confessional poetry

Bill Roecker reads poems appearing in Willamette (1970), You Know Me (1972), and Closer to the Country (1976).

Tony Hoagland reads poems from the collections Donkey Gospel (1998), What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), and Hard Rain (2005), as well as one unpublished poem.

In this lecture, Rachel Zucker discusses risk, shame, and questions of gender and privilege in relationship to confessional poetry. 

Rachel Zucker reads from an early draft of The Poetics of Wrongness (2023), her collection of essay-lectures which consider confessional poetry, the ethics of writing about one's life and relationships, and the primacy of motherhood. This lecture was originally given with Timothy Donnelly and Srikanth Reddy as part of the 2018 Bagley Wright Lecture Series conference "You Are Who I Am Talking To: Poetry, Attention, and Audience."