Women Poets on Mentorship

Women Poets on Mentorship is a collection of 24 essays by young women poets about living women poets that have inspired or mentored them. The essays are funny, articulate, touching, and sometimes gossipy.

From the jacket:

The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women's poetry.

We hope this anthology will be of great interest to poetry enthusiasts, feminists, readers and writers (and we hope everyone in the world fits into at least one of these categories!).

Here is the link to amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Poets-Mentorship-Efforts-Affections/dp/158729639X

The link to the University of Iowa page:
http://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/2008-spring/greenbergwom.htm

Please buy the book and buy another for a friend. And, if you like it, consider writing us a short amazon review (we've heard that helps with sales). If you are interested in teaching the book or reviewing the book, please let me know and I can pass your request along to Iowa.

Thank you all so much!

Rachel (and Arielle)

And in case you're wondering: Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker, Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel, Miranda Field on Fanny Howe, Katie Ford on Jorie Graham, Daphne Gottlieb on the Circle of Mentorship, Matthea Harvey on Anna Rabinowitz, Kirsten Kaschock on Being Non-mentored, Joy Katz on Sharon Olds, Katy Lederer on Lyn Hejinian, Valerie Martínez on Joy Harjo, Erika Meitner on Rita Dove, Jennifer Moxley on Susan Howe, Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye, Mendi Lewis Obadike on Toi Derricotte, Danielle Pafunda on Susan Wheeler, Kristin Prevallet on Anne Waldman, Cin Salach on Maureen Seaton, Robyn Schiff on Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Kathy Lou Schultz on Myung Mi Kim, Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley, Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido, Elizabeth Treadwell on Paula Gunn Allen, Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton, and Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock

Coming soon: On the Gurlesque

We keep promising, but we're so busy. This time, really, it's coming soon. Like hopefully part 1 this weekend.

In the meantime, a few things we've noticed elsewhere:

"But he just continued on his way. She had to say, 'That's her book' three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a nineteenth-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn't read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless--for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we've never really stopped."

From "Men Explain Things to Me"
by Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch.com

"Margaret Drabble's booklet on Plath and Nicholas Wroe's article on the entire series both emphasised Plath's importance aside from her 'suicide' poems... by invoking the cliché of redemptive motherhood: '... the vivid colours of giving birth, the pleasures of breast-feeding and the "power and mystery of the maternal bond."' Phew. It's a good thing she had kids. Otherwise what could be said about the work!

Drabble describes Plath's 'appalling - and 'exhilarating' - poetry as the kind from the 'heart' rather than the head, in this way minimising that poet's formal dexterity and finesse. Apparently, it's radical to attribute her fame to the usual criteria: an exceptional feel for language, outstanding technical skills, a powerful vision and mastery of form."

From "How to Trivialize Women's Poetry"
by Eva Salzman at the Guardian Online book blog

Dim Sum

Being several & a few responses
to the trio of "Numbers Trouble" articles
in last fall's Chicago Review

Organized by Elizabeth Treadwell

Introduction
Esther Belin
Susan Briante
David Buuck (NEW!)
CAConrad
Michelle Detorie
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (NEW!)
Tonya Foster & Evie Shockley (NEW!)
Rachel Levitsky (NEW!)
Joyelle McSweeney
Sina Queyras
Linda Russo
Sandra Simonds
Carmen Giménez Smith
Elizabeth Treadwell
Catherine Wagner
Christine Wertheim (NEW!)
Biographies

Dim Sum: Introduction

I read with some excitement the “Numbers Trouble” articles [links to PDFs provided] in last fall's Chicago Review, and in the arc of possibility their publication seemed to open up, I initiated this forum, and I thank those who joined in for their responses.

Thanks also to the Pussipo listserv (after Acker; for experimental women writers), of which this Delirious Hem is a gorgeous external organ.

I’m also grateful to Delirious Hem’s web personage, Shanna Compton, for agreeing to loosely moderate any comments these pieces garner.

