Category Archives: Poetry

Female Poets, Agency and the “Suicide Girls”

by

After three class meetings, my course on Contemporary American Women’s Poetry has come together nicely. There are 15 young women in the class who are — more or less — engaged and interested. It saddened me to hear how afraid of poetry they are, but it didn’t surprise me. This is a response I expect, and one of my goals is to get my students past that fear so they can read and enjoy poetry. I have a number of Education Majors with an English concentration in the class, so I hope that if I pass along my love of poetry to them, they will pass that love along to their students in turn.

Students’ fear of poetry is one of the big hurdles we must overcome during the semester, and it is one of the reasons poetry is more difficult to teach than prose. I have found, however, that poetry, by its very nature, lends itself naturally to being taught, and I try to use that to my advantage when faced with a semester in which my students and I are going to spend long hours “working the poems.” The very things that students find difficult about poetry — its structure, its imagery, its metaphors, its wordplay — are the things I can use to help them learn not just to analyze poetry but to enjoy it as well. I know that at first, as i move line-by-line through the poems, many of the students feel lost, confused. But in very short order (if we are lucky) they begin to see, they begin to feel comfortable hazarding a guess as to why a poet might use a particular word in a particular place.

Starting off was (relatively) easy. On the first day I used Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” because it allows me to demonstrate so many things to my students: received form, enjambment, imagery, word play. How does one lose a place? A name? The poem also allows me to talk about whether we should use a poet’s biography as a lens through which we examine her work. By the time I was halfway though the poem I had a few students who were already engaging with the work.

It was also easy to figure out the poems we would read for the next two classes. The second time we met, we had read “Mountain Time” by Kathryn Stripling Byer and we spent the class watching Byer’s marvelous March 2013 reading here in Brooklyn. The students enjoyed the video very much and said they found it helpful to hear a poet read her own words.. For the third class we went through Bishop’s “The Prodigal,” with Bishop’s wonderful imagery and wordplay drawing responses from the students as they began to find their way toward a little more comfort with poetic analysis.

At the end of that third class meeting I introduced the concept of agency, and talked a little about the ways in which female poets are not accorded the same agency as male poets. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are the obvious examples, the easiest for my students to grasp. We discussed how critical reaction to a male poet such as Robert Lowell, who suffered from what used to be called manic depression, ran along the lines of, “Look how, despite Lowell’s mental illness, his poetic talent was able to emerge.” Then we talked about how critical reaction to a female poet such as Sexton or Plath, a poet who, like Lowell, suffered from a mental illness, tended more toward, “Isn’t it amazing how her craziness made her a good poet?” The students can see how Lowell retains his agency, which for Plath or Sexton is granted to her mental illness and not to her.

But now I’m faced with a quandary. I am not working with a pre-determined order of readings for this course, so each week I pick the next week’s poems depending upon where our class discussions go. Sexton’s “Her Kind” is a great poem to use early in the semester; students respond well to it, and it’s a good work to have them start their own analysis now that I’ve modeled the process for them. So that was an easy choice for Tuesday’s class meeting. I decided to add “Wanting to Die” to the same class so the students can see Sexton’s power and control as she writes about suicide: “But suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build.”

So far, so good. It seemed natural, then, to move to Plath for Thursday, and “Lady Lazarus” was the obvious choice: “I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real. / I guess you could say I’ve a call.” Like Sexton, Plath is retaining agency, presenting the act of suicide as her choice, as something over which she retains control. And even if she was not successful in her most recent attempt to die, she still retains a potent, feminine power: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”

Here’s the rub. Have I now, by linking Sexton and Plath through these readings, somehow perpetuated the mythos of the two writers as the “Suicide Girls” of poetry? Have I done them a disservice? Yes, they are both fine poets with strong, vibrant voices. And yes, both do address suicide in their works. But have I reduced them to a caricature, the self-destructive female poet driven to suicide by her uncontrollable madness? Have I taken away their agency just as surely as do those who reduce the two poets’ work to a function of their mental instability?

Of course I can address these questions in next week’s class discussions. The problem is that somehow subtleties get lost, and the action of linking the two poets will end up speaking louder than the words I use to reinforce the idea that both Sexton and Plath retained agency within their poetic works.

I have decided to go ahead and have the students read these poems as planned, and I will address these questions and my uneasiness with the assignment during class. I will trust in the poems — and in each poet’s vision, vibrancy and voice — to carry over the idea that the strength and power in the works are ample evidence of Sexton’s and Plath’s agency. No mere “Suicide Girls,” these two poets produced original, groundbreaking works that continue to speak to readers today.

Why Study Women’s Poetry?

by

For the Spring 2008 semester (during my first year as a full-time instructor), I designed and taught a new course, Contemporary American Women’s Poetry. I was working straight from my dissertation, and the course gave me the opportunity to see the poems I’d been living with for so long from a new perspective, that of my students. A poetry course can be a tough row to hoe, particularly when students have avoided studying poetry and are suddenly faced with going through works line-by-line and analyzing everything from punctuation and word choice to metaphor and rhetoric. That this was an upper-level course (juniors and seniors) only complicated matters because, in addition to analysis, students must now work at synthesis — in simple terms, coming up with their own ideas and interpretations. It isn’t enough for them to simply tell me what each aspect of the poem is (X is a metaphor for death, Y is a word that has two meanings and the poet meant both); they must also tell me how those parts combine to make a whole, and then tell me what the whole means.

