Said what we said

As someone who can't get enough of reading comments on comments on comments on blogs, even I found Erika Staiti's new project, Said what we said, gigantic and exhausting. Which is not to say also important and impressive. At more than 250 pages on gender alone, OK, it will take a while to get to the end.

(For those who aren't in medias res, Erika has pulled together all of the conversations on a lot of blogs into a single document of an online conversation, showing how the conversation developed. For race, she follows the discussion of a flarfian poem performed by Michael Magee two years ago that started a conversation on language and racism and whether racist language can be appropriated in an anti-racist context. For gender, she pulls together the conversation around "Numbers Trouble" by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young in the Chicago Review, which took the low representation of female poets in poetry journals as a jumping off point to discuss women and poetry.)

Some of the discussion around the publication of women (and granted I've only read 20% of the conversation at this point) really rang true for me as a female poet and as the editor of an online poetry journal. For instance, the idea that women are published less than men could only be due to one of two things: sexism by male editors or lack of drive by female poets. Of course it's more complicated than that (and the discussion acknowledges that). As an editor, I do pay attention to the ratio of men to women in There (it's been pretty 50-50, but I have a very small sample size). And while I have solicited many of the women published in the journal, I have also solicited men, and I have also received work from men and women that I don't know. But I have noticed that creating a community of women poets, which has grown out of my relationship with Mills College, does seem to make it easier to find women poets and easier to solicit work from them and easier for them to hear about There as a publication where their work would be positively received. Now as a poet who is also a woman, I have found that I'm not always as active, as perhaps I should be, to send my work out to publications. But I don't know if that is a Woman Problem or if it is a Really Long Poem That I Don't Know How To Break Into Discrete Units For Publication Problem. How much is me, and how much is female? And I'd like to think that it's about me as a human, and not me as a person with ovaries.