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”