As I was teaching the course, I was also organizing a one-day conference on women’s poetry. I decided to title the conference “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” because this was a question my students and I were discussing in class. “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” isn’t meant to suggest that the work of female poets is somehow inferior or less-worthy of study; what we all were struggling with was the idea of studying women’s poetry separately from men’s. We talked quite a bit about why you hear people discuss “women’s poetry” but not “men’s poetry.” We questioned whether teaching a separate course in women’s poetry was somehow buying into the idea that women’s writing was something different, something “Other.” My students (ten young women, two young men) struggled with these issues, often saying that they could see both sides: poetry is poetry and should be taught as such, without regard to sex or gender, versus the very real fact that poetry by women is often not taught in traditional lit courses (or, if it is, there are only one or two works by female poets included in the syllabus). That the scholars and poets who attended the conference were also struggling with the question “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” was reassuring to the students, even if it didn’t help them decide which side was right.

Then in May of that year, I ended up teaching Contemporary American Women’s Poetry as a “mini-mester” course. It was the first time the college was offering these intensive courses, which met from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for ten days. After the first day, we all (myself and my students alike) were viewing this as a sort of poetry boot camp. I had six students enrolled (three young men, three young women) and the majority of them needed this course to graduate. And I do mean needed, because graduation came smack-dab in the middle of the mini-mester and if they weren’t doing well they wouldn’t be able to walk at commencement.

Instead of using the poems from the semester-long course, I had the students get the anthology No More Masks! edited by Florence Howe (and don’t get me started on the fact that this wonderful collection is now out of print). We read a lot of poems and did a lot of work. I assigned some poems for them to discuss, and then we did a lot of “down and dirty” analysis and synthesis by picking out poems that appealed to us each day and doing cold readings of them. After three or four days, a young man in the front row raised his hand and asked wearily, “Are all the poems about sex?” The three young women and I cracked up, and I couldn’t help but tease him a little by saying, “Yes,” to which he (and the two other young men) gave a little groan. I then went on to explain that no, the poems wouldn’t all be about carnal pleasure; he managed a weak smile and bent back to his book.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that young man this summer as I work to revise the syllabus for Contemporary American Women’s Poetry, which I will be teaching this Fall for the fourth time. In June I reached out to the wonderful people on WOM-PO, the Women’s Poetry Listserv, and asked them if they were teaching the course what would be the one poem they believed absolutely must be included. I got many, many terrific suggestions (and no, most people couldn’t limit themselves to just one), and have been spending wonderful hours reading and researching and revising the course. But I keep coming back to that question: “Are all the poems about sex?”

What if we read “sex” to mean not physical relations but our own sex, the equipment we were born with (or chose to change)? Are all the poems we (both male and female poets) write somehow about our sex, about being a man or woman? I don’t think there is a poet in the world who would, like Lady Macbeth, cry “unsex me” before s/he sits down to write. We are who we are because we are men or women. Our experience of the world is mediated through sex (and gender, and race, and class).

Yet our experience of the world is also mediated through myriad other “smaller” things. I grew up in a small town on the coast of Maine. I read a lot as a child. My parents were both teachers. I have only one sibling, a sister, with whom I am close. I married later in life. All of these things, and hundreds more, go into shaping the way I move through the world, the way I observe things, the way I react to different situations, the emotions I feel in response to certain experiences. And the way I write poetry. We certainly are not going to break poets down into minute categories — that would be neither helpful nor productive.

So what do I tell my students this semester? One thing that has helped me frame this discussion is telling them about a book I read while writing my dissertation on metaphors of motion in women’s poetry. One obviously important metaphor for poets (both male and female) is walking. In my research I ran across an academic book published in 1991 that dealt with walk poems, and eagerly began reading. Here I was, almost literally hip-deep in copies of poems written by women about walking, wonderful poems that speak to the human experience and condition and do so through taking a particular experience and universalizing it. So imagine my annoyance when it quickly became apparent that the author of this book believed that women’s walk poems focused on the poet’s particular experience rather than on using the poem as a way to link different kinds of experiences together as men’s walk poems do. In other words, Walk Poems by men speak to a universal experience, no matter how particular the subject of the poems may be, while walk poems by women (and yes, the capitalization is deliberate on my part) speak only to the particular experience within the poem. My students are appalled, but the female students are not surprised. Though young, they have already seen this dismissal of women’s experience as too inwardly focused. Too particular. Too, well, female. They push back when they can, fighting the good fight as generations of women who came before them did, but they do get discouraged and it doesn’t help when the very place where they should be judged by their intellect and abilities — academia — is home to some of these very same prejudices.

This, then, is the answer to “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” Because we must.