About the Poethead blog

The kernel of this blog is based in promoting and discussing women poets, editors, writers and translators. This blog came about because I could not access many women writers nor indeed adequate translations of women poets’ work. This is an academic and historic lack which is not readily acknowledged here in Ireland.

For the past three years I have carried a feature on Poethead called A Saturday Woman Poet , which I started after a popular newspaper distributed a series of modern poets as a give-away idea. The series included but one woman poet, Sylvia Plath. There has been little emphasis on poets working in translation, in editing, nor indeed in the sound and visual formats. I sought to dedicate one day a week to the work of women poets. The resultant list of women poets included in the blog is available here, and in the following poethead categories and tags , 25 Pins in a Packet , translation , women writers, and a saturday woman poet.

The editors’ categories on the Poethead blog are relatively new and include references to the funding and editing of women editors and translators. My posts and articles are about the women editors who have brought such writers as Simone Weil, Julian of Norwich, Dante and others to a contemporary audience. The list of women editors mentioned in the blog include, Eavan Boland, Cate Marvin, Marion Glasscoe, Dorothy L. Sayers and Joan Dargan, to name but a few.

Poethead carries links to the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights and to UBUWEB, both are concerned in the issue of the poet’s voice, the dissemination of literature and in the intellectual rights of writers to the ownership of their own work. I like sites such as Jacket 2 , Nomadics , Poetry Ireland and Guernica , and I frequently link to them.