What’s Feminism Got to Do with It? Gender, Poetry and Everyday Life in the 21st Century

Inspired by the feminist and civil rights movements, many 20^th century women poets adopted an “I”-empowered poetics that intertwined personal and public worlds. By the end of the millennium, fragmentation and polyphony appeared in poetry as a response to the notion of “I”-dentity as constructed by class, religion, race, gender, and sexual preference. Is the exploration of a woman’s everyday “personal experience” in poetry still a political act? What are the challenges of writing a poetry that destabilizes gender and diffuses the self? What are the gender-related challenges (and aims) for today’s writers and readers of poetry?

Introduced by Suzanne Wise