a response to Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young

Regarding "Numbers Trouble" in the Chicago Review 53:2/3.


Dear Juliana and Stephanie,

I have a number of thoughts regarding your piece in the CR; I am publishing this on my blog, rhubarb is susan, as well as e-mailing this to you privately. I would be happy to enter into correspondence with you, either in private or out on the tubes.

the rhubarb numbers

Since January 2005, I have reviewed one hundred and thirty four human authors, one bird and one computer. Taking the bird as female and the computer as male, I find that seventy-eight of those authors are female. I compute that as 57% female, with a shot-noise of ±6%. I think it is plausible to read Eric's work as a Pygmalion project, in which case the computer is female and my numbers go even higher.

From the sample compiled by Joshua Kotin and Robert Baird, that fraction has been exceeded only by Conjunctions in 1995, and Fence in 2000, although one must be careful because the sample sizes of those two issues are sufficiently small that Poisson noise becomes a problem. In the case of Conjunctions, for example, the underlying gender preference at two-sigma confidence could be as low as 25%.

outliers are political

I believe what is clear is that women are no longer "outliers" in avant garde poetry (contrary to what Ron Silliman claimed in his remarks about Pattie McCarthy, and has claimed in the past about what happens to women after childbearing.) The spread of female representation in avant garde magazines seems to range from 20% to 40%. As my work on rhubarb makes clear, there is an abundance of women writing, and it is not hard at all to "read" contemporary poetry in a gender neutral fashion. "Big hammers", like women-only poetry contests, are today misguided.

At this point, I do not believe that "women in poetry", as a pure numbers game, is a political question. There are many complex sociological factors that we will one day use to explain why the fraction is 30% and not 70%, but these do not seem like questions that one can "organize around". (In your discussion, one thing you do not address is that men submit their work more often and more persistently, and that women, when solicited for material, do not respond as often -- both things that Elisa and I have found working on absent.)

What I find both expected and depressing is that nowhere in your wide-ranging piece is the elephant in the room addressed. I was just at the CR release celebration, and while my eye could not detect whether the crowd was 30% women or 70% women, it was hard not to notice that all of us -- with, I believe, the sole exception of Roberto -- were white. (I apologize if I err here -- the party was good, and the wine was abundant.) Similar experiences over and over again at the readings I attend here in Chicago; if you look solely for African-American representation, it becomes more disturbing still.

I am explicitly not suggesting you (or the CR) are biased against writers of color in any knowing or unknowing fashion. Indeed, in reading your Transformation, Juliana, it is quite clear to me that you know and understand the complexities of race better than I. Am I sad, though, that you did not apply your acumen to this very neighboring question of which I believe you can not be unaware? Yes.

[Update. Juliana drops me a line: "just quickly on the race issue... yes. i/we agree. race is really way worse. we say so in the paper: "We did not chart out race and class as we did this. But we can assure you without a doubt that racial and class representation is dramatically skewed toward white middle-class writers in all the contemporary writing scenes we examined, way more than gender. And that this also has a lot to say about the failures of feminism." (this is in the "Methodology" note on pg. 109.)]

I do think that today the question for the avant garde community is not "why 40%" but rather "why zero?" (or 5%, or 10% -- but not much more.) I really want to see this addressed -- and I believe, incidentally, that the questions we are asking about women are enriched by including race.

the secret life of pussipo

Let's drop the numbers talk for a moment.

Occasionally I will gossip with women in the poetry community and I will be told hair-raising tales of sexism and discrimination. I take these tales seriously, although I tend to find that most revolve around previous generations. (I would not feel comfortable calling-out an old man like Ron on views that he has somewhat inherited from the state of culture in his youth; in some sense, I feel that I can not argue with Ron, but I can argue with men of my generation -- I am 28.)

Let's talk about pussipo. I have very mixed feelings about this list. I know that women who operate blogs generally have to exercise some pretty extreme censorship mechanisms to prevent sexually violent comments. And the majority of women I know who maintains a listserv or blog presence in the poetry community have had to deal with stalkers and deeply inappropriate behavior. The one time I used (briefly, and no longer!) an online persona that was "read" as female, it was an immensely educational experience.

So on the one hand I celebrate your walled garden.

On the other hand, I feel personally affronted; I feel judged and sentenced by the worst representatives of men. I mean, I do not seethe away, this was a passing feeling when I was first informed about the list, but I think my response is reasonable. Instead of restricting membership, why can the list not set limits on posting? Why can it not accept men as members while holding them (and everyone else) to the standards we expect?

I am quite sure that doing so would probably involve kicking a lot of people out, but then again, is this not exactly the kind of political actions we should be taking as a community? I don't want to make an issue out of this, I am not demanding anything; I am just leaving a note at the gate of the cloister.

i dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none

I want to elaborate on a comment I left with Johannes Göransson:

While I myself am combative, outspoken, &c. -- I do recognize that "being a poet" as an educated, white, male author, is not threatening to people even if I do "behave badly". It sort of "fits" preconceptions and while I believe the editors I have worked with are authentic people, it is clear that other kinds of writers in my position do not have these properties, and that they are hurt by it in a sort of "death of a thousand cuts" fashion.

I think this is the crux of the issue. The age demands an image of its poets: if you "act like" a poet, you will receive attention and publication. It is vital to be clear that today society's images of the poet includes women.

It is just as vital to assert that these images are very particular. While the number of male modes (for whites -- compare the treatment of Amiri Baraka to Fredrick Seidel) is broad to the point of freedom, it is, in my experience that women do not have this freedom. While I in general choose poets I like to review, it is clear to me that I have to filter -- not against men, but against a "kind" of poetry that women are "allowed" -- encouraged, rewarded -- to write. I addressed this issue explicitly in a series of essays on Cole Swensen (1, 2, 3 and finally 4, after which I mostly STFU about poor Cole.)

What I thus see as the "important work" that we can do as feminists together is not counting numbers, but looking explicitly and deeply at what those numbers are counting. Again, I should be clear: I am not claiming this is all you are doing, and I acknowledge your work in other parts of the field, as well as the work of others who, incidentally, count numbers.

I think we need to be proactive in celebrating women (and men) who are writing against these received ideas about what a poet can do. I want women to write like men, and I want men to write like women (I do not, contrary to what is commonly accepted, consider writing as a gay man a "substitute.") And I want us to celebrate each other for those moves.

To me that is both a feminist demand, and a demand of the best of the avant garde, and I am happy to sign my name to it.

Yours,

Simon

Update. Dale Smith has one of the smartest responses to the piece I've seen yet online (although there are plenty of other excellent ones as well.) The title is "Re: The Name & the Paradox of its Contents", but I much prefer taking it to be "I am a footnote."

Update. More responses worth checking out. Ange Mlinko at the Foundation broadens the conversation; I agree -- if there was a "shorter Simon" in this post, it would be for us to take the discussion beyond the numbers, and to ask uncomfortable questions that don't have the quantative aura of statistics. K. Lorraine Graham also has some excellent thoughts in the personal history mode, and also is hosting an excellent conversation in the comments.