But is this perceived gender subject preference the norm among male editors? I doubt it, based again on my personal experience and observations. Of my four published collections, two address women's menopausal years, and I found no reluctance in men editors to publish the individual poems in these collections or to write enthusiastic and positive reviews of them. Karla Huston reports that she also feels her work has never suffered gender bias.
However, I believe the style of writing between men and women might affect the quality of their poems and result in a different gender statistic. I know many excellent women poets who pull away from using words like fuck or asshole when those words are appropriate to the poems they're writing. It's as though they don't realize those words are not a personal reflection on them but rather an accurate depiction of something or someone they are depicting. Respondent Anita Wynn hit on this when she wrote, ". . . people seem to forget that a poet doesn't always use his/her own voice, and that the speaker is not necessarily representing the writer."
Even the opinion that women's subject matter drastically differs from that of men's is open for debate, until it is scientifically studied. But several poet and editor respondents feel that there exist definite gender content differences. In addition to the men mentioned above, Ken Gurney notices it. He says, "The majority of rants and experimental poetry I receive as submissions are from men. The majority of healing, life affirming poetry I receive is from women."
There are also some women who express their affirmative opinions that gender content differences exist. Ursula Gibson thinks that women's poetry deals more with their life circumstances and their relationships and men's more with protest, anger or politics.
Laura Stamps feels the reason she gets a much higher rate of acceptance from magazines that are edited by women is simply because she writes about what interests them. She says, "Men tend to write about. . . their current depression, bars, heavy drinking, their girlfriends/wives or the one that just dumped them" and that they are more likely than women to curse or write about feminine topics like nature. Laura also thinks that most of the women poets who get published a lot in the small press do so because they write "like men." However, Ania Wynn says her "masculine style" has been a constant criticism.
On the other hand, Gordon Purkis prefers women's writing. He thinks it's superior in many ways and says that the highest percentage of "junk" coming to Mastodon Dentist is from men who don't know when to quit.
True, there are some responders who either just accept Charles' assumption that women are underrepresented in the small press or who enthusiastically agree with it, making this topic one of complexity and one ripe for a full-fledged study. (Too bad I left sociology for poetry.) One conclusion that I strongly draw from these responses, however, is that the number of published women in the small press has increased dramatically in the past few years.
Rosemary Cappello from Philadelphia Poets best summarizes this with her publishing history. She tells us: "When I first started writing poetry back in the 70s, I received enough acceptances to encourage me, but here are some of the rejections I'll never forget. "Why don't you try the women's section of the newspaper?" "Your poem is quite acceptable, but in it, you mention a famous woman. If you change her name to a [certain famous] man's, I'll publish it." She goes on to say that when she first founded, edited and published Philadelphia Poets in 1980, she received more poetry from men than from women. However, now she receives an equal amount of poetry from women, and in her next issue, women will have the edge.
We women have clearly come a long way in the small press world, and there's no reason to think the journey is slowing. Mostly what I see indicates that we are at least close to an overall satisfactory 50/50 publication percentage with our men poetry friends.
We're all in this world of poetry together, and some good advice in these varied query responses came eloquently from Rhina Espaillat, who says, "Certainly there's a need to watch out for injustices and under-representations in any field, but the sooner we can move away from that to a consideration of artists as artists, undifferentiated by sex, religion, national origin, political ideology or any other such category, the more we can concentrate on doing what we do as well as we possibly can, and judging the resulting work on its own merits."
Charles Potts sums up perhaps the best and most succinct conclusion to the matter when he says, "Write well and forget your gender."
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