Do Women Write "Female" Poetry?

This is a question asked recently by The Guardian.

From the story...

Many of the poems in my next book are influenced by the artist Helen Chadwick, whose early work made much use of images of her own body – until a change in the late 1980s. She wrote: "I made a conscious decision in 1988 not to represent my body ... It immediately declares female gender and I wanted to be more deft." I think I am in love with the word "deft", which seems to me to describe exactly how a poet should be – but apart from that I was intrigued by the idea of art that might not declare gender. When I applied the idea to poetry I saw how prescriptive we can be – particularly as readers – in our assumptions about the influence of gender on writing.

A related question has been knocking around in my head for the past few weeks: "Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the 'female' poem?" The occasion which prompted the question happened yesterday, when the Aldeburgh poetry festival and the Poetry Society combined to host an event called The Female Poem, which I chaired, and which boasted a distinguished panel of writers: Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and Pascal Petit. It was so popular that it sold out in minutes and had to be moved to a larger hall, which suggests the subject is urgent – and not just to women; our audience was mixed.

Pictured above: Poet Carol Ann Duffy.