12 - The WP Network: Anthologies and Affiliations in Contemporary American Women's Poetry

Summary

On or about January 1973, something else changed.

In 1973 the United States ended its military involvement in Vietnam, and tennis pro Billie Jean King bested Bobby Riggs in a televised “Battle of the Sexes.” The American women's movement heralded key victories that year, beginning with the Supreme Court of the United States easing abortion restrictions with Roe v. Wade. The Congress and President Nixon endorsed Women's Equality Day, and the first International Feminist Planning Conference took place in Massachusetts. Helen Reddy won a Grammy for “I Am Woman” – the first feminist anthem to go gold on the American pop charts. It would be a banner year for new books by women for women, including Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation, The New Woman's Survival Catalog, and the first commercial edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

Poets proved crucial to women's new success in the battle for the bookshelves, crossing genres as they challenged gender scripts. Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying boldly depicted women's sexuality; Marge Piercy's novel Small Changes presented women's everyday lives, and Denise Levertov's prose collection The Poet in the World highlighted women's growing stature as critics. In 1973 women poets were assuming a more visible and vibrant place in a changing literary world, which now included Muriel Rukeyser's Breaking Open, Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck, Ai's Cruelty, Sonia Sanchez's Love Poems, and Alice Walker's Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems. But nothing quite matched the unprecedented explosion of women's poetry anthologies in the American publishing industry. Indeed, big New York publishers joined smaller presses to bring hundreds of poems by contemporary women to a wider readership. Five new anthologies appeared that year:

1. • Four Young Women: Poems

2. • Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets

3. • No More Masks!: An Anthology of Poems by Women

4. • Psyche: The Feminine Poetic Consciousness

5. • Mountain Moving Day: Poems by Women.

A smaller venture, Anthology of Women Poets, came out in a second edition. This cultural convergence of 1973 manifests what I term the WP Network in contemporary American poetry, offering key insights on how women's poetry coalesced, affiliated, and disseminated.