You know, I forgot one that works whether you’re a male or female poet: Mentor a female poet!

As a quick note, while poetry on a national scale may be a boy’s club, here in NJ it seems to be more of a matriarchy, with much of the interesting editing and promotional work being driven by women.

One other issue I find is how, still, it is women’s poetry if they write about say: motherhood. But if a man writes about fatherhood it is universal? Guys read both genders. Please!!

While there is a bravado spin to that line, it strikes me as a quality I don’t recognize often with some other male poets I know, many of whom feel singularly underappreciated, unrecognized themselves, and so it makes their world view smaller, more petty.

If he is grousing about how the New York presses or the Iowa-dominated magazines have overlooked his genius, he’s not likely to be inclined to praise other contemporaries (and here I would say especially women or minorities).

And for the male poets who have game, some seem hell-bent on establishing lineage, which is awfully male-dominated as they unwind through the generations. I got this feeling in reading Dean Young’s wonderful The Art of Recklessness, in which he offers some token nods to women poets, but is consumed drawing back from Ashbery to O’Hara to the Dadaists (Breton, above all), and then mainlining back to the Romantics (Keats in a big way). He glances off Gertrude Stein (a more “reckless” writer, I’m not sure of), and I was kind of hoping that he’d stop there, with her, rather than trying to go back to the predictable father-hunt.

Essentially to recognize someone else’s game requires some generosity and humility. Of course, the saddest part of it is that it really costs nothing to pay that kind of respect, that there is no diminishment in that word of praise or admiration.