Because I count, I counted the Schrödinger’s Poet Readings where people step forward and say, if you don’t know about this poet, you should and gives a 5-10 minute spiel on the life, times and works of a poet.
What is up is not a statistically significant size of sample to not have coincidental errors. And not all got recorded. But, there’s an odd disproportionality that intrigues me to speculate what could cause a pattern if there is one. Presuming each gender presentation as identity of featuring and featured poet,
Of the 38 on record,
males read males: 20
females read females: 9
females read males: 7
males read females: 2
What might account for this? Resonance? Are we collectively taking as heroes same-sex literary models because of there is some nature to gender and voice that causes resonance? Is that evidence for gender of subjects or dialect existing?
Or can it be attributed to the weight of history led to knowing more males than females that skewed?
Or unconsciously one gender noticing the pattern unconsciously and playing by team and against team?
Or might it be a sort of a variation of the law of advertizing that males want to look at females and females want to look at females; in literature males want to read males and so do females?
Not everyone, not absolutely, but as a greater than statistical chance tendency.
There’s never one reason, and is particular reasons, such as timeliness of anniversary of a birth or death.
Get enough data and obvious patterns fall apart but more complex patterns rise.
I’ll have to keep watching for the next 30 years and see what the next 690 data points do.
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This is interesting. I had to choose 25 poets for a reading list for my MFA exam, and one of my classmates chose all men, but didn’t think of it that way. I consciously chose all women, in a feeling of untetheredness, as most of my classmates had 1 or 2 women at most, male and female both.