--Elizabeth Treadwell

Dim Sum: Esther Belin

I did get a chance to read both articles in the Chicago Review but was not able to read the original Ashton article that spurred the conversation. Interestingly, as I read both articles I agreed with sections of each. At times, I felt the response was more of an inquiry about each author’s intent. In that sense, the conversation has furthered the dialogue around the disparity between men and women writers and teachers of writing. I agree with Ashton when she expresses regret in not making her “point more baldly” ("The Numbers Trouble with 'Numbers Trouble'”). Spahr and Young’s “Numbers Trouble” was obviously a misreading from Ashton’s point of view. And it very well may have been misread and easily disregarded but as pointed out by Spahr and Young it is Ashton’s tone for “dismissal of female community [that] parallels a larger cultural dismissal of feminism” that draws further investigation.

A misreading such as this has the potential to be quite damning and I am thankful Spahr and Young chose to address it. Ashton’s overall tone in her response burbles in curtness. Never once did I sense camaraderie with Spahr and Young as colleagues seeking fresh knowledge. Yet Spahr and Young’s inquiry splashed in the puddle of playfulness. I did appreciate their accessible language. As a working poet (I work primarily with tribal communities struggling with the English and/or written language) I am very conscious of who is actually invited to join in the conversation based on accessible style and tone of the author. Ashton was not readily accessible and a bit confusing which may account for her feelings of being misread. Then I begin to question her intended audience and motive. Is she a comrade in arms or does she play to follow her own definition of innovation?

Both articles and outside conversations I read on blogs have led me to believe there is an innate trouble when tallying numbers and applying it to humanity. I often wonder if that is an essential complication with using the amalgamated English language. It reminds me of the No Child Left Behind movement. In the end, it is all a numbers game. Yet all the students that are deemed equally proficient are definitely not equal. Does are our movement subvert us to a social Darwinism? And are we prepared for the results?

Dim Sum: Susan Briante

Trouble, Trouble

About midway through her stunning sequence The Book of the Dead, in the poem “The Dam,” Muriel Rukeyser inserts a small string of numbers that provides a key to much of what comes before and after:

111      611/4      (3.20)      671/4      691/2       671/4      691/2      +3      691/2      691/2      3,4000

This ticker tape shows a series of high/low and opening/closing stock prices for Union Carbide, the company whose exploitative mining practices in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, resulted in the death of an estimated 475 to 2,000 miners, the majority of whom were African-American migrant workers. Without Rukeyser’s research and lyric imagination, those numbers might tell a story of shrewd profit. Instead they come to represent the brute greed that took the lives of these miners.

It might seem odd to place these numbers at the start of a response to Julian Spahr and Stephanie Young’s “Numbers Trouble” essay and the debates that followed it. The numbers simply don’t compare. But Rukeyser confirms (as do much of the best writers of documentary poetry) that it takes an act of the imagination to read life into numbers, an act of poetics. What disturbs me far more than the numbers in Spahr and Young’s essay is the lack of imagination and sympathy reflected in the many narratives that have come to be wrapped around them.

For all of the numbers printed in “Number Trouble,” the most salient figure comes here: “female professors earned on average just 81% of what men earned.” These numbers suggest the economics that lurk behind the other numbers included in Spahr and Young’s essay, as well as those compiled by the editors of the Chicago Review. A report published in 2003 by the US General Accounting Office showed that for “full-time wage and salary workers, women’s weekly earnings were about three-fourths of men’s.”[1] The authors of the report then tried to calculate earning discrepancies taking into account the differing levels of education between men and women, hours worked, etc. and still found a 20 percent difference in the salaries of men and women that could not be explained mathematically.

In order to imagine the reality beyond those numbers, one must imagine a difference in the material conditions of many men and women, which may or may not affect the form of our poems but which certainly could affect how those poems are produced, the amount of time we might be able to bring to the writing desk, etc. What range of reality might exist beyond that simple 20 percent difference in salaries? One could easily imagine (if they chose to do so) that wage differences between men and women would be exacerbated by other factors such as race or ethnicity, age, even marital status or sexual orientation. (I’m suspicious of using any one single marker to gauge privilege or disadvantage.)

