Visibility

One of the reasons that I was so intent on having fat poets (fat women poets) write poetry about themselves, about being fat, about being in general, was that I was tired of our being invisible.

You'd think that with our robust, in many cases large and fat bodies, we would be quite visible everywhere we went. However, this is not the case. Anti-fat propaganda has managed to take such a vise-like grip on many people's tastes and emotional responses that they actually have developed a way of not seeing us, as prominent as we are.

And along with that invisibility goes a denial of the wish to participate fully in our lives as citizens and human beings in the land in which we live.

We are forbidden not only the possibility of beauty, but also of love, lust, fun and complexity. We are often even forbidden the right to be judged on our intelligence and abilities (Every month a study comes out stating that fat people are less intelligent than thinner people. Luckily every such study seems to sink into oblivion after it wins some free, quick, cheap publicity).

So it got to the point where many of us -including the originator of the Fat Poets' Society, Mary Ray Worley- felt that it was necessary and wonderful to point out in poems that we have the right to claim the possibilities of beauty, love, lust, fun and complexity. And we did exactly that in Fat Poets Speak I:  Voices of the Fat Poets' Society.

We aim to do the same thing in Fat Poets Speak II: Living and Loving Fatly