Commentary by Rebecca Foust, Poetry Editor
This week’s column kicks off National Women’s History Month, declared by resolution of Congress in 1987 and celebrated annually by a number of exhibits and events. We celebrate women every day here at Women’s Voices for Change, of course, but this week’s poem is an explicit recognition of the accomplishments of women poets, a subject poet Kim Bridgford is passionate about. In 2010 she founded The Mezzo Cammin Women Poets Timeline project, an ongoing effort to find women poets and to preserve their work and history in a database that includes each poet’s work, a photo, and an essay. The hope is that as “the database grows, we will see the vast legacy and richness of women’s poetry not only in this country, but across the world.” Bridgford has continued and expanded this work with an annual poetry conference she founded and directs, Poetry by the Sea, whose faculty typically includes at least as many (and sometimes more) women as men. I attended in 2015 and had a terrific time.
As I look at the library cart I recently purchased to hold the overflow of the hundreds of books I draw on to write these weekly columns, it seems hard to believe anyone would ask the question posed in the note to this poem: What will the timeline do when it runs out of women poets to feature? The question is itself a reflection of the discrimination women writers experience. Strong gains in the last century notwithstanding, men still dominate the worlds of academia and publishing, an imbalance dramatically demonstrated in the red-and-blue pie graphs of a group called VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. As women’s reproductive and other rights come under increasing fire from the current administration, I’m grateful to groups like VIDA for tracking the statistics that prove what we already know: Gender Equality is a goal that remains elusive in this country. Visit here more information about what VIDA does and the methodologies it employs.
“To the Women Poets” is an homage or paean, a poem that praises and shows appreciation for its subject. It’s a sonnet in a chapbook of sonnets called Doll after the fact that many of the poems use as speakers or take as their subject different kinds of dolls—Barbie Dolls, American Girl Dolls, and even “inflatable dolls”—that, as it turns out, make powerful, sometimes painful metaphors for women living in a patriarchal society. The poems are feminist, fierce, funny, poignant, and technically astute, using and reworking the sonnet form in ways that serve each poem and its message. Here’s one of my favorites, whose title makes terrific, punning play on the fact that the Barbie Doll celebrated its 53rd product anniversary in 2012:
 
Barbie Turns Fifty-Three
She finds the world is not designed for her,
Although she now has joined AARP,
And kits her ice chest out, and SUV,
Buys clothes from Pendleton that flatter her.
Still, she’s nostalgic for the beach days when
She strolled the sands with GI-Joe and Ken.
She loved the dream house, and the pointy shoes,
The narrative without a compromise.
Yet the past, when it’s examined, has its flaws.
She doesn’t have to be a birthday cake,
Her dress vanilla, frosting at each layer.
It is enough to make her grab two Bayer.
Who is Barbie in her menopause?
And what is this new sorrow, and this ache?
 
That last line is a zinger, right? It delivers an emotional gut punch to readers rendered vulnerable by the smart, wry humor of preceding lines.