Hope That Holds.

Speaking as a poet, the idea of disconnecting myself from my experiences as a woman to embody this state of genderlessness...isn't appealing to me, especially since my poetry is woman centric. It's a very western thing, I think, to avoid the problem of the body and to think that the spirit is what embodies us. I tend to think it's both. And it's kind of convenient, that way you really don't have to do the work of existing as a woman and what that means in this world. A lot of women poets throughout the ages have felt like they were men trapped in women's bodies, because there was no other way to deal mentally with being a woman and a poet. There was just no framework, nothing they could draw on. We have a tradition now. Women poets we can look to and learn from. Gender doesn't just disappear, because you want it to. It certainly matters to most men who won't give you the chance because you are a woman.