Note: Blogger is doing some weird-ass stuff in the last few days, including deleting this post and comments on this post and the previous one, so if it appears twice, I apologize, blogger keeps erasing it…and I can barely upload a new file with blogger, it just won’t update! Grrrr…
Annie Finch has some good points about the numbers game….
In this e-mail from the Wompo list re: the Chicago Review/gender bias debate…I got her permission to post it here. I think she is saying great things about editors taking responsibility for their content – what do you think?
“I know we had a long discussion about this issue–ratios of women to men being published–on WOMPO a few years back. Does anyone have an idea where it was? I’ve been searching the archives but I can’t find it. I’d love to re-send a post or two I remember writing at that time…
in a nutshell, though, I’d just say what’s been said before: to blame the slushpile for the contents of a journal (or book, or reading series, or anything else) is naive at best, willfully ignorant at worst. To edit seriously is to create, not simply to mirror. Passive mirroring of the slushpile is not the norm; it is a choice of the status quo, an active and political act.
I’m not surprised that, as pointed out in the article and blog, the submissions to many journals skew heavily male, and of course white; that has been true of just about everything I’ve ever edited or run. But the submissions are just the starting point and don’t have to bear much relation at all to the finished product. Otherwise, what is the creative satisfaction of editing? Shaping each of my edited journals or books, I have paid central attention to race as well as gender. It’s inconvenient and difficult and often fails. And afterwards it rarely seems enough. But how could I not? It amazes me how an editor could not, and aim to have a living, exciting, responsible, mature journal or book as a finished product. But it seems many of them don’t.
And of course, patterns of acceptance become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Chicago Review’s ratio of 1/3 is pretty much the standard across the board lately, it seems: 1/3 women is considered perfectly “normal” on a masthead. I bet it relates to the psychological tests that show when there are more than 1/3 women in a room men feel as if the room is mostly full of women. And where race is concerned, I doubt they’ve even done those studies yet. . .
I remember when I first found out that things were just about as sexist in the innovative poetry world as they were in the formalist poetry world, in spite of the high-profile exceptions (Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Harryette Mullen, etc). At first I was really surprised. Then I realized it made total sense.I’m glad this discussion has finally come out into the “mainstream” literary world. It might spur more women to take on the kinds of active literature-shaping projects that will begin to make a difference.
Annie”
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
ka
Thanks for posting this.
shanna
yeah, thanks, i’m not on that list. many of the same points i’ve seen in other discussions, but she’s articulated them very succinctly here. 🙂
personally, i have decided to be a little more proactive in my submissions….as soon as i have something to submt.
Jennifer
Maybe I’m completely missing the point. But something about this — “Shaping each of my edited journals or books, I have paid central attention to race as well as gender.” — disquiets me. Perhaps she meant that as an editor, she winnowed down the slush to the pool of submissions she would be equally proud to publish and THEN looked at gender and race. In the service of balance and diversity. Which I suppose is admirable. I would be curious to know what trumped what, though, and if she considered the author’s demographic when approaching their work as opposed to afterwards. Naive, I know, but I guess I just see the editor’s task as presenting the best work available, period. Of course, that’s a subjective standard too, whichever way you slice it, and personal bias will inevitably come to bear but if a publication is serving a political agenda instead of an artistic one, I’d sure like to know up front. As in, “Year’s Best Poetry Representing As Few White Males As Possible”.
jeannine
This comment has been removed by the author.
jeannine
Dear Jen,
I think she’s just saying that editors need to question their own “this makes me feel cozy” feelings and make sure they are really taking the best – not just the most familiar-feeling, most comfortable-making, poetry by people just like them. I mean, I’m a chick, I tend to be more interested in women’s poetry than men’s. (Sorry guys. Kiss kiss!) But if I’m the editor of a big-ole-powerful poetry mag, and I’ve got an issue where it’s an 80 percent female issue, for instance, maybe I’d need to take a look at WHY I was taking so many poems from women and not so many from men. It would only be resposible to say, hey, maybe I’ve got too many WASP-y poems, because I use WASP-y language in my own work, maybe I need to get a little diverse. So it’s an exercise is self-knowledge, and not editing lazily, that I think she’s advocating.