed at you. I am editing to clarify. We're friends, we're cool.

PS Because we are friends, I am adding this about your:
Basically, I think it is every woman's right to say to her husband / partner, "Honey, I need you to look after the kids for an hour while I get some writing done in the study." Any husband who doesn't respect that is, well, a jerk. I'm dead serious. It's every human's inborn right to have some time to oneself.

Congratulations on your impending marriage. Here is my unasked for advice. Don't wait for for your wife to ask "Honey, I need you to look after the kids for an hour while I get some writing done in the study." Shouldn't that be "our kids", or maybe an hour and fifteen minutes or maybe how about the husband asking, "Honey, etc."

I'm so glad I'm not young anymore.

[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 ...

[David Landrum]

"The prevailing climate of poetics"?

The author's statistics are noted, but it seems to me that there are no lack of women poets. I pick up Poetry, Contemporary Poetry, Poets and Writers or any other number of publications, and find women publishing books, winning prizes, publishing poems, editing journals, judging contests. In fact, in some of the listings of prize-winners in Poets and Writers (which includes photographs of the winners), you'll be surprised to see a male face in the crowd.

I wonder if the statistics are selective. I wonder if the author of this article has looked broadly enough at her area of study because it does not seem to me that there is this sort of "prevailing climate" (of exclusion of women) in the world of poetry.

dwl