The Kings are Boring: Some Thoughts On Women's Poetry

I started mulling over the idea of niceness in women's poetry after three different men -- from different generations, who knew me in different capacities -- read the manuscript of my first book and each responded with some variation of, I really like your poems, but they're not very nice. I can't imagine Eliot's editor telling him that The Waste Land was great, but it wasn't very nice -- niceness is, predominantly, a cultural expectation of women. Case in point: recently, at my day job, a young man who spends week every day meticulously cataloguing his ennui via Facebook status updates told me I "should be friendlier." I don't work for an escort service; it's not my job to be his friend. Evidently, it's his job to ponder pictures of his dog on the Internet, which occasionally makes my job more burdensome. I am, therefore, unfriendly on occasion -- because as Tina Fey so eloquently put it, Bitches get stuff done.