As some of you know, this lecture is really, really hot
off the presses.
I finished it today, just in time.
The working title is What We Talk
About When We Talk About the Confessional
and What We Should Be Talking About.
And I'm going to start just with a little bit of context
about how I came to write these lectures
and where this lecture fits in with the other two lectures
that I've written.
And I think maybe it's appropriate
in particular with this lecture because my context
or introduction has, as you will very soon
see, a rather confessional flavor to it.
In late January of 2013, I told my mother
that I was going to publish my memoir called Mothers,
despite the fact that she told me she did not want me to
and that if I did, terrible things would
happen to her, to me, and to my children.
A few hours after receiving my email
and forwarding it to several friends,
with a note saying that I was breaking her heart,
my mother, who was in Taiwan at the time,
was rushed to the hospital.
She suffered an aortic dissection
and never regained consciousness after an emergency heart valve
replacement surgery.
For months after my mother's death,
I organized memorials, cleaned out her apartment,
managed her literary estate, and mourned her,
all while feeling that I'd killed her--
that my actions, my writing and my decision
to publish my writing, had in small or large ways
caused her sudden death.
I stopped writing.
Perhaps I was in shock or afraid of my own writing,
or perhaps I imagined that never writing again was penance.
Two years after my mother's death,
I began to write these lectures.
I started reading and writing about two topics--
photography and confessional poetry.
When I completed drafts of these lectures,
I realized that they were both about my mother's death,
although neither of them mentioned her directly.
Looking back, I see that I was trying to exculpate myself.
I was searching for antecedents and justifications
for my practice of writing accessible autobiographical
poems and prose about my mental/emotional state,
my body, my lived experience, and for including
in that writing real people--
my mother, my children, my husband, my friends,
other poets, who I named or otherwise identified
with or without their consent.
My work had always had a kind of photographic relationship
to the real--
to truth, to truth-telling-- and has relied on the excitement
and/or discomfort of revealing too much.
I was trying to align myself with artists and movements
in order to find protection and permission.
I ended up writing a third lecture
about all the ways my writing had hurt others.
I made a list of everything I'd ever
written that had hurt someone--
my most provocative and offensive lines and poems.
I came to realize that none of these three lectures
was working.
I started over again and wrote three new lectures.
The first is The Poetics of Wrongness,
in which I define the poet's role as calling out
her own and others' wrongness and subverting
hierarchical power systems.
The second is called A Very Large Charge:
The Ethics of Say-Everything Poetry, in which I
search for a code of ethics for writing about real people.
Tonight's lecture is the third lecture that I've written
and it is about Confessional Poetry--
the origin and evolution of the term, the problems with it,
the pleasures of it, and how a re-examination
of confessional poetry might be useful in 2016.
Part of the confusion around the term confessional
is that it originally referred to a few poets writing
in a specific time period.
But the term quickly began to be used
to describe a mode, a style, a quality of poems
written by many poets across several decades.
If that were not complicated enough,
confessional became a derogatory epithet, inherently
white supremacist, and later overtly misogynistic,
and was used as a gatekeeping strategy.
Maybe we should just retire the term.
But to reject the term altogether
is to overlook the extent to which contemporary poetry is
profoundly influenced by the legacy of confessional writing
and the extent to which we, who are both drawn to
and repelled by this legacy, are newly in need of a poetry that
employs the elements of what is often called confessional.
Like all literary movements or schools,
confessional poetry contains unlikely bedfellows--
none of whom wanted to be called confessional, all of whom
wrote in a range of styles and modes
across their writing lives.
Still, while rereading the work of the five
poets most often associated with confessional poetry--
Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, Anne Sexton,
and Sylvia Plath--
and the criticism of the period, I
attempted a taxonomy of attributes.
Poems that are called confessional
rely heavily on sound and repetition,
use simple syntax, remark on the passage of time,
and are less interested in condensation
than most lyric poems.
They are narrative, relatively accessible,
and often include a mixture of verse and prose.
They are often emotionally shrill, self-absorbed,
hysterical, messy, and traffic in shame.
They tend to be long, often written in series,
have a strong awareness of audience,
and are preoccupied with religion.
Many confessional poems are written by non-Jews
about Judaism or Jewish history and have
a particular fascination with the Holocaust.
Some so-called confessional poems
contain most of these attributes, others very few.
I'm not interested in developing a confessional-or-not litmus
test.
But for the term to mean anything at all,
there have to be shared characteristics.
And there are.
Let's go back a minute.
The term confessional as it relates to poetry
was coined by the critic M.L. Rosenthal
in "Poetry as Confession," his 1959 review of Robert Lowell's
book Life Studies.
Here's a quote from the review.
"The use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession
grows apace in our day.
We are now far from the great romantics
who spoke directly of their emotions
but did not give the game away, even to themselves.
