From a foot­note to Jen­nifer Ashton’s “The Num­bers Trou­ble with Num­bers Trouble” (PDF) in Chicago Review 52:2/3:

During the proof­read­ing process, an editor at Chicago Review sug­gested an inter­est­ing objec­tion to my read­ing of Sloan. His con­cern was that the effort to bring together some common aspect of the poets’ sit­u­a­tion and some aspect of the poetry doesn’t auto­mat­i­cally get you the essen­tial­ism I’m crit­i­ciz­ing. To make his point, he sug­gested a hypo­thet­i­cal coun­terex­am­ple with a geo­graph­i­cal instead of a gender focus—an anthol­ogy of Chicago Poets. You could, he argued, think there was such a thing as Chicago School (a shared aes­thetic) or you could think that there was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing work being pro­duced in Chicago, or you could want to make vis­i­ble a par­tic­u­lar com­mu­nity of writ­ers who hap­pened to live in Chicago, but you wouldn’t be required to think that the geo­graph­i­cal con­tin­gen­cies of their Chicago-​based sit­u­a­tion were some­how the essence of the writ­ing. Well, yes and no.

…Read More…

Over at Deliri­ous Hem, Eliz­a­beth Tread­well has orga­nized “Dim Sum,” a slate of 14 responses to Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young’s “Numbers Trouble” [PDF] and Jen­nifer Ashton’s “The Num­bers Trou­ble with Num­bers Trouble” [PDF], both of which appeared in Chicago Review 53:2/3.

Other responses to the debate are avail­able here.

Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950-1952), at MoMA.
(Photo: The Willem de Koon­ing Foundation/Artists Rights Soci­ety (ARS), New York)

Some­thing must be in the water: now New York mag­a­zine has run an arti­cle by Jerry Saltz on gender in the art world. The num­bers there look even worse than they do for poetry. Saltz counts 400 works of art on dis­play on the fourth and fifth floors of MoMA, where the museum dis­plays art from its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion of paint­ing and sculp­ture. Of these, four­teen are by women, or 3.5%. Count­ing artists rather than art­works, Saltz comes up with 11 out of 137, or 8%. (The dates of those pieces run from 1879 to 1969, an obvi­ously impor­tant factor that Saltz doesn’t take enough account of, though see below for some­one who does.)

Here are more stats from the article’s sidebar:

The new Chicago Review—click here to buy the issue—includes a suite of arti­cles that dis­cuss gender rep­re­sen­ta­tion in poetry pub­lish­ing. The arti­cles include “Numbers Trouble” by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young and a response by Jen­nifer Ashton, as well as a short note on gender rep­re­sen­ta­tion in lit­er­ary mag­a­zines that I wrote with Joshua Kotin. (UPDATE: The arti­cles are now avail­able as PDFs at the CR web­site.) “Numbers Trouble” is a response to an ear­lier arti­cle by Ashton pub­lished in Amer­i­can Lit­er­ary His­tory and enti­tled “Our Bodies, Our Poems.” Ashton’s arti­cle was itself a response, at least in part, to Spahr and Young’s “Foulipo,” which was per­formed at the 2005 noulipo con­fer­ence in Los Angeles.

The Poetry Foundation’s Har­riet blog pub­lished a spate of posts yes­ter­day dis­cussing the arti­cles. Har­riet editor Emily Warn intro­duces the posts and offers her own take on the ques­tions raised. Har­riet blog­gers Ange Mlinko and A.E. Stallings also com­ment. (Update, 12/3/07: Stephen Burt has con­tributed a response at Har­riet as well. Update, 12/5/07: Click here for Burt’s second response.)

Update [2/29/08]: “Bachelorettes, Even,” a ver­sion of Jen­nifer Scappettone’s response to Jen­nifer Ashton’s “Our Bodies, Our Poems” (both of which were first pre­sented as talks at 2006’s “How To Read. What To Do” con­fer­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago) has now appeared in Modern Philol­ogy 105. Scappettone’s response was the first to make the con­nec­tion between Ashton’s argu­ment and Spahr and Young’s “Foulipo.” The arti­cle is also notable for immor­tal­iz­ing this blog in a foot­note in an aca­d­e­mic journal.

The Spahr/Young and Ashton arti­cles have been dis­cussed on sev­eral other blogs as well. I’ll try to keep an updated list of sub­stan­tive com­ments here. The list so far: