[Andrew Mandelbaum]

neverminded

[Mary McLean]

Poems which explicitly address Big Philosophical Questions or weighty abstract nouns almost always strike me as pompous and dull. One of my favourite poems on poetry is Making a Meal of It, by Dick Davis, which contains the wonderful line:
“No point in calling up
vast, empty words like Fate –
the table’s set, sit down
and eat what’s on your plate.”

[Shaun J. Russell]

One of my favorite "philosophical" poems is by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He wrote it as a grad student at Princeton, as I recall, and mentioned it in his memoirs:

I wonder why, I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder;
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder.

Succinct and memorable.

[Julie Steiner]

You can turn it into a women’s issue, but here’s my five-word response to that: Hildegaard of Bingen. Emily Dickinson.

I do understand what you mean, Andrew F.--truly I do--but the fact remains that a poem with a male narrator doing things in a stereotypically male sphere is often automatically deemed to be about Man, capital M, and addressing Big Questions of Relevance to All Humanity; sometimes this is phrased as The Voice of the Tribe, deemed of relevance to everyone. But change to an obviously feminine viewpoint (which, BTW, Emily Dickinson hardly ever has), and many male readers seem unwilling or unable to identify with the protagonist or situation. It's just a chick writing a chick poem for chicks, and therefore couldn't possibly be about anything important.

Even in this discussion, men are tossing around the term Man when they mean "all humanity." Women are automatically expected to assume that they are included in that term...but when women talk about their own experience, male readers tend to stand outside of it and refuse to see themselves as included.

It drives me nuts when I write about rape and some male readers say I'm attacking them. No I'm not, I'm attacking the rapist. What is WRONG with some guys, that in such a scenario they can more easily identify with an antisocial person who happens to be male, rather than with a decent human being who happens to be female? But I digress.

So, yeah. Gender issues. They're a thing sometimes.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Julie, I have a very heavy work load at present, so will have to bow out of this thread after this post, but I feel I owe you a response.

I want to point out, first, that I never said the works I mentioned have no importance. I don’t know where you got that idea. And that the writers were women has nothing to do with it, since I meant male neo-formalists as well.

As for women’s issue aspect, in addition to Hildegaard and Emily, mentioned earlier, I can name Kathleen Raine, Mirabai, Catherine of Siena, the Sybil of Cumae, my wife Daphne. And many more. The point is that there is hermetic profundity and intuition that is not by Man, as you call it. Whoever does it, that is what I most want. To identify it as only male is to negate the women saints, mystics, seers, sybils, prophets. I know you don’t want to do that, Julie, but that’s the binary you’re setting up, or seem to be.

And with that, I have to get some rest. I realize we are not going to see eye to eye on this, and that is ok. I didn’t expect nearly anyone would agree with me here. And that is ok too.

[Susan McLean]

Andrew, I think we differ mainly in taste, and slightly in our definitions. The type of philosophy that I am interested in is a practical philosophy, a way of living one's life with grace and meaning, and I do find useful insights for that in the works of Stallings, Espaillat, Dickinson, and many other poets, male and female. I have little interest in philosophies that take me out of this life and into another plane entirely. Hermetic poetry is not at all to my taste, and visionary poetry may be lovely, but is not closest to my heart.

Susan

[John Whitworth]

Nemo, I think I fell out of love with philosophy after David Hume.

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

[Julie Steiner]

Sorry, Andrew, I expressed myself very poorly if you got the impression that I thought you and I were not basically on the same side of the gender question.

We agree that the mystical, altered-consciousness tradition of poetic expression includes both men and women. We also agree that Alicia Stallings and Rhina P. Espaillat--and many formalists of both sexes--tend not to write in that particular tradition (although Rhina has done many lovely translations of St. John of the Cross, who certainly did).

I do, however, also share Susan's view that the types of subtle philosophical explorations that Stallings and Espaillat engage in through their poetry tend to be missed by more male readers than female readers.

The reason for that may be as simple as what Nemo keeps emphasizing--that poetry allows readers to experience the presented images and scenarios firsthand. Those things have very different emotional resonance depending on the reader's personal history with them; and that emotional resonance, or lack thereof, sometimes affects the reader's willingness to look past a metaphorical vehicle's outer surface for deeper layers of meaning.

You were talking about something else, though--"the visionary and hermetic" approach vs. "the practical and skeptical"--and I went off on a tangent, so I'm sorry for the confusion. My bad. Readers' unwillingness or inability to empathize with certain kinds of narrators and protagonists is one of my hobbyhorses, so I never miss an opportunity to hop aboard.

[Mary Meriam]

"It's just a chick writing a chick poem for chicks, and therefore couldn't possibly be about anything important."

Thanks for saying this, Julie.

[Roger Slater]

I understand the attitude you are describing, but that sort of dismissiveness doesn't seem to me to be as pervasive as you suggest. Alicia and Rhina are not lacking for enthusiastic male fans at the Sphere, myself among them, and my favorite American poet is Emily Dickinson, whom I don't look at as anything even vaguely resembling a chick writing chick poems for chicks. Catherine Tufariello has written some of my favorite poems ever, and I'm reasonably confident that my short-list of favorite poets currently posting at the Sphere would be heavily skewed to female poets, Mary and Julie among them. (I just won two free Ablemuse books in the translation contest, and the two I requested were by female poets). While I don't doubt that we all bring to our reading of poems a personal outlook that includes our gender, I think it's somewhat unfair therefore to accuse male readers of somehow not getting or appreciating women's work. And I don't read poetry for philosophy, but I see as much philosophy in women's work as men's.