Editors’ Note: Undoing Numbers

Within the constellation of factors upon which we base our editorial decisions, we have made a perennial effort to balance male and female contributors to Aufgabe. The process always seems to be accompanied by a certain unease about the right way to get to at least a 50/50 split. We’re perfectionists! So, naturally we followed with interest the recent exchange between Jennifer Ashton (in her essays "Our Bodies, Our Poems"(1) and "The Numbers Trouble with 'Numbers Trouble'"(2)) and Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young (in their essay "Numbers Trouble"(3)), which was followed by considerable commentary on poetry-related blogs. We decided to use the conversation as a starting point for this editors’ note and what follows are responses from each of the poetry editors for Aufgabe. Each of us felt it important to distinguish between (biological) sex and gender in these responses. Johnson and Grinnell use "male" and "female" rather than "men" and "women," since demographically speaking, the ratios discussed reveal the sex rather than the gender of the writers and rely upon names, which are changeable, without accounting for queerness in any form. Brolaski uses neither in zir response, which explores questions of authorial legibility and the breaking down of gender binaries.

Paul Foster Johnson

     Spahr and Young’s "Numbers Trouble" was written in response to Jennifer Ashton’s "Our Bodies, Our Poems." Ashton argues that the concept of "women’s innovative poetry" in current practice is essentializing and outmoded. In her initial essay, Ashton supports this argument by claiming that in the mid-1980s, female poets had achieved parity in publications and editorial and faculty positions. Spahr and Young focus their response on this assertion, analyzing the ratio of male and female poets who have published in (mostly U.S.) anthologies and presses and who have received awards. They find that despite limited improvements, female poets were not only underrepresented in 1985, they currently remain underrepresented in the areas studied. The study goes on to solicit and report responses from poets regarding the desired role of the "poetry community"-presumably constituted by people and also by poetry institutions-in "engaging with the living and working conditions of women in a national/international arena."(4)
      These essays provoked a wide range of online responses, many of them organized by Elizabeth Treadwell on the blog Delirious Hem.(5) For the most part, the responses agree with and extend Spahr and Young’s conclusion:

[T]he experimental/postmodern/avant-garde/innovative poetry scene needs a more radical feminism: a feminism that begins with an editorial commitment to equitable representation to think about how feminism is related to something other than itself, and to make writing that thinks about these things visible.(6)

