TL;DRAbstract
When a woman poet uses tropes of birth in her work, she seems to be consigned by our culture to a distinctively female poetics. Given the ways in which masculinised concerns are valued as universal and representative, and female concerns considered of interest to women only, then a woman writer, writing from her own maternal experience, appears to be disqualified from the sphere of the high-minded and serioutsly poetic. Pregnancy and gestation are the 'central events'l of Medbh McGuckian's Marconi's Cottage and when giving readings from this volume, McGuckian noted how her audiences reacted with indifference if she introduced a poem saying, 'this is a poem about early pregnancy', or 'that is a poem about late pregnancy'.2 She observed that 'all these men are sitting there, and the women are bored, and the men I think are not too excited either, you know'.3 The prospect of listening to poems about birth obviously did not satisfy an audience expecting more traditional poetic subjects and
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When a woman poet uses tropes of birth in her work, she seems to be consigned by our culture to a distinctively female poetics. Given the ways in which masculinised concerns are valued as universal and representative, and female concerns considered of interest to women only, then a woman writer, writing from her own maternal experience, appears to be disqualified from the sphere of the high-minded and serioutsly poetic. Pregnancy and gestation are the 'central events'l of Medbh McGuckian's Marconi's Cottage and when giving readings from this volume, McGuckian noted how her audiences reacted with indifference if she introduced a poem saying, 'this is a poem about early pregnancy', or 'that is a poem about late pregnancy'.2 She observed that 'all these men are sitting there, and the women are bored, and the men I think are not too excited either, you know'.3 The prospect of listening to poems about birth obviously did not satisfy an audience expecting more traditional poetic subjects and
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