What troubles me about the numbers that Jennifer Ashton initially gets wrong in the essay that began this whole debate (“on the numerical level the problem of under-representation has been corrected”)--before deciding they don’t matter--is that they speak to a different kind of essentialism. The essentialism they reveal is not created by women poets (innovative or otherwise), but is imposed upon them by a market that values their work less than that of men. Any woman who does not come from the middle- to upper-classes, or is not white, or does not benefit from the privilege of a trust fund or a joint checking account might not be able to dismiss those numbers as quickly as Ashton. And Ashton is not alone.

Emily Warn, writing on the Poetry Foundation’s website, summarized her whole reaction to the conversation as: “I feel bored and a twinge of guilt.”[2] She lumped the numbers debate together with Francisco Aragon’s arguing for the inclusion of more reviews of work by Latino/a poets on the Poetry Foundation website. Warn called them both examples of “advocating on behalf” of a “poetry clan.” Warn suffers from a lack of imagination, an ability to speculate that differences in gender and race do more than simply place us in different “clans,” but may reflect vastly different historical and material realities. In the spirit of no longer reinforcing traditional inequalities, an editor--like Warn--might decide to be an activist who looks beyond the slush pile for work, who realizes (as many editors responding to the Chicago Review numbers did) that women and other traditionally under-represented groups often constitute a significantly smaller number of submissions in the first place. One might also imagine how the over-representation of a particular group would allow certain topics or styles of writing to seem universally appealing, instead of merely being the replication of a comforting and relatively homogenous worldview: one that tends to be white and male and well-heeled. But didn’t we already go over this decades ago?

Numbers are troubling. I am troubled by the number of US soldiers killed today in Iraq, the number of Iraqis killed since the start of the war, the dollar’s continued decline on international markets, the rising murder rates in Juarez, Mexico, and Newark, NJ, the scant amount of money we spend per child on public school education.... In light of these numbers, the numbers of women poets published in anthologies shrink in significance. But the lack of imagination these numbers have inspired do not. It takes both sympathy and imagination to spin a web of connections around the incident at Gauley Bridge as Muriel Rukeyser did--and as practitioners of documentary poetics continue to do.[3] At the end of Brenda Coultas’s lyric investigation “The Bowery Project,” after documenting sidewalk trash piles and makeshift shelters created by the homeless, after chronicling her own attempts at dumpster diving and becoming a public character, Coultas writes: “My own tale is of walking and observing, of imagining.”

Choose to be an activist poet or editor, but don’t choose to simply dismiss evidence of realities that do not correspond to your own. I was born in Newark, NJ, in the winter after the riots. I witnessed the 1994 peso collapse in Mexico City. It has taken very little effort to realize that I have been protected much more than others by privilege and made more vulnerable than some by the facts of class and gender, chance and choice. What I’m calling for here is both an act of ethics and poetics. If we can’t imagine the complexities of our world, how can we begin to change it? The new economy is here; the empire is over. Walk. Look around. Bite down. Hang on. Calculate. Investigate. Imagine. Get to work.

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NOTES

[1] United States, General Accounting Office Report to Congressional Requesters, Women’s Earnings: Work Patterns Partially Explain Difference between Men’s and Women’s Earnings (Washington, DC: GPO, 2003) 2.

[2] Emily Warn, “Essentialism? Say What?” Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation, 3 November 2007

[3] In the documentary, Zizek!, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us that 40 years ago we were still engaged in a fierce debate over whether socialism, communism and capitalism would prevail. Today, noting the prevalence of apocalyptic disaster movies (from Independence Day to Armageddon), Zizek concludes: “The paradox is that it is much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.”

Dim Sum: CAConrad

DEAR IDENTITY, DON'T TAKE ANY SHIT!

          "Time to hone the fucking consciousness!"
               --Maryse Holder

America's New Deal safety nets have been dismantled, our unions are mostly dissolved or muted, and our testosterone-driven ambassadors of privatization and military have cost over a million REAL human lives after invading Iraq, a country whose undeserved bloodshed and suffering at our hands still has absolutely no relief in sight. Could it be possible that the arts also want to be on the Right side of American history? Are the statistics that women are on the low end of being represented in experimental poetry that Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young present in their essay "Numbers Trouble" correct? The tools to measure their accuracy are not at my disposal, but the essay's importance cannot be denied from witnessing the strong responses it has generated.