      Spahr and Young’s poetry scene is anti-essentialist in its implication that "feminist interventions" operate in the same field as other movements and ideas, as opposed to, say, woman-centered projects associated with 1970s cultural feminism. This anti-essentialist conception is tacitly affirmed in the blog responses. The methodology of Spahr and Young’s essay is another aspect about which the blogs are generally silent. Among the exceptions, Joyelle McSweeney considers the patriarchal "anthological thinking" surrounding the quantitative disparity alongside a non-hierarchal editorial approach through Deleuze’s concept of the assemblage; (7) Dale Smith laments the businesslike task of "a poetics based on spreadsheets."(8) Yet tempting as it is to articulate a more democratic editorial vision, it is difficult to overcome Spahr and Young’s success in realistically mapping the environment indicated by the general term "community."
      Rather than staking out a pure position from which innovative writing can be delivered, Spahr and Young provide an accurate sketch of the existing conditions in which experimental writing is produced. These conditions include a necessary engagement with presses, journals, reading series, and blogs. For many, writing is also a livelihood, often in the form of academic teaching jobs. While many poetry institutions have strong progressive commitments, dominant attitudes about professionalism are always present in their organization and choices.
     From here it is not a long leap to the (rightly) cynical conclusion that power in poetic communities is correlated with outcomes as measured in publications or awards. As it turns out, the structure of poetic communities has very little to do with formal allegiance or stylistic preference. In this particular conversation, this is indicated by the avoidance of analyzing any nuance or innovation in technique of the writing that turns up in experimental publications. The numbers have the final say on a publication’s success or failure in the arena of representation.
     This is not to say that writers are exempt from the burden. Poetic communities have adjusted to past feminist interventions and now accommodate a recognizable "but not exclusive" set of concerns identified with feminism. In the sociology of poetry there is a system of signs understood by writer, editor, and, ultimately, a niche audience. For example, an editor may be inclined to publish writing that exhibits certain hallmarks of a feminist project: poems that explore the erotic connotations of jouissance, poems that are well versed in the language of psychoanalysis and sexual difference, poems in which the body registers as a site of linguistic soundings. There may be much to admire in these kinds of poems, but their value to an editor derives at least in part from the specialized knowledge they contain, and the prestige that knowledge confers upon the publication among those who discern it.
      Because of the increasing specialization of poetry as an academic discipline, it is not surprising that it does not connect with "the living and working conditions of women in the national/international arena." Only through the complete abstraction of "poetry" is it possible to make this broad connection. If this engagement is a central concern of the poetic community, it would be necessary for this community to examine its own social basis in relation to these living and working conditions. This would be a fundamental step toward finding some sort of common cause.
      As an editor, I am drawn toward work that reflects, negates, or distorts the context of its own creation. With specific reference to the topic at hand, kari edwards’s insistence upon "no gender" is a transparent and bold statement of poetics, but one that is ironized by the fact that edwards was a self-described gender activist. In this issue, Evelyn Reilly’s rant about the customs of poetry readings and Brandon Brown’s use of satire in relation to class and academia come to mind as other examples of writing that attends to the conditions in which it exists.
      In the same way that Theodor Adorno argues that the only way we may form a concept of freedom is through our lived unfreedom,(9) the ideal of equality in the poetry world is given meaning only by the experience of inequality. It is important for writers and editors to consider the professional and institutional demands of the poetry community, and how these demands relate to what they are writing and selecting. This preliminary step would be necessary before applying this specific problematic to general struggles.

Julian T. Brolaski

Gender is only one factor on which to base pairs...In addition...gender is not a simple masculine-feminine binary as the use of many terms both toward and within the queer community demonstrates.
- Anne Curzan, Gender Shifts in the History of English (10)

We all appear in "bursts of proximity" (Dwibedy, "jetsam"), or as Rumi observes, "Language is a tailor’s shop where nothing fits." Is it possible to speak outside the confines of gender? Race and class are not always visible in names, so what is in them? Gender is often in them. We think of gender as "visible" and legible in language. That’s how Spahr and Young conduct their study in "Numbers Trouble" - it is for the most part a study of names capable of being gendered - or names which are known to read as one or the other. It is a vital step towards addressing gender equanimity in poetry. But in order to dismiss the idea of gender as a criterion for legibility we must "undo gender" - as Judith Butler puts it - in favor of personhood:

The very criterion by which we judge a person to be a gendered being, a criterion that posits coherent gender as a presupposition of humanness, is not only one which, justly or unjustly, governs the recognizability of the human, but one that informs the ways we do or do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire, and the body, and the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of one’s gender, and hence, the unrecognizability of one’s personhood. (Butler 58) (11)

As editors who confront head-on the problematics of "counting" gender - we (the Aufgabe team and others) must also consider those who cannot accurately be counted: Dana, Alex, Jess, Sean, Kit, Chris - whose abbreviations obfuscate gender - K.C., J.R. - who refuse to be counted - kari, Julian - ambiguously gendered names that one is eager to give a stamp to - to make them eligible for personhood, but as kaufman writes:

this bridge splinters then gives way
(from "censory impulse")

Not that we could negate sexism by insisting on a gender neutrality - we must continue to be feminist editors and readers - to be personists (12) by considering ways we might end or at least undermine gender. kari edwards’s insistence on "no gender" - echoed by Kate Bornstein and other trans/gender activists - is a functional paradox: the evacuation of gender as a means of becoming multiply or fluidly gendered:

And stay for our way our way our way of safe
safe is safer with superbugs bugged
safe is safer than other is neither
and other is neither much good or safe
(Coleman, "We are going to talk about science with pictures")

