Tuesday Confession: In Which Things Don't Get Done, Feminisms, and Closed Doors
You'd think, after my last post, full of go-get-em-ness, that I would have gotten a ton done this weekend. Sadly, I spent the last several sunny, beautiful, 80+ degree days sleeping off a summer cold, with, I'm afraid, a bad attitude on top of it. Grump grump grump. The dog days of summer indeed. (The dog days are over, the song goes in my head, the dog days are done...)
Confession #1: I've been trying to write some fiction. It's slow going, much slower than poetry, and harder to feel happy with what I've been doing - you don't get that feeling of completion, and I'm much less confident in my prose skills than my poetry skills. So I wrote a couple of paragraphs, that I'll probably have to re-write. Blech.
Confession #2: Sometimes I feel that as a person with lady-parts, I am just dealing with worse odds, not just in the poetry business, but it all the business of my life, over and over again. Celia makes some good points in her blog post here. Some parts of this feeling may have to do with several books I've read in contemporary poetry and fiction that were highly overpraised by "people in charge" and were just miserable, sad, boring, and un-fun reading - and they all happened to be written by men.
Confession #3: I haven't sent out poems lately. This may have to do with #2: the feeling "why bother when they're just going to publish somebody in their clique/coterie who is probably more, you know, male than me?" Jeffery Bahr said something kind lately in one of his posts - about why the Dickman twins were getting so much attention - "OK, I think that Seth and Tricia and Elisa and Jeannine and Rebecca and . . . write better stuff than these guys. But, I also think that most of the 50 Best New Poets do too. I really don't get how this works." The whole post is here. I agree, and his confusion is also mine - especially after reading hundreds of poetry books for book reviews for five or six years now. In a fair and logical poetry world, based solely on quality of poetry, Rebecca Loudon would be getting as much attention as Ben Lerner, and Kristy Bowen and Elisa Gabbert would be getting the awards, grants, and praise as often as the twins. (Let me point out, I also love Jeffery's poetry and think it is under-appreciated, and he is male. So. It's not just a girl thing.)
It does feel that so much of the poetry world, the awards and attention given by the folks in charge, is coterie and cliquery and some mysterious old-boy network. Some writers would say we should take away their power by creating our own power structures - I know Kristy, and Collin, and Reb Livingston have all written about this on their blogs - but without power, time and money, how is that a realistic goal? It all feels to me like climbing some slippery ice mountain. With a blindfold.
Confession #1: I've been trying to write some fiction. It's slow going, much slower than poetry, and harder to feel happy with what I've been doing - you don't get that feeling of completion, and I'm much less confident in my prose skills than my poetry skills. So I wrote a couple of paragraphs, that I'll probably have to re-write. Blech.
Confession #2: Sometimes I feel that as a person with lady-parts, I am just dealing with worse odds, not just in the poetry business, but it all the business of my life, over and over again. Celia makes some good points in her blog post here. Some parts of this feeling may have to do with several books I've read in contemporary poetry and fiction that were highly overpraised by "people in charge" and were just miserable, sad, boring, and un-fun reading - and they all happened to be written by men.
Confession #3: I haven't sent out poems lately. This may have to do with #2: the feeling "why bother when they're just going to publish somebody in their clique/coterie who is probably more, you know, male than me?" Jeffery Bahr said something kind lately in one of his posts - about why the Dickman twins were getting so much attention - "OK, I think that Seth and Tricia and Elisa and Jeannine and Rebecca and . . . write better stuff than these guys. But, I also think that most of the 50 Best New Poets do too. I really don't get how this works." The whole post is here. I agree, and his confusion is also mine - especially after reading hundreds of poetry books for book reviews for five or six years now. In a fair and logical poetry world, based solely on quality of poetry, Rebecca Loudon would be getting as much attention as Ben Lerner, and Kristy Bowen and Elisa Gabbert would be getting the awards, grants, and praise as often as the twins. (Let me point out, I also love Jeffery's poetry and think it is under-appreciated, and he is male. So. It's not just a girl thing.)
It does feel that so much of the poetry world, the awards and attention given by the folks in charge, is coterie and cliquery and some mysterious old-boy network. Some writers would say we should take away their power by creating our own power structures - I know Kristy, and Collin, and Reb Livingston have all written about this on their blogs - but without power, time and money, how is that a realistic goal? It all feels to me like climbing some slippery ice mountain. With a blindfold.
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