tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7083730.post155045446761312922..comments2023-06-02T17:54:44.641+02:00Comments on Connaissances: Sex Quiz: the ReasoningJonathan Wonhamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09862200571016427320noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7083730.post-36710666996413204672007-07-14T10:13:00.000+02:002007-07-14T10:13:00.000+02:00Hi Jonathan, I'm in California now, and looking f...Hi Jonathan, I'm in California now, and looking forward to seeing the results of the contest. I don't have the poems with me, but it seems to me that the most interesting criterion for determining the gender of the writers of these poems isn't overt content but style. My guess would be that male poems tend to be more rational in their organisation and more stripped of ornament, and that female poems might be expected to be more intuitive, associative (sinuous?) and decorative, by which I mean there might be more adjectives and adverbs, possibly more chatter. Sounds like I'd rather be a "male-identified" poet (as someone once said to me of Ann Carson), doesn't it?<BR/><BR/>Lots of exceptions, of course, especially when we look at the canon; still I think it's possible to generalize.<BR/><BR/>And yes, I agree, this is an interesting exercise. My choices, by the way, were mostly intuitive. If I went back and rationalized them, as you have done, I'd probably find I should have been more analytical. I'm still betting the TLS readers picked more male than female poets.<BR/><BR/>PS Andrew Zawacki, in the intro to his anthology of Slovenian writing ("Afterwards," White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY, 1999) talks about "the discouraging lack of writing by Slovenian women promoted in Slovenia" and hence in his anthology. He quotes "Australian poet and editor Tracy Ryan," who asks "Is it possible that many editors do not 'see' a good woman-authored poems because their template automatically excludes it?"Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7083730.post-86772901739292400142007-07-13T00:18:00.000+02:002007-07-13T00:18:00.000+02:00One of the interesting things about the first four...One of the interesting things about the first four anthologies that I mentioned above is that there is no overlap between them among the women writers. <BR/><BR/>In other words, Romer includes neither Catherine Pozzi or Anne-Marie Albiach in his anthology.<BR/><BR/>The Wake Forest Press book I referred to anthologises 28 French women poets so the counter-anthology you suggest is already available. Not that I think the concept of a 'counter-anthology' is a very healthy or desirable situation.<BR/><BR/>The quiz was just for fun and for interest. In general it was quite difficult to identify the gender of the writer and, in a way, I hope that our guessing results are not that accurate.Jonathan Wonhamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09862200571016427320noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7083730.post-25287415050917810142007-07-12T23:52:00.000+02:002007-07-12T23:52:00.000+02:00I guess the ting to do would be to make a list of ...I guess the ting to do would be to make a list of the women poets neglected by the anthologies you mention and to make up a counter-anthology. At least as a conjecture.<BR/><BR/>Worth trying?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7083730.post-3779655973288590742007-07-12T23:08:00.000+02:002007-07-12T23:08:00.000+02:00Hello again GeorgeMy interest in this gender issue...Hello again George<BR/><BR/>My interest in this gender issue began in France. It had crossed my mind only dimly before. In France, however, the poetry culture seems very male dominated, even today. I have written about this subject at length <A HREF="http://connaissances.blogspot.com/2006/03/french-poetry-by-women.html" REL="nofollow">here</A>.<BR/><BR/>As an example of this male-dominated culture I did a head count of women in anthologies of 20th Century French poetry in translation:<BR/><BR/>The Random House Book of 20th Century french Poetry (ed. Paul Auster; Vintage, 1984) contains 1 woman poet in a total of 48 contributors.<BR/><BR/>Mid-Century French Poets (ed. Wallace Fowlie; Grove Press, 1955) contains no women poets among ten contributors.<BR/><BR/>The Penguin Book of French Verse (ed. Brian Woledge, Geoffrey Brereton and Anthony Hartley; Penguin, 1980) contains 1 woman poet among 23 contributors in the 20th Century Section.<BR/><BR/>20th Century French Poems (ed. Stephen Romer; Faber 2002) contains 7 women poets from a total of 53 contributors.<BR/><BR/>The origin of this bias seems to rest firmly on the shoulders of Gallimard, the major publisher of French poetry, who have only 4% of their output from women, a number of whom are well known foreign writers such as Emily Dickinson.<BR/><BR/>A recent anthology of poems about Paris called "poètes de la ville" from Gallimard had 45 contributors and no women.