Sugar and Spice

This week's Portsmouth Poetry Society meeting was on Gender in Poetry.

One does have to tread carefully in these sensitive days and there might have been a danger at times of an assumption that girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice and boys are horrid but it was noticeable that whenever a poem was read without the gender of its author being known, the vote usually got it wrong and I found that reassuring, especially as I voted for the wrong side every time.

I had introduced the subject thus,

Gender in Poetry – Is there a difference between poetry written by women and by men. 

Anthologies that bring together poems under titles such as Scottish poetry, C16th verse, Carribean poetry, Chinese Verse or on a theme of childhood suggest that such selections have common themes, issues or styles that make it significant or of interest to read them together. There are also such books as The Faber Book of Women’s Poetry. The question seen from that perspective seems to ask what is there that those poems share apart from not being written by men.

When I was at University, from 1978-81, the prevailing orthodoxy on the Stylistics and Criticism course was the primacy of the text based on the ‘intentional fallacy’ of Wimsatt and Beardsley, the ‘death of the author’ announced by Roland Barthes and the analytical methods of Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, all of which concentrated on the text as the object of study to the exclusion of extraneous detail such as the biographical details of the author, or even who they were. I took this to mean that poetry was made of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and the way they were assembled and the way they functioned was the same whether put together by male or female, and I thought that for at least a couple of decades.

However, the orthodoxy changed, as they usually do and, as they often do, it took a complete about turn. Literary biography became the new fashion and started to concentrate on how the poetry informed us of the life, although why a poet’s life was deemed to be so much more interesting and suitable for such investigation than that of a grocer was never made clear.

It didn’t really dawn on me that there might be a decisive difference between women’s poems and men’s until a reading by Deryn Rees-Jones at Oxford in 2007 after which I thought that those particular poems wouldn’t have been written by a man.

We have had our thunder stolen somewhat in discussing this issue by the winter edition of Poetry Review, which included a piece by Pascale Petit entitled, Do Women Poets Write Differently To Men? In it, she mentions women’s ‘closer relationship with the body, and its wonder, shock and messiness’. This is the sort of thing I thought I found in Deryn’s reading, with a closer engagement with personal feelings as well as physicality.

However, Pascale expresses the significant reservation that ‘it might be more useful to think in terms of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ poetry rather than the division of gender, and that some men write feminine poems and some women masculine poems.’

There are plenty of theories about the differences between the genders, including Virginia Woolf’s identification in To the Lighthouse of the ‘arid scimitar’ of the male and a female ‘rapture of successful creation’, or the perceived polarities of logic and intuition.

Some themes are likely to be of more interest to one gender than another. Kate Clanchy’s first three volumes- Slattern, Samarkand and Newborn - might be read as a progress through courtship, home-making and childbirth, for instance, but these are tendencies or generalizations that we might identify rather than inviolable laws.

Another possible difference suggested by Pascale Petit is that women’s poetry is that of ‘outsiders’ in a world where men are ‘central’. On a more radically feminist agenda I have heard it suggested that the ‘I’ in poetry stands for something male and stands thus for the suppression of the female. I’m sure there would be plenty of objections from male poets (me, at least) that we can also feel like outsiders and we have absolutely no designs on making the ‘I’ specifically male.

Pascale’s conclusion is that women do write differently to men but she acknowledges that ‘for many, gender is not relevant to their craft’.

As with most of the commonly identified divisions in the population- like ethnicity, religion, etc.- I prefer to consider us all as individuals, each in a minority of one, rather than in blocks that assume whole sections of the demographic can be bundled together.