A Salon with a Revolving Door

This essay argues for the importance of virtual networks to twenty-first century poetry by women by analyzing the “space” of Wom-po, an email list devoted to discussion of women's writing. Wom-po offers an example of computer-mediated communication among Anglophone poets from several continents, demonstrating the complex relations between web-based networks and geography. The group's fluctuating membership negotiates between an ideal of transnational sisterhood, in which common interests blur geopolitical boundaries, and the local circumstances that affect access, information, and the ability or willingness of poets to support one another's endeavors. That this group is defined by gender, moreover, suggests the persistence of bodies in words, whether on a screen, in live or recorded performance, or on the printed page. Relatively new networks such as Wom-po can create poetic connections that would have been difficult to sustain just a quarter-century ago. Even when communities aspire to egalitarian, transnational openness, however, they achieve it only imperfectly. This study illuminates where Wom-po takes place, or what space its members invent for themselves; how the list challenges national boundaries; and to what extent it continues to be defined by US literary culture. Transnational poetic community can exist and new technologies of poetic dissemination increase its chances of thriving. The case of Wom-po reveals both the limits of virtual networking for authors and the border-crossing literary world it makes possible

Aesthetics · Art · Ideal (ethics · Literature · Media studies · Openness to experience · Poetry · Political science · Quarter (Canadian coin · Salon · Social science · Sociology · Thriving · Computer Science · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · History · Law · Social Psychology

• Separatism as Strategy

  Estelle B Freedman, Estelle Freedman•Feminist Studies•1979

  Add to list