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:

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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:

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Chicago Review’s Autumn issue (53:2/3) is back from the press and avail­able now for only twelve dol­lars. Buy a copy today!

POETRY in the issue includes Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (enti­tled “The Book of Adam”); “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” the second half of CD Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war (the first half of which was pub­lished in CR 51:3); and poems by Larissa Szpor­luk, William Fuller, Sarah Gri­d­ley, Roberto Har­ri­son, Mark Tardi, John Peck, Erín Moure, Oana Avasili­chioaei, and Elisa Sampedrin.

FIC­TION includes five short sto­ries by Peter Markus and Jede­diah Berry’s “Minus, His Heart.”

CRIT­I­CISM in the issue includes a defense of real­ism by Georges Perec and a long con­sid­er­a­tion of Hart Crane by Allen Grossman.

The issue also includes a three-​part con­ver­sa­tion on gender in con­tem­po­rary poetry, with an essay by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, a response by Jen­nifer Ashton, and a note by Joshua Kotin and Robert P. Baird.

REVIEWS in the issue include:

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