Citation

Greenberg A, Klaver B. Coll. Lit. 2009; 36(4): 179-207.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, West Chester University)

DOI

10.1353/lit.0.0087

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Coming from a place of mutual interest in what it means to be a teenage girl, what it means to write about (and avoid writing about) that experience, and what Sylvia Plath has to do with this, we - poets Arielle Greenberg and Becca Klaver, at the time a professor and graduate student respectively - wrote an essay. We chose collaborative correspondence to promote a cooperative, freewheeling, and inclusive (read: feminist) approach, one that revises more traditional academic modes. Our interests were manifold: the myth of Plath and the legacy of the "suicide girl poet"; our own girlhoods and the poetry that was important to us then; what we think we know about Plath's poems versus what we see when we read them; what makes a poem attractive to a teenage girl reader; the poems teenage girls might want to read now; and what, if anything, these poets have to do with Plath. Our discussion of girlhood centers on a subject who is white and middle-class, like Plath and like us. We acknowledge the limitations of and problems with this. Also, we are not hoping to offer any solutions to the many difficulties of girlhood described in this essay. Above all, we hope that this conversation might be a jumping-off point for others to think about the ways in which poetry is important in the formation of identity for young women.

Language: en