Things are winding down here. I'm trying not to think about that too much.
Today I corresponded with editors about two different things I'm writing for two different publications. I felt like a real freelance writer! Of course, they're the only two things I'll have published all year.
Tonight we were talking about gender in poetry, about poems that strongly announce themselves as "male" or "female." It made me think about how in most poems by men, the "gendered" aspect even of very "male" subject matter is in tension with the unmacho--even delicate--act of putting that subject matter in a poem. In other words, the craft of poetry has a natural--or at least conventional--tendancy to balance out the excesses to which stereotypical maleness is prone. Very "female" poetry, on the other hand, doesn't have an automatic mechanism to undercut its own seeming limitedness, so female poets who are drawn to gender-specific subject matter have to work harder to seem inclusive.
Not fair, but interesting. It seems connected to me to the fact that, I guess as a consequence of feminism, a woman can't exactly dress in drag. She can impersonate a man, but that's different. If it's just the clothes, there's not a lot that because of its genderedness you would have to say was being worn in an ironic spirit.
Actually, though, that may be less true than it was last time I thought about it because of the way fashions have changed. Even an outfit I've seen a million women wear, versions of which I've worn myself a million times, like Carharts and a big t-shirt, would probably now "read" to me as a statement. Interesting.
2 comments:
Oh, I dunno Stove, men in drag are impersonating women too. They're even called "female impersonators," which does seem like the flipside of being butch.
Women can do hilariously male things in their poems. Plath does it in "Lady Lazarus" -- she strips down and then turns on the crowd with her laughter. Stoic irony isn't confined to men anymore, and neither is tenderness suddenly turning distant and tough.
But I'm gonna go read some Horace. He makes me feel strong, like a John Wayne movie on TNT.
Right.... I'm thinking this all supports my original point if it bears on it at all.
Which is not to say that men can't be strippers too....
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