I am intimidated by poetry criticism because I've spent most of my adult life reading fiction and sometimes writing about fiction. As I age, I've been reading much more poetry and much more poetry criticism, which, given my relative lack of experience with the forms, has left me formulating (what seem to me to be) dumb questions, and trying like mad to find answers that make sense. One of the things I've thought about consistently is the role gender and sex play in my reading and in the litworld at large. Nearly all of my favorite poets are women (my favorite fiction writers are almost exclusively male), usually somewhat combative as regards sexual and gender roles, and aggressively intellectual (and is that a complex idea?? that the women I reference would pillory me for as merely another example of sexism?? like, why can't women be aggressive in the same way that men seem so comfortable with without being labelled as shrill or dykey or, well, you get the point? at...
Like the title says.