Anne Sexton: Teacher of Weird Abundance (Suny Series, Feminist Theory in Education)
A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who confessed the unrelenting  anguish of addiction and depression, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was also a  dedicated teacher. In this book, Paula M. Salvio opens up Sexton's  classroom, uncovering a teacher who willfully demonstrated that the  personal could also be plural. Looking at how Sexton framed and used the  personal in teaching and learning, Salvio considers the extent to which our  histories--both personal and social--exert their influence on teaching. In  doing so, she situates the teaching life of Anne Sexton at the center of  some of the key problems and questions in feminist teaching: navigating the  appropriate distance between teacher and student, the relationship between  writer and poetic subject, and the relationship between emotional life and  knowledge. Examining Sexton's pedagogy, with its "weird abundance" of  tactics and strategies, Salvio argues that Sexton's use of the  autobiographical "I" is as much a literary identity as a literal identity,  one that can speak with great force to educators who recognize its vital  role in the humanities classroom."Our best teachers are dissonant and enigmatic figures; they haunt and  inspire us with their strangeness and provoke in us anxious excitement and  wild thoughts. Paula Salvio's engrossing meditation on the melancholic life  and work of Anne Sexton stays close to this discomforting insistence. With  sensitivity, insight, courage, and a writer's flair, Salvio presents a  compelling study of Sexton's life that will provoke readers to be grateful  for the power of creative, honest, and searching scholarship." -- Deborah  P. Britzman, author ofNovel Education: Psychoanalytic Studies of  Learning and Not Learning"Who is the poet who teaches? When that poet is Sexton, Paula Salvio  argues, the issue of teaching persona is never far from the center of the  room. The fact that Sexton has never been studied through this lens is the  first reason to read this book; the second is that Salvio teaches her  readers more about Sexton, poetry, and teaching than any course I know." --  Dawn Skorczewski, author ofTeaching One Moment at a Time: Disruption  and Repair in the Classroom--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.