I love it when people make weird, unsupportable broad statements – like “contemporary women’s poetry isn’t interesting” (Insert eye-roll by me here – honey, you’re just not reading the right books) or “Genre writing can’t be good.“
Elisa does a great job of talking about genre writing here and I had to pop up and add my two cents.
Genre doesn’t matter. Surprising and interesting writing matters. And I would say, sadly, that tooooo many “realistic” literary fiction books are both uninteresting and not terribly well-written. Plot – dare I say such a dirty word – matters. Characters matter. You can have both. My friend Felicity thinks that “realistic” literary fiction may even be on its way out. I mean, you’ve read “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” right? They’re just edging their way out of the mainstream bit by little bits, and critics are all up there saying “this is great!” Is it any wonder, in our post-apocalyptic-seeming lives, that we want more, well…wonder?
I think I’ve said here before that my favorite fiction writers by and large could be considered “genre” writers. Here’s a list of some of my favorite books of fiction:
Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin, Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen, Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake and After Dark, Osamu Dazai’s Blue Bamboo, AS Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories…all of them have something a little genre, a little cross-the-line-into-an-alternate-reality, a little speculative aspect. (AS Byatt’s Possession crosses the line into the Victorian romance/mystery genre, I think.) Some of this has to do with what I read and loved growing up – a lot of Madeleine L’Engle, a lot of Andrew Lang’s fairy books and large tomes of Greek mythology. I liked to program computers – I read some of Asimov’s short stories (my Dad’s books, of course) when I was seven or eight – and I liked to play video games. I may not have been the poster child for “average girl,” perhaps, but I think there were enough girls liked me who would have been more interested in comic books if they’d had any useful female characters, who tried to find in books stories of remarkable girls doing remarkable things. In fact, I think I’m still trying to find books like that.

It occurs to me as I write that this may be why my books of poetry get passed up by mainstream publishers and contests – well, they have references to Japanese anime, obscure folk tales, comic books and computer programming – my poetry gets all marked up with “speculative” and “genre” fingertips.