"Why Study Women's Poetry?"

I really did have an eye-opening epiphany yesterday when I attended an almost nine hour (seemed longer due to the wine and cheese reception afterwards) conference on women writers and poets at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. I just wish I could write a paper and get some graduate credits towards a master's degree or doctorate. The ground-breaking Feminist ideologues and writers of the past forty years showed up: Meena Alexander, Mary Ann Caws, Marilyn Hacker, Alicia Ostriker, and Grace Schulman. I was the only male there who did not present paper or moderate a panel. Maybe next year if organizer Wendy Galgan has the energy to do it again I will submit on something I've been working on from a class I am taking now at CCNY with Dr. Jane Marcus on the Literature of the Spanish Civil War. The highlight was when Wafaa Muhammed, an Iraqi from the Radcliffe Institute, and friend of poet Marilyn Hacker, gave a somber, yet enligtening (I hesitate to say entertaining due to the subject matter) audio-visual presentation and translations of on "The Poetics of the Female Body: A Study of Arab and American Poetry of War (1967-2007). She also mentioned that "I could not leave Iraq under Saddam Hussein unless I was a Baathist and was able to only after the war in 2005." Meena Alexander discussed her childhood in India and read from Fault Lines, her memoir and from Raw Silk a collection of poetry. One of her most famous poems "Kabir Sings in a City of Burning Towers" moved me to tears so beautiful in its simplicity, yet powerful with the right words. I will continue later with more about the other panel presentations. But I will list some of the books I had picked up.
1. Desesperanto. Poems 1999 - 2002. Marilyn Hacker.
2. The Volcano Sequence. Alicia Suskin Ostriker.
3. Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic. Alicia Suskin Ostriker.

I will discuss Schulman, Hacker, Caws, and Ostriker in another blog. Stay tuned.