TEACHER OF 'WEIRD ABUNDANCE': PORTRAITS OF THE PEDAGOGICAL TACTICS OF ANNE SEXTON

Abstract

This essay reflects upon the pedagogy of Pulitzer prize winning poet, Anne Sexton in the context of post-modern preoccupations with and anxieties about academic taste, the role of the personal in the classroom and education's desire to console unruly bodies with normative prescriptions. After a brief introduction to the ways in which Sexton was positioned as a poet by many of her critics, I perform a series of readings of a final assignment that Sexton developed for her students at Colgate University during the spring term of 1972. The performative features of this assignment invite her students to experiment with varying degrees of dramatic introspection and personae building. These conventions are used to direct her students' attention to her poetry, where they encounter the suffering, violated and often grotesque images of bodies in pain. Drawing on the work of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, as well as Michel de Certeau's trope of a ‘walk in the city,’ my readings work to thematize some of the pedagogical manoeuvres that Sexton used to negotiate with a classic academic culture based on what de Certeau calls the ‘tactics’ of people who are subordinated, weak and have no space of their own. The narrative tactics that surface in Sexton's teaching materials unsettle the ‘given’ social expectations and anxieties about the psychic, emotional and physical borders that should circumscribe a teacher's body, particularly a female teacher who suffers with addictions, anxieties, and mental illness, for Sexton's body constitutes a dangerous conjunction: teacher + addict; teacher + illness. By reading Sexton's teaching life through cultural texts that refuse to privilege high culture as the locus of political opposition, Sexton's pedagogic documents can be used to cue educators to develop more refined tastes for irony, parody, and the grotesque so that we might re-define the limited tastes that represent ‘rationality’ and emotional reliability in our classrooms.