Warning: There will be no technical jargon in this blog entry.

So, I have noticed a proliferation of poet blogs in the universe lately, which, generally, is a good thing. I like hearing from other poets, especially about the frustrating nature of the poetry “business,” such as it is. Here are some (non-comprehensive) links to some interesting poetry blogs: Kim Addonizio’s, Victoria Chang’s, Jeffery Bahr’s, Kelli Russell Agodon’s, and Oliver de la Paz’s.

I am reading some books for school right now, including Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing the Language, Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares, and A Donald Justice Reader. One of the chapter’s of Ostriker’s book is really interesting to me; it deals with violence and anger in women’s writing, and how she thinks women tend to write “victimization” poems where the women passively receive bad treatment from men/husbands/fathers/society etc or “revenge” poems where women are the ones doling out abuse. I have been thinking a lot about how women in my generation can transcend either of these none-too-desirable options – how to respond to violence against women, or to our own anger, without being a victim or an abuser? This is why I keep going back to comic books. For me, the best role models didn’t come from the Bible, or Greek mythology, or fairy tales, all of which pretty much had nothing but women victims and femme fatales. (There are, of course, certain exceptions: imagine my delight when I learned about the character from the Apocrypha, which I borrowed from a Catholic college roommate, of Judith. Don’t know why she didn’t make it into the regular old testaments.) My role models were the slightly alien race of women like Wonder Woman, and Batgirl (don’t ask me why, as a kid I just thought she was the coolest) and later, the female characters in X-Men and even later, characters like Sarah Pezzini from the Witchblade comics and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. These women were feminine without being meek and overly self-sacrificing, and there was no doubt they could fight and overcome villains. The idea of being able to directly confront evil, as opposed to waiting around for someone else to do it for you, has always been very appealing to me. So I write a lot of poems about female comic book heroines, and video game heroines, etc.

I am hoping to someday do an all-comic-book-heroine chapbook, maybe even with illustrations. Wouldn’t that be cool? Yah, apparently poetry book publishers are not clamoring for this kind of subject matter, sadly. Oh well, a girl can dream.