Poetry Cheesecake

My dear friend and co-editor of Weave, Laura Davis, talked about a very interesting topic over on her blog, Laura Without Labels a few weeks ago at this point - women as both smart and sexy, and is it possible to effectively present yourself as both at the same time.

Laura wrote about this topic primarily as a member of the skeptical community, but her post got me to thinking about how, from my experience, I am perceived as a woman off the page in poetry.

As you may or may not be aware, I run and host a poetry cabaret with my darling friend Crystal called The TypewriterGirls, and I must say that we have had some pretty darn lovely ladies and gents at our shows. Crystal and I always find some kind of costume to wear for our shows, often ones that could arguably be described as "sexy".

Anyway, whereas Crystal and I often look oddly sexy at TypewriterGirls shows, we stopped short of doing a show about sex where we wouldn't mention herpes or necrophilia, but rather would try to actually be sexy. We (or maybe it was just I) even had an idea for a flier that would have involved strategically placed typewriters.


In the end, as I said, we opted not to do a show about sexiness, in part, I think, because Crystal writes very lewd, weird, semi-offensive comedy, and it probably wouldn't have worked out anyway, but mostly because we didn't want to reduce the TypewriterGirls to poetry girl cheesecake. I don't know if this is at all a common occurrence in the poetry world, this idea of pretty poet girl as primarily pretty girl and secondarily poet (I do recall the great Fence debacle of '05), but especially where readings are concerned I see where it could be problematic.

To be fair, we do, I think, get a somewhat larger audience in part because we're cute girls who (sometimes) dress cute, and in that way it works to our advantage. However, I know that Crystal and I both desire to be seen as poets first, cute girls second, and while most men don't have short skirts to take advantage of on stage, they do have an establishment that they still seem to have a majority stake in.

Men also seem (whether this is accurate or not) to either be more confident than women about their writing or have a greater desire to publish. Laura and I probably receive twice as many submissions from men and as from women for Weave. I have been told by a male editor that for every ten submissions from a man, he receives one from a woman. To that I say - DANG.

I know a lot of amazing female writers, but it's true that many of them just don't send their work out, and I'm not certain why that is because honestly, it's a problem I've never had. I've been submitting my work regularly since my senior year of college.

I would, of course, be interested to hear others weigh in on this -- is this disparity because men are encouraged to publish more than women? Is it because there are just more men writing than women (I seriously doubt this)? Is it because women do see publishing as male dominated? Or is it because Laura and I are just so cute that men want to be near us via their poetry?

Lifting Belly High

Over the past three days I had the great fortune of attending the literary conference Lifting Belly High: A Conference on Women's Poetry Since 1900. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. There was a point last night when Crystal and I were hugging each other and crying, we were so moved by this event and the amazing women we met there.

One of the panels I attended was a panel on Rachel Blau DuPlessis a poet and scholar who has done amazing critical work on feminist writing and is in the process of writing a long-form poem (and by long form I mean that it currently is 3 books long) called Drafts. One of the speakers at the panel talked specifically about DuPlessis' use of footnotes in Drafts, and this discussion has only further excited me in my reading of this body of work. Drafts is far from the easiest poem I have ever read, but is clearly layered in ways that I am enjoying discovering.

I also got to meet Dr. DuPlessis while at the conference. I hope I didn't gush too embarrassingly.

The panel Fairytales and Epics was also fascinating. I am very interested in how women writers utilize myth, folklore, epic, fairytale, and religion in our poetry -- some of my favorite poet friends do this in their writing, and I always love seeing the way that they look at the myth - as Dr. DuPlessis said, "criticism becomes the heart of the myth." It says a lot about us as people and as women, how we reinvent the mythology we have received.

I got the chance to talk to two of the panelists after the panel; Julie Weeks, a scholar from Notre Dame who studies fairytale, primarily in British women's poetry and who had some really good ideas regarding my research which I am itching to take a look at, and Claudia Emerson, one of my poet heroes. Julie came out for tea with Crystal and me and we talked about Romania. It was lovely.

There was a roundtable of Feminist Presses that I also attended. It ended up being one of the most encouraging parts of the conference for me (though there were many of those!) because every single one of the panelists talked about how community building is important to them and they consider it part of their duty as a feminist press. This is one of the principals Laura and I founded Weave on, which, by virtue of our commitment to having at least 50% of our contributor list be female and the mere fact the Laura and I are female, I consider to be feminist.

One of the biggest highlights of the conference for me was getting to meet Judith Johnson, an amazing poet and performer, and also the editor and founder of 13th Moon. I can't think of any other way to say this -- I love Judith Johnson. She's warm and intelligent and fiery and truly works to empower women through her writing and publishing efforts. I hope I get to spend time with her again.

The only downside to the conference was the almost complete homogeneity of the participants. I would say 80-85% of us were white women, and then there was an even split on the other 15% of men and women of color. There has been a lot of talk already of how this can be changed. It was really nice to see this shortcoming acknowledged and to actually talk about ways to remedy it. Hopefully we will act on these ideas.

I could go on and on, and may in an additional entry, but I wanted to get all of this written out while it was still fresh in my mind. I've been so excited and so nervous over the past few days that I have had difficulty eating, and now I'm heading out to Windber with Phat Man Dee for Blair and Renee's baby shower!!

Busy busy.