<BR/><BR/>So, in France, it is very much a political issue. French women are being denied a broad poetry forum. To quote the back cover of the anthology: 'Women's Poetry in France, 1965-1995' published by Wake Forest University Press: this anthology contains "the work of such well known writers as Anne-Marie Albiach, Andree Chedid and Marguerite Duras but also others who have been unjustly neglected in their own country."<BR/><BR/>So, that was the starting point for my interest. I have also been honest enough to write about the bias in my own poetry book shelves <A HREF="http://connaissances.blogspot.com/2006/03/8th-of-march-is-womens-day.html" REL="nofollow">here</A>. I am prepared to admit that I am not, in general, attracted by the work of women poets, although there are a number of notable exceptions, particularly, for example, Elizabeth Bishop.<BR/><BR/>What bothers me is that I don't know whether the presence of so few women poets on my shelves reflects the results of long term cultural neglect of women writers or my own biased value system, to use the term you mentioned.<BR/><BR/>As you know, I work on the editorial staff of Upstairs at Duroc magazine in Paris. The editorial committee of this magazine assess the contributions anonymously and go through a rigorous process of selection in which every editors' comments are taken into account in two rounds of selection. The editorial team is quite large and includes both men and women. The result is an extremely readable magazine in which contributor gender is very balanced (21 men out of a total of 40 contributors in the last issue). This is not a function of the selection process, which is anonymous, but rather of a good mix among the editorial committee. It also proves, I think, that the writing of men and women, when judged anonymously, is found to be equally good.Jonathan Wonhamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09862200571016427320noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7083730.post-65994396190810881262007-07-12T21:19:00.000+02:002007-07-12T21:19:00.000+02:00I posted a reply to the original posting, Jon, but...I posted a reply to the original posting, Jon, but either it hasn't arrived or you haven't put it up. I referred you there to Greer (not just The Female Eunuch but also Slipshod Sibyls) and Paglia (Sexual Personae), and suggested that some attributes that we take as value are - wrongly or rightly - thought of as masculine: these might include abstract thought, scale, structure, the journey out into the unknown and a few others, at least that is the case Paglia makes. The ‘privileging’ of such values may be because the valuers have been men but, then again, it might not be entirely and absolutely so.<BR/><BR/>Is Alice Oswald primarily a female poet? Is Jo Shapcott - apart from her subject matter - specifically female? Is Bishop? Is Hacker? And if we could isolate the feminine/female in them where would we be? Would we be saying: <I>we want more of that, whatever it is, because it normally gets a bad deal</I>? And what would then be the list of your ‘female’ descriptors? Would having such a list signal an advance in so far as the descriptor list might be privileged? Privileged by whom?<BR/><BR/>I am frequently asked to endorse other people's books. The overwhelming number of books that I have endorsed have been by women. I don't endorse them because they are women or because they write in an identifiably womanly way but because they are very good poets. In the same way I have probably reviewed an equal number of male and female poets, and - wonder of wonders! - my praise has not been determined by their gender. Not to my knowledge at any rate. If you think otherwise you will have to prove it.<BR/><BR/>I simply wonder at the point of the guessing game. I mean beyond the fun of a guessing game. Is it a matter of literary politics? I suspect it is not merely an anthropological issue that you are pursuing, but a political one. If so, would you like to take the guessing game into the realms of class which, I think, would be just as important a political issue? Then point me to those neglected female poets of the past that the feminist publishing houses have not yet discovered. Over thirty years of effort has gone into that. <BR/><BR/>Maybe – and this is what I guess – you simply want to point the finger at male prejudice. That too has had several years of effort and publicity behind it. It’s easily done and needs no originality, daring or even much skill. That is simply the weather of the last thirty years. <BR/><BR/>In the end, I suspect, we will be returning to questions of attribute and value. In that case, which of the ‘male’ attributes – assuming we can isolate them - would you want to downgrade and which of the female’ attributes would you privilege? And how would you go about doing that? Would that be a worthwhile exercise?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com