Jennifer Bartlett ponders the question

. . . and comes up with some other ideas.

Good points . . . (we've acknowledged 1. and 4. in the post & comments below). As for 3., I guess that's true. Some poets just don't write a lot of prose, critical or otherwise. But many of the women Sina mentions in her post and the couple I mention below already do write lots and lots of prose. They are publishing those pieces in mags and books, where we're lucky to find & read them. Wondering if in those forms, they mostly reach the choir? Blogs can be come upon by chance, there's no editorial filter, can be spontaneous and interactive.

It seems lots more unlikely for a multichanneled conversation to spring from an essay in Rachel Blau du Plessis's The Pink Guitar than that same essay being reprinted (or the book being reviewed) out here.

It's not as though we lack women role models and mentors. But they do not blog. So our access to them is more traditionally delineated. Still working on the group blog idea, which is perhaps one way to cross the technological hump both Andrea & Jennifer (2.) suggest and to provide the kind of interactivity with our heroines (who are all sufficiently obsessed, Jennifer's #5) some of us would love to see.

Last year I taught my mom to blog and use Flickr (and even to work a little html) for her Seniors Church Group, so it's not as if women over 60 are suddenly unable to use the interfaces, though they may indeed be less interested in it than their male counterparts. (I can think of 5-7 male poetry bloggers over 60 right now, without even trying, but 0 women.) Yes, younger people in the general population are more used to working with computers and electronics, but there are very few (hmm, I can think of some, and a few luddites who are not even 50) older writers who haven't adopted word processing software. Blogger is really no more difficult to learn than MSWord.