The term "post identity politics" is in the news these days in reference to our 2008 presidential election year. In fact it's used rather casually by reporters. But should poetry BE news, or be led by and mimic the news? We all agree (at least I think we all agree?) that many fearless, dissenting individuals fought and suffered to make much needed room for everyone. Isn't it clear how much we owe it to ourselves to owe it to them to remain vigilant over the ground they battled for and won for us?

When I say vigilant I DO MEAN vigilant for everyone, meaning every gender, every race, every every. And while I despise the term "identity politics" because I feel strongly that it insults the room we all share, and insults those who fought for that room, I will still use it in what I have to say here, mostly because, unfortunately, it is appropriate at times. But let me say first that I feel "identity politics" to be a misnomer, meaning it has no sense of the various caste systems inherent in the kind of consumer-dependent system like America's, and how such a system's interior pulls and persuades outside bodies, including the arts, into its unconscious (and often unconscionable) orbit. Identity politics is a term as deprived of truth as saying, "Americans are living longer," something also casually mentioned in the news these days. But seriously, are ALL Americans living longer, or just the Americans who count, meaning the ones with money to spend? Are homeless Americans living longer? Are American soldiers in Iraq living longer? Are the MILLIONS of impoverished, uninsured Americans living longer? You get the drift. And furthermore, "identity politics" assumes one's identity is their choice and is being directed in such a way for gain. I agree there are those who choose a "political correctness" in order to wield power, and that is wrong, which is exactly why I said I will use the term here, but let's be honest that it is not always the case that identity is directed or wielded for power and gain.

When I say we need to be vigilant for everyone, every one of us, it is because I have observed identity politics in its worst forms, the kind of behavior that begs to be confronted. One of the most recent, bizarre incidents was on New Year's Day in New York City during the giant fundraiser marathon reading for St. Mark's Poetry Project. This incident became one of identity politics inverted. Poet Eileen Myles was making her way through the enormous crowds, handing out copies of what she was about to read, talking to us the whole time, explaining how this was only a fragment of a much larger work. About halfway to the microphone a man in the audience yelled at her, claiming that when she was director of the Poetry Project (which, by the way, was over 20 years ago!) that he had asked her for a reading, and that instead of giving him a reading she had ranted at him about how much she hated men. It caused a reflexive "SHUT THE FUCK UP ASSHOLE" from some of us, but he continued to yell at her. She marched the rest of her way to the microphone and yelled back at him, "THAT'S AN OUTRIGHT LIE AND YOU KNOW IT!" And of course anyone who knows Eileen Myles knows damn well that she is one of the last people we can accuse of being politically correct, and furthermore that she has many male friends. If you read her work those men are celebrated all over her pages. But here we were, faced with a disgruntled, anonymous man USING identity politics to accuse someone of using identity politics who hadn't used identity politics in the first place! Never mind the fact that maybe his poems sucked, NO NO, it HAD to be BECAUSE SHE WAS A MAN-HATING LESBIAN that he didn't get that reading 20 fucking years ago! It's outrageous, this kind of invented slander! This cowardly, vicious attack is a perfect example of how vulnerable women can be as we march into "post identity politics," making way for a tremendous backlash. And the term "post identity politics" is the biggest insult of all, claiming that it was just a phase we were all going through, this sissy idea of being inclusive!

Identity politics! I despise the term! The resulting complacency of its dismissive assumptions are similar to what my grandfather dealt with years ago when he warned that the union at the factory where he worked was too lazy, too eager to make concessions, and would falter. He was right, and it did, and many lives disintegrated into poverty as a result. Just because space was made for writers to be more inclusive for gender, race, etc., does NOT mean we can afford to ignore the possibility that we won't slip back into a time of inequality. In fact Spahr, Young, and others feel we have already arrived at this backslide. And ALSO, and maybe MOST IMPORTANTLY, is that we be vigilant with one another so that ALL are to be included, including those of privilege who have come from power. It's the intelligent decision, I believe, to have TOTAL inclusion! This also means (in my opinion) helping and/or inviting those who have been abusive with their power and privilege in the past to be reformed in the larger sense of equality.

In other words, what is our goal? Do we want everyone to feel that their class and gender and race are not obstacles to fitting into the arts? Or are we more interested in damning others their entire lives for fucking up, taking some asshole statement they made and throwing in their face decade after decade? Because if we do, who at that point is abusing their power?