They found, instead, cosmic equations and symbols,
transcendental reconciliations, in the course
of which the poet lost his personal complaint in the music
of universal forlornness.
Eliot and Pound brought us into the forbidden realm.
Yet, a certain indirection masks the poet's actual face.
Lowell removes the mask.
His speaker is unequivocally himself,
and it is hard not to think of Life Studies
as a series of personal confidences,
rather shameful that one is honor-bound not to reveal."
So poets had always written about feelings.
This was not new.
The romantic poets had big feelings
but according to Rosenthal the romantic poet
lost his personal complaint in the music
of universal forlornness.
The modernist poet was writing from an impartial distance
about and from a self that was fragmented and ontologically
unsure and employed a persona or a mask of the self.
Poetry, as Eliot wrote, is not a turning loose of emotion
but an escape from personality.
The emotion of art is impersonal.
What came to be called confessional breaks
from the lyric tradition of both the romantics
and the modernists.
Confessional poetry is personal poetry
that stays personal, rather than becoming universal,
and in which the speaker of the poem is unequivocally himself.
I call this quality I-ness.
And what happens when Lowell removes the mask
and becomes unequivocally himself?
About half the book, Rosenthal writes,
is essentially a public discrediting of his father's
manliness and character as well as
of the family and social milieu of his childhood.
We hear the poet's psychological problems as an adult,
and spy, as Rosenthal calls them,
grotesque glimpses into his marital life.
So originally, confessional poetry was poetry in which one,
the speaker is himself.
And two, the poet brings what should
remain private or personal into the public sphere.
Three, the poem's contents disrupts the social norms
of its time.
For example, the poem contains content
that was or is considered grotesque, insane, gendered,
impolite, subversive, overly sexual, suicidal, or shameful.
And four, the poem feels dangerous,
in part because it causes the writer and/or the reader shame.
When Rosenthal wrote, "Lowell seems
to regard poetry as soul's therapy,"
he was remarking on something new in Lowell and in poetry.
Lowell was disobeying his inherited Boston Brahmin
mandate to be discreet and inconspicuous
and was defying the tradition of modern poetry, which
he had previously exemplified.
Lowell was a practicing Catholic--
he had converted from Episcopalianism--
and a diagnosed manic-depressive who had received treatment
in and out of mental institutions for most
of his adult life.
Perhaps Rosenthal, an avowed humanist
who grew up speaking Yiddish in a religious Jewish home,
was trying to understand the full weight of what
it meant to Lowell to sully his family's reputation
and undermine his straight White male
Protestant privilege by writing poetry in which he emasculated
himself and revealed himself to be emotionally unstable,
a lousy husband, a failed father,
and a pretty unpleasant person.
But the choice of the word "confession"
to describe Lowell's poetry and of the phrase "soul's therapy"
confusingly allies the Christian practice of confession with
the secular practice of therapy and poetry.
Confession, or the sacrament of reconciliation,
requires one to examine one's conscience,
confess one's sins to a priest, express contrition
for these sins, and ask forgiveness.
The priest may then suggest penance
and will then absolve the confessor.
The process of confession returns a person
to a post-baptismal state of righteousness.
Therapy, and I'm speaking of Freudian psychoanalysis, which
was predominant in Lowell's time,
is a process in which a patient works
to bring unconscious material into consciousness
in the context of a therapeutic relationship.
Conflicts between the conscious and unconscious mind
arise in response to repression, and this repressed material
manifests as neurotic or psychotic behavior
and mental disturbances such as anxiety and depression.
On the surface, confession and therapy may seem similar.
One speaks one's sins to become good again.
One speaks one's story to stay sane and healthy.
But the Freudian notion of illness or madness
as being caused by repressed thoughts
is antithetical to the Christian notion of thoughts as sinful.
There are no good or bad, sinful or godly thoughts
in psychoanalysis.
It is only the repression of thoughts, a kind of unthinking
of thoughts, especially thoughts one thinks
of as bad, that cause illness.
Psychoanalysis aims for integration, understanding,
wisdom, and maturity.
Confession aims for absolution and a return
to grace or a state of innocence.
The conflation of the Christian practice and therapy
results in a great many contradictions
and confusions as to what poetry as confession is.
When Rosenthal writes, "It is hard
not to think of Life Studies as a series
of personal confidences rather shameful that one
is honor bound not to reveal," what
is the location of that shame?
Is it in the nature of the secrets Lowell reveals
or in his use of the poem as a public space
for private material?
Is it the shameful content of a poem
or the expression of private content
that makes a poem confessional?
And if it is the first, shameful according to whom?
To God?
To the state?
To the mainstream?
By this measure, any poem written in America
in the 1950s or 60s that included homoerotic content
should be considered confessional.
But Allen Ginsberg is only sometimes considered
confessional and Frank O'Hara almost never.
And what is the role of the reader?
In "Poetry as Confession," is the reader
a psychoanalysist priest who offers absolution and provides
a therapeutic context?
