Elizabeth Bishop's response is too well known to quote in this company, I
think. While I'm in instinctive sympathy with her and I think 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. And I don't think that's
because say Irish poets, or poets born since 1960, necessarily make a more
cogent and theorisable group than women. Membership of this list should show
anyone how various are British poets or British and Irish poets or young
poets (no Old Codgers' anthologies, I note). So the problem isn't I think
that women-only anthologies are necessarily divisive, it's that women are
denigrated, and people are willing to express their denigration of women. 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. All anthology criteria are arbitrary to a degree --
but a good anthology finds something in the *work* -- even if its a very
contestable thing like "modernism" -- and not in the identity of the poet. I
suppose what I'm saying is I'd like more anthologies of feminist poetry and
fewer of women poets.
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