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.
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