Thursday 16 October 2008

Women Poetry Editors

A couple years ago I remember talking with other women poets in London about submitting to UK magazines. "So many of the editors are men" kept coming up as an issue we weren't sure how to contend with.

That's changed, at least as far as magazines are concerned. While Fiona Sampson has been at the helm of Poetry Review some years now, in the last year Zoë Skoulding has taken over editorship of Poetry Wales, Kathryn Gray of New Welsh Review, and now Caitriona O'Reilly at Poetry Ireland Review (not UK really, but as close or closer to us than Northern Ireland). Not only are they all women, but women in their late thirties/early forties, still establishing themselves and to that end (insofar as I've seen with Zoë and Kathryn; there's yet to be an issue of PIR edited by Caitriona) taking risks and making claims, trying to stir discourse into discussion if not debate.

Anyone want to do a survey of a round of the UK magazines akin to Spahr and Young's in "Numbers Trouble," to look at the percentage of women poets in magazines--and in what magazines, at what levels? The London Review of Books, for example, appears to favour male over female poets by a significant proportion. Thoughts?

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