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:
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:
The autumn 2007 issue of Chicago Review is at press and available to pre-order.
(The issue will be mailed in early October.)
The issue features: the second half of “Rising, Hovering, Falling,” C.D. Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war; Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os; an article on feminism and innovative poetry by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, and a response from Jennifer Ashton; essays by Georges Perec (on realism) and Allen Grossman (on Hart Crane). Plus the next installment of Kent Johnson’s twelve-part critical novella, a review of J.H. Prynne’s “To Pollen.” And much much much more.
The full table of contents is posted as a pdf on CR’s website and is summarized below.
,
Stay updated via RSS (Syndicate).