Women Poets

I love browsing around in second hand bookstores; I usually find something that catches my fancy. I even snuffle through the well-used and abused sections of second hand department stores, Salvation Army shops, Goodwill, Value Village and the rest.

Not long ago I came home with a volume titled 20th CENTURY WOMEN”S POETRY, edited by Fleur Adcock and published by Faber. What caught my attention was the blurb on the back claiming, “This anthology of women’s poetry is destined to establish a canon by which other, more partial anthologies will eventually be judged.” Inside I found a good representation of British, American, some Canadian, and a few other English language woman poets. After perusing through the contents, some familiar and some not, I carefully read Adcock’s introduction to discover the thought process behind the collection.

Adcock admits there is no special tradition in women’s poetry, nothing that should make it be seen as something different or separate. The fact remains that for many years men, men who didn’t take women seriously, dominated publishing. The feminine suffix added to poet, producing “poetess,” almost becomes a diminutive; no wonder women poets have dropped its usage.

Women were writing. Some lived in social isolation; some flourished in the limelight of a man; others gained attention by being outrageous, even scandalous. This does not take away from the power of the poetry. There is an excellent mix here of well known poets and those not well known. Some have been almost forgotten. Some seem somewhat dated. All have a quality that still appeals at the turn of another century.

Today women poets are being published without preference or reference to sex. Female poets are being read and taught. They seem to have reached a real equality in the literary world that they never had before.

Still, I believe there is some cause for concern, a trend we should watch with care. The work of women poets, of women writers, may get shunted into the lit section of “women’s bookshops.” In larger stores they may be relegated to the “women’s” section rather than with all poetry. And there is the dismaying trend in universities to make female poets part of “women’s studies,” and thereby creating an unwanted ghetto.

Men and women are one in their humanity, one in their dreams and perceptions, one in their use of language. A poem in itself has no gender. If it does it is as a result of the reader, not the writer. When the waters of two streams come together to form a creek, how can you separate them again? Women have moved from poetesses to poets. There can be no greater injustice than to marginalize them again.

Gender, No Sex

Rather than offering a broad scope of philosophy or literature, this time I want to get down to a small but personal irritant in the English language. In its development English has overcome most of the strictures of gender and number of nouns and pronouns in the language. The most glaring anomaly is the third person singular when gender is not neuter but unknown. Even the present tense verb form changes for the third person singular.

We say that I, you (both singular and plural), and they make but he, she, or it makes. The question raises its head when we refer to a person but not his (or her) sex. See how awkward this gets?

When I was learning the English language (for it's not my mother tongue) I was blithely taught that the masculine "he (or him, his)" when used in this way presumed the inclusion of the feminine "she (or her, hers)." And that explanation of inclusiveness satisfied me for a long time. But a decade or two later the feminist social movement raised a fuss about such language, not only about the third person singular but also about non-gender specific nouns automatically being assigned the masculine singular pronoun. First they did away with suffix identifiers such as -ess, etc. There are no more actresses; they are all actors. Even God in her wisdom will take on the feminine form.

Sometimes it becomes silly and goes overboard, e. g. the use of the term "herstory" when the original "his" doesn't have any connection with gender. Or when a "manhole" becomes a "personhole." You may notice that this is never applied to already derogatory terms; you won't find anyone referred to as a "womaniac" or "personiac" no matter what the sex of the individual.

But back to the gender of person. What do you say when you don't know the gender of the person referred to? "Whatever the doctor tells you, do what he/she says." To go back to the time I was taught English, we were also told that the pronoun form "they, them, theirs" is plural and not to be used for the singular. Then the teachers threw in exceptions: you may use it in the case of singular collective nouns such as "the crowd raise their voices" or "my family always take their vacation." (Note that the verb form also becomes plural.)

I read in a neat little book that the third person plural had been used to fill this gap for a long time, by such people as Shakespeare, the authors of the King James Bible, Jane Austen and others until the latter part of the nineteenth century when there was a concerted effort to regulate the language, an effort that led to the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition and other awkwardnesses. But English with its very adaptable nature will not be regulated.

Therefore, I will end a sentence with a preposition if I need to. I intend to use "they" for the third person singular pronoun if gender is unspecified. But I'll listen to any person who thinks they can find a better way.
Sometimes you can teach this old dog a new trick.

Gender and Poetry

Sometimes, it seems, the old dichotomy that separates women from men is still strong even though it has been some time since we classified writers by gender. We've come a long way from the times that female authors felt they had to write and publish under masculine names to be read and taken seriously. We've finally dropped the designation "poetess" from our lexicon the same way "actress" has disappeared. And on the surface, that's a good thing.

But any real differences have not been obliterated. A writer writes with his whole being, and that includes gender as well as many other characteristics that formed the person. If the writer is true to him/her self (see how awkward this is already?) those traits, including gender, will show. I, as a male, find it impossible to write honestly with a female point of view. I can try to imagine, but only imagine.

For some strange reason, poetry written by women appeals to me more often than that written by men. I don't know why. Perhaps I am more in tune with a feminine insight into daily existence than a masculine outlook. It does not seem to affect any other aspect of my being. This too has become a part of how I express myself.

I have just finished reading two books, one fiction and one non-fiction, about strong women and found myself with strong feelings of empathy. That's what set off this musing. And that brought to mind an incident that happened a long time ago: I was giving a reading to a (mainly Afro-Canadian audience and included, as contrast to my own, several by the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks. I was somewhat taken aback when several of the ladies took me to task. Who was I to try to interpret the work of Ms. Brooks? At the time I thought that it was because she was black, but now again I think it may also have been because she was female, and female sentiment and expression were not expected from a male.

Ah, well. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. The divide has not crumbled completely; in some places it is stronger than ever. With very few exceptions, women write romance and men write porn.