dumbfoundry

"My poetry trip to the U.K. this winter was marked, among many wonderful experiences, by something more sobering: a string of stories poured out to me by women poets about gender imbalance and discrimination in prizes and book and journal publishing at the top levels of the British poetry world. While I am a natural idealist and would prefer to spend most of my time sitting under a pine tree writing and reading, sometimes a situation cries out inescapably for action. Starker than similar accounts I’ve heard in the U.S., yet all too familiar, these tales inspired me to address my longstanding frustraion at the stagnation in po-biz. As Eva Salzman points out in the introduction to her cross-Atlantic poetry anthology Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English, it is still true that “the baggage attached to ‘woman poet’—poetess or not—is more like a lead weight.”"

This entry was posted by Ivy on Monday, June 08, 2009 at 12:20 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.