In today’s Guardian in Ruth Padel: ‘Poetry has a responsibility to look at the world’, she says,
On its own, a burning moral issue never made any poem good, and often makes one worse. A poem must first of all be a good poem; something you make as well (as inventively/imaginatively/beautifully/convincingly/technically) as you can. It’s got to work in an interesting, fresh way as a poem. Its voice has to control the tones and resonance. If it’s not a good poem it’s letting poetry down as well as letting down the moral issue you want it to address.
For her book that mixes prose and poems, for 7 years she
researched birds, the physiology of magnetite – which helps animals navigate (and which we don’t have) – the migration of dragonflies, sharks, lemurs and butterflies. The historical stuff: Troy, Greece, America, the Irish diaspora. And the spiritual and psychological dimensions: the concept of “displacement”, human life as a peregrinatio, pilgrimage; the flight into Egypt of the Holy Family who, seeking sanctuary, become patron saints of all asylum seekers. The emotional background to all of this was the increasingly multi-faceted concept of “home”. Home is the other side of the crystal. It is what migrants have to leave. It is what they are looking for.
I don’t know about the poems that resulted, but the process looks promising. There’s rigour and contemplation.
Meanwhile at the Globe and Mail Linda Leith ponders this gender disparity. She says,
the lion’s share of the submissions are from men. The men win, hands down, not only on quantity but also on quality. I have asked a couple of women – and a couple of men – to work on their books a bit more.
[…but] why is it that such a high proportion of the submissions are by men? Is this a fluke? If I had waited to write this article five years from now, would I have a different experience to report? Is it some fault of mine? Am I inadvertently looking for a quality that men are more likely than women to produce?
There’s something going on. What is it she wonders. Is the male conspiracy idea more comical or paranoid? Blaming males for unilaterally in this generation creating a prohibitive patriarchy is absurd. There is cultural embedded behavior loops. Men step forward, women step back. While I have a few women for a year to give me poems to publish 3/3 have said no, later, maybe. Meanwhile 2 males have sent unsolicited manuscripts. That’s hardly a statistically significant pool. More numbers could easily wipe that difference out, yet I expect it won’t, unless this generation coming further dilutes gendered behaviour and just follow interest and personality instead of gender boxes. Is female kowtowing on the decline? The women’s movement to resist being told what to wear or not. We’ve come a long way from Kathrine Switzer in 1967 being controversial for running the Boston Marathon. But then I get isolated in my bubble of people who think gender queer is unmarked, where we can just move on. But then, girls are still more likely to not get literacy options, less likely to own land, and be blamed for having their boundaries ignored.
The idea that something externally imposed called prejudice causes this outcome seems naive. If we treat children different by gender from infancy, how do we expect that will disappear when it comes to communication as adults, as outcomes in literature and participation?
That culpability is getting rejigged by things like the SlutWalk in Toronto and London :
[photo by Tom Radenz in London, UK]
Things are messed up. We need to rewrite the scripts of cause and effect. The script as is goes: Females get their boundaries crossed because they invite it, leave themselves vulnerable, and don’t protest enough. The onus needs to be swapped.
If it weren’t offloading blame unilaterally, we’d just about have it.
Restorative justice model where we go in as a dialogue and say, what just happened here? to both sides and figure out and meet as two humans, we’d have a closer step.
What’s going on with outcomes in literature? Discrimination? Differences in outcome doesn’t prove a particular cause. It signals a problem, something to investigate.
Are women capped and lower in capacity than men? That’s taboo to think and particularly damning as a female to think I’d damned to be lesser by birth not only by habit and law and history worldwide. If it were possible to level the cultural perception difference, excise embedded discrimination that makes some females hold themselves lower and some males hold themselves higher could females in aggregate only perform more poorly? In Olympic sports females and males can’t do the same time in some sports. Some females exceed some males but on the whole, are there gender-biology differences past the cultural handicap?