One of the things women poets have been engaged in - among the other things they've been doing - is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Women are treated as unjustly in poetry as in life. The feminine ones are not idealistic, and the idealistic not feminine.
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.
New voices in an old art - and women poets have been that for much more than a century - do not diminish the art through the category. They enrich it. They renew it with common quandaries of craft and innovation. The category simply allows the quandaries to be seen more clearly.
Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
So the best way to understand poetry, which is made by men, is to imitate, and that goes back to making work as a kind of doorway into new work, as opposed to making work as a mirror of the old work.
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.