We must be brave and speak up, or nothing will change, except maybe that things will get worse. A few years ago Kyle Conner published some of my poems in his magazine POETRY BROADSIDE. It was nice to be published, as we all know it's exciting to see our poems in print, and that someone cared enough about our poems to take the time it takes to publish them. But when he handed me the freshly printed magazine it only took me a few seconds to realize that there were no women included. Not one. It was impossible to not notice, or at least I had thought so, and I said so to him right away. And he seemed quite honestly puzzled, as though it hadn't occurred to him. What is my point with this? Ever since reading Spahr and Young's essay "Numbers Trouble" I have been calculating my own personal set of numbers. In doing so I was only interested in listing poets whose work I am blown away by, poets whose work changes me, stays with me, poetry to live with, live by, poetry I cannot live without. More than half my list of poets turned out to be women, no surprise to me. Many of the strongest minds and voices, many of the most courageous poets alive today, as far as I'm concerned, are women.

Am I saying there MUST be women in all magazines? I'm saying I don't see HOW THERE CANNOT BE, that's what I'm saying! How is it possible to overlook the women? We would have to be deaf and blind to not notice them, and it's not just their poems, but their ideas about the work! For instance, I LOVE what Kaia Sand said in a talk she and Carol Mirakove had a few years ago, information that opens the way to essential, real power (posted here):

"I chose the term 'avant-garde' over 'experimental' because 'avant-garde' implies the social side of the work. There are a lot of ways to pitch in with an avant-garde movement--this is an inclusive frame. So many artists have shown us that if you want to extend what's possible, you need to build the ground to walk on--and that's collective action."

When Tim Peterson invited me to coedit EOAGH: Queering Language with kari edwards, Paul Foster Johnson, Erica Kaufman, Jack Kimball and Stacy Szymaszek, you better believe I said YES! A chance to work with some of my favorite living poets to bring together the queer avant-garde was an amazing opportunity! During our time of editing together I attended a party, and I was talking about the project with some friends. A rather drunk grad student (I have no idea who he was and frankly I don't care to know him) overheard the conversation and interrupted by using the term "identity politics" several times, "DON'T YOU THINK THIS WORLD HAS HAD ENOUGH OF IDENTITY POLITICS!" Alcohol is not an excuse, in fact in my opinion it's merely the grease that loosens the truth from people. But it was the very kind of conversation where I did NOT want to come off as politically correct and shut him up and shut him down, but at the same time wanted to make it clear that the value of the anthology was not to separate these poets to say we were better, or deserved more, but to say WE ARE HERE, this avant-garde. Much in the same way EVERYTHING I HAVE IS BLUE was an anthology of working class queer writers to say to the greater queer writing community WE ARE HERE, this avant-garde. At the Philadelphia launch of EOAGH: Queering Language we were fortunate to have Kevin Killian in town for the event. At the microphone he thanked Tim Peterson by saying to him, "You have made the dreams of a middle age man come true because when I was young, we who were gay and lesbian, we were frightened and suspicious of the avant-garde because some members of the avant-garde despised and held in contempt those of us who were gay. And I always hoped there would be a place where we could all come together, and maybe this is it now."

We must work hard with one another to take seriously, and to live up to the equality and fairness we know we all deserve. But sometimes there is a recklessness, a hidden hostility ready to spring on anyone who bears their identity.

Making room for the unheard voices is essential, IT'S VITAL as a matter of fact, for poetry, for going for a loaf of bread down the street, for going for a job, for LIVING! It's not to be taken lightly, and it's not to be wielded for power except the power to make room. Once it's used to humiliate or slander, the generosity it once instilled is negated.

None of us can afford the generous spaces that have been created for us to be done away with. I IMPLORE some of the other writers who have been responding to Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's essay to take a breath and please consider some of what I've said. After reading the opponents to Spahr and Young it's clear to me that some people want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Can we really afford that?

Many thanks to Elizabeth Treadwell for making this additional forum available, and for inviting me to participate.

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Delirious Hem wishes to acknowledge that this is the second version of CAConrad's piece to appear in this space. Thank you for your understanding.