Kit, hi there. I found your statement "I suppose what I'm saying is
I'd like more anthologies of feminist poetry and fewer of women poets"
interesting but like Geraldine I find it a bit tricky because of the
problem it would bring up about what is feminist poetry, written by
either sex? Would Carol Anne's 'Mrs. Shakespeare' qualify while
Geraldine's poems wouldn't because of their refusal to over simplify?
If the main subject in a poem is 'women' does that make it feminist?
Then it would depend on having the right 'attitude' and 'opinion' etc.
Nevertheless I think I can see what you are getting at - a focus on
poetry that deals with the issue without being stamped and slot.

You also said:
"While I'm in instinctive sympathy... with
Geraldine on this issue, the problem I have with it is that it only
seems to
be gender groupings that attract this response -- that they're
divisive and
so on. If people want to make anthologies based on nationality or date
of
birth, they're very rarely accused of divisiveness."

I don't agree. Anthologies based on country or date of birth are
mostly a way of managing all the poetry out there. If I have an
interest in French poetry, for example, then i don't want to have to
trawl through an anthology that contained a mixture of nationalities,
and of course the choice would be very limited. But WO anthologies
don't work like that. It's almost like treating women as a different
species.

Of course the main push for WO anthologies, although it might have
started on the radical fringe, ended up finding its niche within
mainstream circles. This is because it fitted in snugly with a
mainstream obsession with personal identity, weather of gender or
race. The push with Brit innovation was the other way - the flight
either away from the straitjacket of identity or a dive into
identity's complex heart. The influence of intellectual post-feminism
was also a lot stronger on innovative and experimental scenes than on
the mainstream, for obvious reasons. Of course the exception to the
endemic mainstream WO anthology was Maggie's 'Out of Everywhere', a
brilliant collection of work which, if I remember correctly, was
almost totally ignored by mainstream critics, feminist or not.

Another important issue you raised:
"I think a similar problem afflicts anthologies based on race (rather
than
nationality), but people only mutter at those, because it does look
rather
grotesque and bullying to be found saying "those black British poets
-- none
of them any good", whereas many women are prominent enough and
established
enough to be picked on."

This is even more dangerous territory but I've been here before so
what the hell. I agree that it's much easier to pick on a writer who
is, as you put it, 'established enough', man or women - I feel much
more comfortable attacking Sean O'Brien than i do some 2nd division
writer. But being critical of a black poet has got me into trouble
before, as if I was criticizing their poetry because of their colour.
This is the stupid side to mainstream counter polemic and propaganda.
A few years back our Language Club in Plymouth put on a reading in
conjunction with Apples & Snakes featuring 4 women poets, three of
whom were black. This was also supposed to be partly funded by the BBC
as part of their 'Who Are You' (or whatever it was called) series on
TV, about finding your roots - the connection was tenuous to say the
least and we never received a penny from them anyway. Three of the
poets were what you could call Performance poets and the quality of
their work was what you'd expect from that. One of the readers however
was not a performance poet even though she was presented as one. Her
poems were normal page poems and she read them as such, in a quite and
unassuming voice. They were poor poems, no different to that written
by thousands of poets up and down the country in little local poetry
groups and writing classes. So why was she there. She was there
because she was female and black. In a conversation in the pub
afterwards I was told that 'I couldn't say that'. Apart from anything
else I find this example of positive discrimination patronizing and
pointless - I think it is actually, in a strange inversion, an insult
both to the individual and to the black community.

I will now plan my last supper on Earth as I fully expect to face the
firing squad in the morning.

Tim A.