The Turn Towards the Cultural, Away from the Political

There's been a controversy in the world of poetry blogs about an article in the Chicago Review by Juliana Sphar and Stephanie Young entitled "Numbers Trouble" that reminds me of everything that rubs me the wrong way about so-called "contemporary/avant-garde/innovative writing" and feminism. To sum up this long and tedious controversy over which much digital ink has been spilled: Jennifer Ashton wrote an article basically saying, "Wow, the gender gap in contemporary poetry has really closed, hasn't it?! [as judged by looking at anthologies and the like] to which Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young respond, "No, it certainly has not! We've rifled though anthologies! We've crunched the numbers! And the outcome? We women, share a foul cultural lot!" This is not a terribly interesting topic of discussion for me, but what I find striking is the shit storm of controversy it's generated on the inter-nets.

Striking and symptomatic the tendency of both poetry and feminism to argue passionately for cultural representation and confuse this with politics. I'm talking about poetry and feminism here as academic disciplines, as groups comprised of individual practitioners, as practices that spawn ideologies, and as ideologies that spawn practices. It's not that I think that the cultural under-representation of women is unimportant but I find the total focus of the poetry community on issues of representation, rather than issues of politics really troubling. Instead of crunching numbers and blaming nebulous sexist forces in the world of editorship, isn't it more useful to ask ourselves whether there are conditions in women's lives that keep them from existing in literary communities and publishing more? I would point out too that the question of publishing in the innovative/avant-garde context here is a very salient one because in contrast to other genres like fiction (although this is becoming less and less true of literary fiction), poetry is not only a gift economy but you're friends are mainly the ones who publish you, so that literary community and innovative writing exist in a tautological relationship to one anther. Aren't women still disproportionately burdened with all the chores of motherhood, full-time jobs, and housework even when in fairly equal partnerships? The material factors that would make a woman too stultified or too tired to write at the end of the day are the material of politics and those go curiously unmentioned in this type of discussion about cultural representation.