Good advice for women poets and women citizens

Annie Finch from her essay, “How to Create a Poetic Tradition,” from The Body of Poetry. Essays of Women, Form, and the Poetic Self (Univ Mich Press, 2005):

One of the probable reasons that women poets have tended to stay away from critical endeavors is that, like our poetess foremothers, we are afraid that they are too closely tied to what someone recently called on this listserv [WomPo] “the shmoozing and the deal making and all the rather icky stuff that needs to get done, I guess.” But criticism allows us to find a way to think about poetry that we can believe in, and that in turn can give one more ability to negotiate the “icky stuff.” Like changing the diaper of a human being your love, the icky stuff can actually be satisfying if you are motivated by passion, if you have a way of thinking about poetry that you care about, and if you realize how important and necessary all this work is to allow the poetry you care about, including your own, to bloom fully.

The key to making the leap, in my experience, is the realization that poets and poetry will never exist in a critical vacuum, even if we try to pretend that they do. Criticism is like politics: if you don’t make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you. And, while criticism’s effect on the individual creative process is open to debate, it is clear that criticism is crucial to the life of poetic traditions—the ways in which we find, appreciate, and pass on poems. In this sense, criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can’t see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear. [pp 56-57]

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