Or is the reader a voyeur witness intruding
upon what should be a confidential exchange
between poet and priest-therapist?
These confusions matter.
The poem, in one case, is a sign of health and, in another,
a catalog of sins.
The poem is either a site of communication
between poet and other or it is an intercepted broken
confidence.
One thing that confession and therapy have in common
is that both require the presence of another human
being.
In this way, Rosenthal's metaphor is apt and useful.
Confessional poems are often addressed to someone--
a priest, a therapist, a lover, a friend, a child,
or the reader--
in ways that break with traditional apostrophe
in the lyric.
In the lyric, "apostrophe," which
comes from the Greek word "to turn away,"
meaning that the orator turns away to address an individual,
is most often a trope of address to a dead, absent, inanimate
other or self.
Most confessional poems are narrative,
which is to say they describe a sequence of events
told by a narrator.
In confessional poems, the narrator or speaker
is almost always the poet.
Lyric poetry, on the other hand, doesn't usually
tell a story about what happened but is itself
the event, the occasion.
Narrative, like folk tale, is how we explain ourselves
to others and is, therefore, inherently a public enterprise.
Lyrics, from the tradition of singing or anything
that can be accompanied by the lyre,
are concerned with the private and are
how we explain ourselves to ourselves.
In a lyric, the poet is a prophet or oracle,
a voice overheard.
In a confessional narrative poem,
the poet most often speaks to a specific real person
and, thus, breaks from the lyric notion that eloquence is heard,
poetry is overheard.
This is part of what gives confessional poetry a sense
of realness and intimacy.
It is also part of what can position
the reader as a voyeur.
Anne Sexton's poems are full of this kind of direct address.
"You, Doctor Martin" is the first poem in her book
To Bedlam and Part Way Back and begins, "You, Doctor Martin,
walk from breakfast to madness."
Whereas Wallace Stevens was interested in the imagination's
ability to press back against the pressure of reality,
Sexton's poems often work to press her reality--
her voice, her will, her physical female presence
against a male interlocutor who is limiting or suppressing her.
The power of Sexton's poems comes as much or more
from their direct address and the discomfort engendered
by such an address than from her taboo to personal content
or I-ness.
In her long poem "The Double Image,"
Sexton directly addresses her daughter, Joyce,
who was four years old at the time.
Sexton describes intense guilt around her separations
from Joyce, which were caused by Sexton's suicide attempts
and hospitalizations.
Sexton explores the tangled relationship
between herself and Joyce and between Sexton
and her own mother, with whom she
went to live like an angry guest,
like a partly mended thing and outgrown child.
"The Double Image" reveals that Sexton's mother never forgave
Sexton for attempting suicide and accused her daughter
of giving her cancer.
In the poem, Sexton and her mother
have their portraits painted and hung on opposite walls.
Sexton describes her mother's portrait
as, "My mocking mirror, my overthrown love,
my first image."
The long poem ends with Sexton admitting,
"I didn't want a boy, only a girl, a small milky mouse
of a girl, already loved, already loud
in the house of herself.
We named you Joy.
I, who was never quite sure about being a girl,
needed another life, another image to remind me.
And this was my worst guilt--
you could not cure nor soothe it.
I made you to find me."
Personal confidences and private details abound in this poem.
And the confession at the end, that Sexton made her daughter
to find herself, to save herself,
is a brave and horrible thing to say to a child,
and also one that feels, to my mind, deeply common and true,
even when one is not suicidal or profoundly disturbed.
The guilt, rage, jealousy, joy, love, pleasure
of the cracked mirror of mother/daughterhood
is both taboo and archetypal.
Sexton wrote "The Double Image" while
studying with John Holmes, her first workshop teacher.
Holmes was dismayed and angry when Sexton read him the poem
and told her not to publish it.
Sexton's poem, "For John, Who Begs Me Not
To Enquire Further," is Sexton's response
to Holmes, who had characterized Sexton
as a guilty, suicidal, deranged, excessive spectacle to Sexton
directly and to her friends and peers.
In a letter to Sexton's friend, Maxine Kumin,
Holmes wrote, "Sexton writes so absolutely selfishly of herself
to bear and shock and confess.
Her motives are wrong artistically
and finally, the self-preoccupation
comes to be simply damn boring."
"For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further,"
is an ars poetica for Sexton's own poems
and for confessional poems, as well as
a straightforward attempt to save face and save self.
The title refers to the epigraph of To Bedlam and Part Way Back,
which is a quote from a letter in 1815
from Schopenhauer to Goethe.
Here's the epigraph.
"It is the courage to make a clean breast of it
in the face of every question that makes the philosopher.
He must be like Sophocles's Oedipus, whose
seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate
pursues his indefatigable inquiry, even when he
divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer.
But most of us carry in our heart
the Jocasta, who begs Oedipus for God's sake
not to inquire further."