On Gender and Quality

A post at The Poetry Foundation blog directed me to Jessica Smith's blog, Women in Poetry (Again). There Jessica writes, 'First of all, most of the great poets writing today are women. I am not entirely sure why this is, but I think it is partly because although there is something to be said for experimentation and poetry as an art of using words for things other than self-expression, the work that resonates with me both says things and a new way and has something new to say. As I have said before, Cage’s “I have nothing to say and I’m saying it and that’s poetry as I need it” is not poetry as I need it. I still need a book that I want to keep on my bedside table. Now, I am not an ordinary person in that the books I want to keep by my bedside table are things like Susan Howe’s Singularities and Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette. I like and appreciate great technical virtuosity like Christian Bok’s Eunoia, but I do not feel the visceral need to return to its passages any more than I feel the need to return to the work of most of the male Language poets (but I feel entirely different about Hejinian, Scalapino) or post-Language poets (again, I feel differently when it’s Spahr). I don’t think this is simply because I’m a woman, because I know men who feel the same way. Perhaps because women were so long subjected to anonymity, a female experience of the world is still novel. Perhaps because women are still oppressed, the way they think and express themselves is still radical.'

To which I responded, at the Poetry Foundation blog:

‘I got into an enormous amount of trouble here before for discussing just this issue, but I am a glutton apparently.

‘To say that “most of the great poets writing today are women” is first to assume that there are a large number of poets out there who could be considered “great,” even in the casual sense of being “very good” — I think that most would disagree with this. I certainly do. There are many, many poets writing today, writing mostly poor or mediocre verse; although they do sometimes they write a good poem. Sometimes they write many poems with admirably good ideas or intentions behind them. Few poets of any gender or background (or time period) are able to write poetry well on any consistent basis.

‘Explaining the quality of a body of work via the relative novelty of that poet’s socio-economic experience; well, this both does disservice to the tradition of excellent women writers in American letters, and makes me wonder where we will be in fifty years: perhaps only trans-gender Afro-Polynesian albino langpo poets will have a novel enough experience to be considered “great”? Kidding, kidding — I kid because I love.

‘Spahr, as Jessica points out, is a very good poet whose association as post-LangPo I think really fail to assist readers to or with her work: the verse is more than the beauty of language-constuctions, of language sans meaning as music; they are more directed and the experience of reading more shaped and evocative by her choices. Anyhow. Beside the point. D.A. Powell is also very good. As is Geoffrey Hill. As is Mark Levine. But most of the very good or “Great” poets are dead, as is also always the case.

‘There’s no magic of experience that makes a good poet is what I’d like to get at, without seeming to dismiss either the unique experience of women in our culture or that there are a few good women poets writing today. There are. They are every bit as good as the very good male poets writing today. Each of them arrived at their talent individually; each became a good poet through much labor. We should not devalue these facts by attributing quality to gender or class or some other marginalization or difficulty or characteristic.’