I realize that in reviewing Simon Armitage's excellent recent book, I listed the great consecutive figures of C20th British poetry as Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Heaney and have been tormented ever since by the worry that none of them are female.A few years ago, more than one poetry magazine would publish justifications of their selection process by analysying the statistics of the male/female ratio as if there were now some quota system in place to ensure equal representation. They need not have. I'm not concerned if my poems appear anywhere that has only 33% of their poems by male poets. I'd be glad if, whatever the distribution was, it made for a satisfying collection and especially if Julia Copus, Judy Brown, Katy Evans-Bush, Kathleen Jamie, Caitriona O'Reilly, Sasha Dugdale, Helen Farish, Helen Mort, and the list goes on, were some of the others.
It certainly is difficult to think of any female author beyond Harper Lee that was a set text for literature courses at school in the 1970's but some parity has been achieved by now and, as remains the case with holders of high political office, positions in business, sport, successful University Challenge teams or -most outlandishly- golf clubs, I do wonder if women haven't got better things to do.
Poor old Eric Monkman didn't even win University Challenge but surely it wasn't only women who eventually began to roll their eyes at his obsessional competitive quiz technique and speculate on whether encyclopedic knowledge, instant recall and an instinct for anticipating the question were really desirable aspects of a well-balanced personality. And his peremptory buzzing in cost his team dearly in the final.
In literature, or poetry in particular, the gender of the author has never been a concern for me. I led an evening on the difference between poetry by men and by women at Portsmouth Poetry Society a few years ago and was glad that our findings were vague if not inconclusive. It's the words we are looking at and I can't see that it makes too much difference how the genitalia of the poet were arranged to a sentence like,
Snow fell, undated.
But, grieving as I am about any possible macho-centric bias in my pantheon of Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Heaney - who surely aren't overbearingly masculine compared to an alternative list of Pound, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes- I have looked to America in their time of need and found compensation in their equivalent list which, beyond Richard Wilbur, is dominated by Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop, the first of which we know plenty about and who I've long been convined was outdoing her husband by 1963.
But the more one looks at Elizabeth Bishop, the more her example gathers momentum as a model of what represented the most admirable of poetry in the language. As such, over a busy Easter and well beyond, I have the Collected Prose and One Art, the Selected Letters, which was too big to get through most post box, in which to immerse myself luxuriously. Not because I feel the need to perform some kind of penance in the face of a male-run world but because she is a candidate to be considered among the best of the lot irrespective of culturally imposed sections.
Art, if not business or politics, is one place where we should naturally fly by those nets and none of what I take from those books is going to be modified by the knowledge that she was a woman, any more than Beryl Burton's record for 12 Hours of riding a bike was for a while ahead of the men's record. She was simply tougher and better than the men so why wouldn't it be.
All of which leads to the small amount of shelf space still left for a few books in the 'pride of place' position in the front room among the classical CD's, Shakespeare biographical books and DVD's, rarely referred to but close to the DVD player, soon being given over to Elizabeth Bishop. After a couple of years there, it is George Eliot's novels that give way and will have to be found a position, probably upstairs.