The way to be multiple is to encourage gender variance in our books and in our lives: female, male and other. I use "gender" here because we are talking about political and poetical bodies - the body as it intersects with its artistic iteration - and how these are read by editors and readers. And then we have the cheat sheet "biographical notes" in which unknown gender is often revealed. Language determines gender and language is well known to be both structural and indeterminate. Gender, after all, is a term we get from linguists. What if we were all referred to by our last names? What about those writers who can pass on the page, but not on the street? Or as Sailers writes:

There is no way of seeing their daily lives
among the voices. Or a queer exotic.
It’s as if their accents have been corrected,
but who knows.
(Sailers, "Dogtown")

How quick we are to police gender! The poems themselves can be neither male nor female, so to what extent can we project a gendered persona on the text? And further we are in wartime - a time which has no respect for bodies or the persons that inhabit them:

War in all its different guises
How can the body take all the confrontation?
hostility? the build-up of arms?
(Rivera, "Poem With a Line Drawn Across the Body")

Should we be thankful or irritated that the draft is gendered? When war makes us devolve into disposable beings we turn to nonsense for sense - one tries to speak the president’s name but it comes out gobbledygook:

lam teevee pee bushchickenpok
tak turkeybird gug dyinfeast...
gug screwa sall gug slavendie
(Rancourt, 'image war')

We must be concerned not only with gender equality but with the issue of authorial legibility - how one is read - to interrogate how the disembodied (poetically bodied) voice is gendered - by readers and editors. So that "no gender' or "no race" or "no class" are not among the disappeared:

these poems which can also describe the singularity of either an individual life, or socio-historical life and/or that instant and duration of their imbrication, their multiplicity, their affectivity...of the Disappeared
(Light, from Against Middle Passages)

but occupy a necessary place on the spectrum, dismantling binaries by engaging the hybrid and the in-between. As Blau du Plessis writes:

And felt compelled
to rip up the page and turn from these pronouns:
I? you? we? Who cares about them!
Who cares how they are linked!
Push them over a cliff!
("Draft 88, X-Posting")13

so that we might expand the distribution of pronouns. To say: out of many, many. Or instead of he/she to give name to the / and to otherly gendered, obfuscated, unknown or illegible persons: zie, zir, zirself.

E. Tracy Grinnell

You should be interested enough in the world, with all its manifold strangeness and contradictions, oddities and possibilities, that your editorial/curatorial vision would organically support ... an ecology of poly-verses. - David Buuck, Delirious Hem, Re: "Numbers Trouble"

