Were you at all conscious in the early stages of your career that poetry was an overly male world and, if so, how did you manage to get around that? Does it matter that we now have our first woman Laureate?:
Wendy Cope: Yes to the first question. Writing parodies of male poets was one way that I rebelled against male ideas about how we should write. The first poems of mine that got published were literary jokes that made male poets laugh. Some of them probably think those were the only good poems I ever wrote. I don’t think the gender of the Poet Laureate is important. I don’t think the Laureateship is important. I am on record as saying that I would be happy to see it abolished.
This entry was posted by Ivy
on Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 2:51 PM.
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