Passionate, confessional, inspired and distressed, Anne Sexton (1928-1974) contributed to Teachers & Writers as a poet-in-residence in 1967, the same year she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966). Despite her critical and public acclaim, Sexton felt nervous as a teaching artist in the classroom much of the time, and she struggled with whether she could teach as an expert in her craft. One of her students wrote in a letter to Sexton [published in Journal of a Living Experiment (1979)], “If you think you are a failure to communicate with the kids you are wrong…If you think that you are a failure because you cannot find out what counts to us, you are also wrong…You made the students care.”

Sexton’s work as a writer in the schools followed not only her Pulitzer Prize, but also the publication of multiple collections of poetry and her collaboration with Maxine Kumin on four children’s books.  In her 1967 artist diary, which was published in a Journal of a Living Experiment, Sexton wrote, “I’m interested in what the kids like because I want to be more in touch with my real audience. I write for kids. People who grow up, half the time, most of the time, they forget how to feel.” Sexton’s diary entries are full of vivid descriptions of the kids, how they made her feel and how she and the classroom teacher, Bob Clawson, helped them to learn. She wrote, “The naughtiest kids are the ones with the most intelligence and the most creativity. They’re creating a scene in class and they can create a scene on paper just as well.”

“[Bob Clawson] said I was a poet and he a teacher, and we would keep journals and we’d like [the students] to do so if they would. One girl asked me what a journal was, was it a diary. I said yes, only longer and more truthful. I didn’t know.” Sexton was honest in the classroom and tried to teach her students by trying to learn who they were. She also struggled with poetry’s place in the classroom.  She mused, “Teaching them to be original, will it help them to get in to college? Is originality a commodity that’s useable?”

"I’m just a practicing writer. That doesn’t seem to affect [the students] too much,” Sexton
wrote in another journal entry, which was published in Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook (1991), “They’re not too surprised about my writing. I don’t think they’re impressed, which is all right with me. I don’t want to impress them. I want to stimulate them.”

-Sally Stark

Sally Stark held an internship at Teachers & Writers Collaborative last spring as a participant in the Coe College New York Term (www.coe.edu/newyorkterm).