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You asked a question, "can you sex a poem" and I came up with a plausible way of trying to answer that question. Whether it works, I have no idea. It would be interesting to correlate your guesses with any answers it may give. The answers it gives may prove or disprove the present of an androgyne; that's science for you. Together with Jane's statement, it's given me a way of thinking about Content and Voice that works for me. So a reductive method can be used with others to bootstrap upwards to a fuller understanding. I wonder if this method could be used to investigate the poetic predecessors of poets using word frequencies as well? Get enough data together and I suspect you could. I agree with a lot of what Jane is saying. Back when I first started writing in earnest I chose, amongst others, Adrienne Rich as as an archetype who I followed for a while. I am conscious now of having followed male poets when I was still bootstrapping myself into something like a writerly condition. Shakespeare, the Romantics and the Kalevala dominated my early reading. Are there any male poets writing *now who seek female predecessors? I Regards Roger On 9/30/06, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > If you didn't know any better, you might well pick the Molly Bloom > soliloquy from Ulysses, or the bits of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet > that are about childbirth, as being by a woman. Marjorie Wellish or > Susan Howe or Laura Riding might be male. Alaric Sumner might be > either. > > I'm not sure, really, what the point of that exercise might be, since > gender is so often in the eye of the beholder. Surely it's a a pretty > reductive way of reading, looking for gender markers; surely > imagination plays in a writerly self? After all, we're talking about > the writing, aren't we? > > All best > > A > > > > On 9/30/06, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > well, yes. That's why I said probably. I think any program would be > > hard pushed to tell the gender if you analysed 3 word epigraphs - then > > again, people reveal themselves in their writing more than we might > > think. After all, we are talking about the writing aren't we? You seem > > to verge into something else at some point below. > > > > All this - and the below - are mere assertions and blow hard unless > > actually tested. Now that'd be interesting. > > > > Roger > > > > -- > Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au > Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com > Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com > -- http://www.badstep.net/ http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/ Suspicion breeds confidence