     I don’t like anthologies. Two of the most important anthologies to me as a young, queer-female poet in the Bay Area were Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women(14) and Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK(15) (the text taught by Leslie Scalapino in my undergraduate writing class at Mills College). These anthologies were undoubtedly important interventions for the reasons Spahr and Young cite in "{Numbers Trouble." And they made accessible a feminist poetic avant-garde that I was searching for and demonstrated that it existed in the present tense across national boundaries. But anthologies are inherently, undeniably, always problematic. Even when necessary, they cannot be inclusive. And yet the compulsion to anthologize is pervasive. Whether for social, aesthetic, temporal, or corrective reasons, the compulsion always results in something that is dated (i.e. out-dated if not incomplete and exclusive) as soon as it is released into the world, hamstrung by its existence as a singularity. Anthologies are not capable of creating the "constant, necessary pressure" identified by Spahr and Young... but journals and magazines are.
     Yes, we do numbers with Aufgabe because it is impossible not to register the lower number of submissions received from female poets and because it is impossible to separate one’s own convictions, aesthetics, and poetic interests from issues of race, class, gender, orientation, and politics in general. We do numbers, however roughly, because each act of editing is an assertion of these positions in some form. The results are mostly imperfect but these things must line up: one cannot claim a progressive and inclusive - and feminist, if truly progressive and inclusive - politics and then proceed to publish serial volumes that fail to represent artists working from a range of circumstances, orientations, or positions. Our politics are essential and we reveal them in every editorial act.
     Each issue of Aufgabe has presented its own dilemmas and I have discussed the question of gender balance and editorial process with several guest editors. What has been the case, and what we will continue to assert into being, is that the editors we work with, the contributors, and the readers of this journal are invested in a more dynamic poetry community that does intervene to impact social conditions, at the very least on the level of representation and accessibility in arts and letters. Journals and magazines make no claims - at least this one doesn’t - to be comprehensive, but we can consistently attempt to create pathways, make connections, and put communities - poets, visual artists, translators, editors, readers - into conversation.
     In issue #5, 4 female poets and 15 male poets appeared in the Moroccan section, and it was a struggle to get work by any female poets to begin with. In issue #6, featuring Brazilian poets, 7 females and 12 males appeared. In the Italian feature of this issue, there is work by 6 females and 10 males, including visual artists (see Jennifer Scappettone’s foreword for her comments on "the maledominated surface of Italian letters"). These are social issues. And again, these numbers say nothing about individual poets' gender or other orientations, circumstances or positions. However, what I can’t ignore in these numbers is that the significance of publishing, say, 4 female poets - nevermind translating into English and publishing these writers in the U.S. as representative of a living poetic reality in their country - likely registers very differently in Morocco, Brazil or Italy than it does here in the U.S. And in any case, it is only a starting point. We must insist on the attempt at balance, even if, frustratingly, it only reveals the work that remains to be done seeking out otherly gendered poets in Morocco and other Arab countries, Italy, the Americas and so forth. The application of our poetic concerns has to consider context since this journal throws together artists and communities operating under very different conditions. This is part of what keeps Aufgabe - a publication for innovative writing - vital: the combination of contexts within which innovative writing is happening, and therefore the definition of ‘innovative’ itself, changes with each issue. We cannot adequately intervene on an international scale unless we are at the same time recognizing different social/political/historical spheres and trajectories of innovation, resistance, and activism. And we cannot begin to address questions of access, unless we as editors are actively seeking out work from a variety of cultural contexts with attention to these disparate realities.
     Constant, necessary pressure. Whenever we engage in editing of any sort - selecting, reading, recommending, discussing, blogging, curating - we must exert this pressure. It is simply not enough to express frustration with the lower number of submissions by female poets and then shrug or throw one's hands up. I don’t know what combination of factors results in a lower number of submissions in the U.S., or why male poets tend to resubmit more frequently and persistently. What I do know is that editing is enactment, as much as writing is. It is proactive and must attend to the thriving and mutable sphere of polyverses.


Brooklyn, New York 2008

Notes

1 Ashton, Jennifer. "Our Bodies, Our Poems." American Literary History 19:1 (2007): 211-231.
2 Ashton, Jennifer. "The Numbers Trouble with ‘Numbers Trouble.’" Chicago Review 53:2/3 (2007): 112-120.
3 Spahr, Juliana and Stephanie Young. "Numbers Trouble." Chicago Review 53:2/3 (2007): 88-111.
4 Spahr and Young, p. 91.
5 Treadwell, Elizabeth, et al. "Dim Sum." Delirious Hem 7 February 2008. A comprehensive roundup of blog responses can be found at digital emunction.
6 Spahr and Young, p. 100.
7 McSweeney, Joyelle. "Against Anthological Thinking" in "Dim Sum."
8 Smith, Dale. "Re: The Name & the Paradox of Its Contents." Possum Ego 1 November 2007.
9 Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum, 1973.
10 Curzan, Anne. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
11 Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge: New York and London, 2004.
12 Not like Frank O’Hara’s personism—whose mock-manifesto names only Ginsberg, Whitman, Crane, Williams, LeRoi Jones and Alain Robbe-Grillet as cohorts.
13 Jacket 35.
14 Sloan, Mary Margaret, ed. New Jersey: Talisman House, 1998.
15 O'Sullivan, Maggie, ed. London: Reality Street Editions, 1996.