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.