How to Suppress Women’s Writing: Joanna Russ

Bad Faith

Denial of Agency

Pollution of Agency

The Double Standard of Content

False Categorizing

Isolation

Anomalousness

Lack of Models

Response

Aesthetics

I have been gathering found poems such as the one above for several years now. They are, in a sense, too easy and I’m wary of actually doing anything with them, but I gather them. Table of contents poems, index poems, poems from margin notes, and poems from comment streams…

This above, from Joanna Russ, is timely given the recent piece on sexism in the poetry community by Jon Paul Fiorentino, the piece published by Zoe Whittall last week on found language of criticism, the ongoing and upcoming counts from Vida and CWILA.

We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks. Suffice to say I want to think about what keeps women’s voices out of the reviewing game. I suspect that all of the above are at play.

–Sina