[Eva Salzman]

Peter,

Are you a friend of Jan's? Is "lost in a fog of apathy" some spurious pleasantry, usual terms of engagement? Why one wonders why?

One wonders what some people are DOING here? Just to be accusatory/condescending/nasty for the hell of it?

Clearly this subject is touching some nerves! So, "apathy"? Methinks not.

[Clive]

Eva, Jane - whatever has happened in this thread, can I make a personal request for both of you to stick around? I've enjoyed poems by both of you in my real, offline life and I was rather surprised and chuffed to see you on here.

Perhaps this should have gone in a PM, but I didn't want to come across all stalky-weird.

[peter richards]

-Rest assured that Stalky Weird is Clive's nom de plume - most of us don't even wear plumes, let alone talk to them and give them names...

Eva, Jane - whatever has happened in this thread, can I make a personal request for both of you to stick around? I've enjoyed poems by both of you in my real, offline life and I was rather surprised and chuffed to see you on here.

Hear! Hear! Please add my request to Clive's. There's only one way to change it.

Perhaps some of this is explained by the fact that it's a Full Moon.

[Adam Elgar]

Hear double hear - Jane and Eva, it's great to have you at Erato - and (let it be whispered) there's more to this site than polemical pingpong at GT. Your contributions will be very much valued on the poetry boards. I really hope to see you there,

All the best
Adam

[Eva Salzman]

Gee whiz aw shucks, thanks guys. (Peter, apologies. The joke got drowned out by a lot of other noise.)

[Mark Allinson]

But feminism ... gender equality ... these concepts would appear to be a serious threat, judging by the efforts made here to discredit them.

Being a long-time equity feminist, who helped raise a daughter to believe that she could accomplish anything she turned her talents to (which she has done and is doing), I am as interested as anyone here in understanding the reason why women poets have less representation in contemporary anthologies.

My daughter shows all the signs of becoming a fine writer (including poetry) and I would be fiercely against any social force which sought to restrain her and/or women like her.

And the reason for this discrepancy must be discoverable, surely.

The one thing I have trouble with is the hypothesis that there is any sort of conspiracy among male editors (and perhaps male poets) to keep women's work down or out of anthologies.

The editor-class (I am sure Clive would agree) tend to be the same class as full-time writers and professors - that is, the university educated intellectual class.

Now, as we know from recent reports, there is no current suppression of women in our universities, in terms of access and assessment, at least.

So why should there be such a problem with editors (or poets) when it comes to selection for anthologies? The same mind-set of accepted gender-equality is current across all members of this class, as far as I can see.

Also, given the reality (I believe) that editors are lovers of fine work, why should they be depriving their readers by rejecting valuable material merely because it was written by a woman? I really do have trouble with that one.

Can anyone explain how they could see this (editorial misogyny) being a real factor in this issue?

[Eva Salzman]

I don't recall anyone saying anything about a conspiracy or did I miss something? It's the status quo and these are hard to change as those in it defend their territory. And yes guys do tend to hang out with guys, and the social aspect has a bearing on the professional one. My unwilling participation in the sexual politics in editing a women's anthology is part of the infuriating part, since it is the challengers to it who are deemed to have a political agenda, whereas the status quo has one too, implicitly. I don't have time or space here to condense what I wrote in a 20 page essay, but it addresses so many of things being said here....

In doing this anthology and addressing the clear gender imbalance in "men's" anthologies (in all but name, a lot of the time) the aim is not to create a separate space but to call attention to the bias in so-called mixed anthologies. Furthermore and infuriatingly, space given to women's work somehow assumes that gender is her only subject, for example in the critical book I think I mentioned in which the (male) editors scrupulously had a section devoted to women writers, but whereas the male section included poems on politics and all kinds of subjects, the women's poems were all about.... being a woman. I mean, I don't write on women's subjects. Come to that, I have many other causes than this one I'd love to spend my time on but this does seem an important issue. Part of the problem is that it isn't seen as equally important to men which does lead one to think that some feel threatened, as was said here elsewhere.