Poetry and Gender: Following “Numbers Trouble”
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:
