Confessional poetry is not just poetry that is personal.
It is not just poetry about taboo subjects.
Confessional poetry contains a quality
of potential self-immolation that
is best understood by imagining this moment when Oedipus
asked Jocasta for the truth.
Jocasta, who knows by this time what has happened,
tries to put Oedipus off when he asks her who he is.
"Someone who ignores all this bears life more easily,"
Jocasta tells him.
"Oh, you unhappy man, may you never
find out who you really are."
As Schopenhauer knows, and as Sexton explains to Holmes,
the poet and philosopher have both Oedipus and Jocasta
within.
But the true philosopher-poet continues to seek enlightenment
no matter how horrible and despite the forces, defenses,
and psychoanalytic terms that beg our inner Oedipus
to please, please stop asking.
Whether it is the search for truth
despite the potential horror that truth may bring,
or the shame of admitting one's sinfulness,
or the sin of breaking a confidence,
confessional poetry is marked by a sense of urgency and risk
to the poet, to the people mentioned in the poem,
and to the poet's readers.
"For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge.
For the hearing of my heart, it really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge,
for a word or a touch or a bit of blood,"
writes Sylvia Plath in her poem Lady Lazarus.
Plath means that there is both an excitement and a cost
for this kind of poem, which often
does feel like the eyeing of the poet's scars.
In Plath's case, the scars often aren't even scars yet,
the wounds are too fresh.
Reading Plath sometimes feels like watching someone
intentionally cut herself.
The experience is exciting, horrifying, compelling,
damaging, and dangerous.
Looking at these poems and poets,
we must try to imagine what it meant
to be writing in the tranquilized '50s, a time
of intense repression when societal expectations about sex
and gender were even more rigid than they'd been in the 1920s.
We must try to imagine what it felt like in 1960
to admit you'd had an abortion or to speak back to the John
Holmeses of the world.
What may have begun as soul's therapy, talking about the self
in order to create a more integrated self,
began to be seen as a kind of witness
to a shared moment of cultural breakdown,
even though the phrase "Poetry as witness"
had not yet come into common use.
When Lowell wrote, "My mind's not right,"
or "I hear my ill spirit sob in each blood cell
as if my hand were at its throat, I myself am hell,
nobody's here," or "I keep no rank or station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale, and small," he had a lot to lose.
But at the same time, it was his straight, white, Mayflower male
privilege that enabled him to risk this kind of writing
and made his trespass noteworthy.
For example, when Rosenthal wrote his review of Lowell,
he made no mention of Ginsberg's "Howl,"
also about breakdown, which had violated social norms to such
an extent that the book had provoked an obscenity trial.
It was easy to dismiss Ginsberg's
counterculture poetics as part and parcel of his status
as a degenerate homosexual Jew.
And I think if Lowell, heir apparent of modern poetry,
had not done it first, it would have
been easy to dismiss Sexton and Plath as madwomen thrusting,
as Snodgrass said of Sexton, her needy, vulnerable, vexed female
voice onto the poetry scene.
This is a necessary slight digression.
For a long time, I puzzled over the whiteness
of confessional poetry.
And to a lesser extent, the straightness.
Why, I wondered, was Plath called confessional but not
Gwendolyn Brooks?
Why is Sharon Olds confessional but not Lucille Clifton?
Why Lowell, but not Ginsberg?
When Black poets write with I-ness
about personal private content, they
are mostly called Black poets.
If and when critics actually take their
work seriously enough to write about them.
When LGBTQ poets write urgent, silence equals
death, explicitly sexual, bodily poems,
they are called queer poets.
The confessional label seems restricted to poets
with mainstream privilege.
I once asked the poet Shane McCrae
if he considered himself a confessional poet.
He'd written that Plath was his earliest,
most important influence.
And I saw what I consider to be strong confessional impulses
in his work.
McCrae responded to me via email.
"I do think that it is in some ways impossible for a writer
of color to be a confessional writer,
or at least to be thought of as a confessional writer.
Writers of color, absolutely, can write autobiographically.
But I don't know that that is confessional.
The confessional is the admitting of a step or a fall
away from a state of grace.
It is a report of grace momentarily destabilized.
But the assumption behind it is that grace
is the default position.
For writers of color, it is not assumed that grace
is our default position.
We are always tainted by the sin of being oppressed."
In this way, the confessional designation
is inherently a white supremacist construction.
It relies upon the notion that only white people
occupy a state of grace from which to fall.
How is it then that confessional poetry quickly
became associated predominantly with women?
Lowell wrote into a feminized space,
but almost immediately the poems of Sexton and Plath
upstaged and outshone him and the other confessional male
poets.
Sexton and Plath garnered a passionate following
among readers and inspired significant anxiety
among critics.
In the introduction to her anthology,
Poems from the Women's Movement, Honor Moore writes,
"When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published in the United States
in 1966, American women noticed.
Not only women who ordinarily read
poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions
had awakened when they read Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique a few years earlier."
Plath was identified with the poets ML Rosenthal dubbed
confessional, but that label obscured the significance
of her posthumous volume.
Here was a woman superbly trained in her craft, whose
final poems uncompromisingly charted
female rage, ambivalence, and grief in a voice with which
many women identified.
Within a few years, many of the things
Rosenthal had noted in Lowell, intense taboo
breaking about the predicament and horror of the lost
self in which an unmasked poet brought
private and personal concerns into the public realm
became a mode or a style or maybe a volume of poetry
that was associated almost entirely with Plath and Sexton
and with poets of the women's movement.
Although contemporary critics mostly
did not deem the poets like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich,
Muriel Rukeyser, Sonia Sanchez, Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin,
Anne Waldman, Lucille Clifton, Diane di Prima, June Jordan,
Carolyn Kizer, Marilyn Hacker, and Molly Peacock confessional,
what we now think of as confessional often
comes from the qualities we associate
with the work of these poets.
The lyric was supposed to be a private, universal, impersonal,
overheard address.
But as Alicia Ostriker points out,
privacy's deprivations belonged primarily to women,
and its autonomy to men.
And I would actually say straight men.
The breakdown of privacy by female and male writers
in the 1960s had the effect of destabilizing the privilege
of white, heterosexual men for whom the lyric may
have appeared to investigate universal truths,
but which ignored or devalued what
Carolyn Kizer called, "Merely the private lives of one
half of humanity."
The high value placed on decorum, modesty,
and impersonality was a way of maintaining
the status quo of the straight, white male plutocracy.
In her essay "My Name is Darkness",
Sandra Gilbert writes, "The self defining confessional genre
with its persistent assertions of identity
and its emphasis on the central myth of the self
may be distinctively a female poetic mode."
Gilbert explains that the male poet
may manage to be at once private and public, lyrical
and rhetorical, because the personal crisis
of the male poet is felt to be the symbolic embodiment
of the national and cultural crisis.
This ability to be simultaneously
private and public, particular and universal,
was not available to women who had seen themselves only
as muses and as the subjects of poems
rather than the creators of self and art.
One of the primary characteristics
of confessional poetry, private content,
reliance on lived experience, I-ness, direct address,
urgency, and a sense of personal risk.
All of these were projected onto the poems from the Women's
Movement so that it made sense that confessional poetry began
to be seen as a quality of a poem, formal or free verse,
that was personal, political, urgent, risky, accessible,
and subversive.
But to conflate the confessional with a stylistically diverse
poetry in which women speak truth
to power despite enormous pressure
is to ignore the important fact that the poets of the women's
movement were not confessing.
Confession is the wrong word.
These poets were not saying, bless me
father for I have sinned.
They were not asking for forgiveness.
Listen.
"I am not wrong.
Wrong is not my name.
My name is my own, my own, my own.
And I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this.
But I can tell you that from now on, my resistance,
my simple and daily and nightly self determination,
may very well cost you your life."
June Jordan.
Or, "Whoever despises the clitoris, despises the penis.
Whoever despises the penis, despises the cunt.
Whoever despises the cunt, despises the life of the child.
Who will speak these days if not I?
If not you?"
Muriel Rukeyser.
"And when we speak we are afraid.
Our words will not be heard nor welcomed.
And when we are silent, we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak remembering we were never
meant to survive."
Audre Lorde.
"But because a woman is acceptable if she is weak.
Acceptable if she is a victim.
Acceptable also if she is an angry victim, shrew, witch.
A woman's sorrow is acceptable.
A deodorized, sanitized, sterilized, antiperspirant,
grinning, efficient woman is certainly acceptable.
But who can tolerate the power of a woman close
to a child riding our tides into the sand
dunes of the public spaces?"
Alicia Ostriker.
"Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried
to kill me and has failed."
Lucille Clifton.
I draw your attention to the conflation
of confessional poetry and the women's movement
for several reasons.
First of all, it was the energy and passion
of the Women's Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, the Gay
Rights Movement, the Anti-Vietnam War Protests, that
gave Sexton, Plath, Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn
Brooks, Adrienne Rich, and poetry itself
a feeling of urgency.
What interest there is today in confessional poetry
comes largely from its eventual connection
with social activism, counterculture, and protest.
People of every age are drawn to such energy as our poets
and poetry readers who often seek out poetry
because they feel marginalized, silenced, disenfranchised,
and alienated.
Many poets in my generation found Sexton and Plath
on our mother's shelves or in used bookstores.
These poems woke us up, disturbed and delighted us.
The poems felt both forbidden and instructional
like our parents' Joy of Sex or our mothers' Our
Bodies, Ourselves.
These were the poems that made us want to write.
We wore these poems like a badge of honor
until we went to college, where most English departments still
exalted Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Stevens,
Eliot, and Pound, and left only a few minutes each semester
for HD, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop.
We sewed these confessional poems
into the inner linings of our minds,
and went to graduate school where
we were told that these were not serious poems
and not written by serious poets.
Some of us had loved the realness of these poems,
but were taught that real poems should not
be shrill, direct, political.
Real poems, we were told, should not be about or for anything.
Many poets of my generation came to poetry
because of Plath, Sexton, Rich, Olds, Clifton, Maya Angelou,
Jordan, Ginsberg.
But our beloved poets were considered important only
in women's studies, African-American studies, queer
studies departments, if our universities even
had such departments.
But poets who had fought to bring
the personal into the private sphere
became our private pleasures.
While Harold Bloom, Marjorie Perloff, and Helen Vendler
said poetry was not big enough or flexible enough
to include these people.
Poetry only had room for Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens,
John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, and only
when she was being very, very mythic.
Many of us loved these poets too,
but had not imagined that one should love poets monogamously,
stingily, exclusively.
My aim is not to convince you to love confessional poetry,
but only to say that your feelings about it
are likely influenced by the intensely
misogynistic, homophobic, and racist
critical response to the original confessional poets,
especially Sexton and Plath.
From a review of Sexton: "Never has there been so much
interest in reading and writing poetry,
and never have publishers spent so much
money publishing it with almost total disregard for quality."
A review of Plath: "Many an uneasy husband notes his wife's
eyes widen and become glaucous, almost erotic,
at the mention of Plath's name.
What is the magnetic pull, the heady vertigo
of this particular poet and her suicide?
The love she inspires has a necrophiliac ardor.
Many of her admirers, like James Dean's fans,
react more to the romantic agony inherent in the myth
than to the art itself."
Another review of Plath: "Sylvia Plath
was a sick woman who made art of her sickness.
Some young people having limited experience need literature
to help them feel bad, and they will
celebrate Plath for a while."
Another review of Sexton: "Who will buy this book?
I think from hearing them speak at poetry readings
and in poetry workshops, it is primarily young girls and women
who admire Sexton for all the wrong reasons,
making her a martyr to art and feminism, who seem out
of their own needs to identify with her pathological
self-loathing and to romanticize it into heroism.
It is very little to do with poetry.
And it does neither poetry nor Anne Sexton a service."
Helen Vendler on Sexton: "The relentless centrality of the I,
almost always indoors, alone, contemplating
its own anguish, even if sometimes in farcical terms,
is finally exasperating."
From the beginning, the term confessional inspired concern.
Concern for Lowell's soul, for the feelings of those
he exposed, for his mental health,
for the effect of this kind of poetry
and its readers and the genre itself.
This anxiety reached a fevered pitch
during the backlash against the Women's Movement,
and inspired a critical panic over what confessional
would do to poetry.
This alarm can only be understood
in the context of the latent or blatant misogyny of critics
whose condemnation of the confessional
serves to defend the heteropatriarchy.
The fear of powerful women and the need
to contain and control or extinguish female power
is older than marriage or monotheism,
which is to say it is as old as the patriarchy.
Concern about and for women readers
is as old as the moment women first learned to read
and certainly predates the particular anxiety
about and for Plath and Sexton's readers.
During the Victorian era, medical authorities
were concerned that women who engaged
in excessive and unsupervised reading of popular fiction
would experience early menstruation, painful menses,
infertility, as well as nervousness, insanity,
and even premature death.
Women poets and novelists were outselling men
when Nathaniel Hawthorne made his remark
about the mob of scribbling women
who were ruining literature.
The concern for the common, i.e. female reader,
for the husbands of Plath's readers,
for academia, for more serious male writers, and for poetry,
as if confessional poets were infecting the genre
with a terminal illness, takes hold at the same time
that an extraordinary tide of female poets entered the scene.
Sadly, this kind of critical assessment
continues apace in our day.
From a 2010 review of Sharon Olds:
"Stylistically invariant since 1980,
Olds writes about the female body
in a deterministic, shamanistic, medieval manner.
Infantilization packaged in pseudo-confession
is her specialty.
Her poetry defines feminism turned upon itself, chewing up
its own hot and bothered cadaver exposed since the 1970s.
Female poets and workshops around the country
idolize her, collaborate in the masochism,
because they say she has freed them
to talk about taboo subjects, she
empowered them, has given confessionalism such a bad name
it can't possibly recover."
Or one of my favorite reviews of my own books on GoodReads:
"Zucker's voice has force, and some of these poems
are vivid in their emotional violence and disjointed verse.
A lot of it, however, feels confessional in the worst sense
of the word, rote, self-absorbed, hysterical,
and lyrically sloppy.
The author's high strung personality
becomes numbing after a while.
It's like being verbally assaulted
at top speed for an hour straight."
I think it is not a coincidence that more abstract
theory-based practices like language
poetry and conceptual and avant garde movements
gained prominence at the same time
that critics were wringing their hands over these scribbling
or shrieking women.
In questioning the nature of truth, sincerity,
and authorship, language poetry temporarily subsumed
the I. Poems were spoken again into the void
just when confessional poetry, misnomer
that it was, an autobiographical transparent poetry by women
and poets of color and queer writers, became popular.
Beginning in the '80s and '90s, poets
who wanted to be taken seriously but also
wanted to include narrative and emotional content, used
elliptical strategies to tell the truth, but tell it slant.
Stephen Burt, who coined the term elliptical,
explains that poets like Emily Dickinson, John Berryman, John
Ashbery, Susan Wheeler, CD Wright, Claudia Rankine,
and others, quote, "Try to manifest a person who
speaks the poem and reflects the poet
while using all the verbal gizmos
developed over the last few decades
to undermine the coherence of speaking selves," close quote.
Although the work of many so-called elliptical poets
had real political force and power behind it,
the trickle down effect was that MFA students and others
studying and reading this work began
to use I in a low stakes or no stakes way.
Many of these poems were accessible and transparent
like confessional poetry and had the narrative chattiness
of New York School poems.
But these poems were so allergic to sincerity and sentimentality
that they hardly ever strayed from an apolitical, apathetic,
flat affect style.
David Trinidad calls these poems,
"Twists and turns of nothing."
They are poems addressed to no one,
about no one, in which nothing is at stake.
Many of the things that compelled Lowell, Sexton,
and Plath, mental illness, surveillance, imperialism, war,
family, violence, have followed us into the 21st century.
And the poets I care about are still
writing about these things.
The poets I care about are also writing
about the systematic institutional violence against
and discrimination of people of color,
LGBTQ people, undocumented immigrants, poor people,
and people with disabilities, as well as about the prison
industrial system, and the destruction of the environment.
Who decides what one can or should write about?
Who gets to write from the I?
Who has the right to speak?
How can I name themself as specifically and honestly
as possible in a way that does not
make a you that is othered in racist, homophobic, or
oppressive ways?
The question of who gets to say what
and in what way is central to most poets writing today.
Issues around permission and taxonomies,
as well as how one is perceived if one writes out
of or against lived experience underlie our conversations
about what poems should look like or sound like, what poems
are for, who poems are for, and the relationship
between poetry, identity, and politics, which is, I think,
our most urgent American conversation.
Over the years, students have asked me,
can I write about my ex-boyfriend?
Can I write about being from the South?
Can I write about my difficult feelings about my mother?
My brother?
Sex?
Depression?
Coming out?
Blackness?
My Asian ancestry?
My father's death?
Gun violence?
Race?
The Middle Passage?
Rape?
Students ask if they can write about things
that have or have not happened to them, that for one
reason or another, they are afraid to write about.
Of course, I always say.
And students bring me these poems
and hold them out in a shaky hand.
I've never written about this before or I'm not sure
this is even a poem, they often say.
Students come to me because I've written
about the things that scare me most and have
asked them to do the same.
I've written about myself and my family, my body,
my feelings in overtly autobiographical ways.
Until recently, this had not been very difficult for me.
As a Jew, I was taught that only actions are sinful,
never thoughts.
And I come from a long line of truth
telling wordsmiths and provocateurs.
Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Philip Roth,
Bob Dylan, Sacha Baron Cohen.
Art was always associated for me with shock rather than comfort.
And I always felt it was more important to say
what needed to be said than to make something beautiful.
For a long time, being called confessional did not offend me.
I did not, at first, understand the extent
to which being called confessional
depends upon my white privilege, and I did not
mind being called a woman poet or even a mommy poet
because I'm comfortable with the way my poetry arises out
of my female experience.
But writing confessionally does have costs.
It has its charge.
There is pressure to write confessionally
because this is the kind of writing that brought many of us
to poetry, and we know how pleasurable
it can be for the audience.
Some of us want to write for and to a less rarefied audience.
And transparent, autobiographical,
socially-oriented poetry appeals to a more general audience.
On the other hand, there is pressure
to eschew directness and narrative,
to explore or embrace the kind of difficulty and direction
that we've been taught distinguishes poetry
and prose from serious writing, and serious writing
from populist writing.
It is a mistake to think that ML Rosenthal's
poetry as confession review described a school or movement.
But I do think Rosenthal absolutely
noticed a moment in the history of American poetry
in which poets started to sound different,
started to use poems differently,
started to want something different from poems.
What if, though, instead of spotlighting
the publication of Life Studies as the pivotal moment,
Rosenthal or someone else had chosen October 7, 1955,
the date Ginsberg read Howl aloud for the first time.
Michael McClure, present at that San Francisco reading,
described it like this.
"Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which
left us standing in wonder or cheering and wondering.
But knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken,
that a human voice and body had been
hurled against the harsh wall of America."
I don't know what word Rosenthal would
have used to describe Ginsberg's barrier-breaking poem,
but I doubt he would have used confession.
If Rosenthal had asked me, even though I wasn't born yet,
I would have suggested disobedience.
Even though Alice Notley hadn't written the Poetics
of Disobedience yet.
Ginsberg brought taboo, personal, sexual content
into the public realm.
Ginsberg was unmistakably, unequivocally, irrepressibly
himself in his poems.
His poems are spoken to real people, to God, to the state,
to me.
And though at times they are deranged, they are not ashamed.
They do not ask for forgiveness.
I don't know if poetry or the world
would have been any different if I were now
writing about a movement or a moment called
Disobedient Poetry rather than Confessional Poetry.
But in my fantasy of this alternate history,
Alice Notley, Anne Carson, CD Wright, Bernadette Mayer,
Claudia Rankine, DA Powell, Sharon Olds, June Jordan,
Adrienne Rich, Eileen Myles, Morgan Parker, Danez Smith,
Arielle Greenberg, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Ross Gay, and so many
others are in it.
No one wastes time accusing these poets of narcissism,
hysteria, directness, accessibility,
or for their difficulty, because these poems run
on the engine of risk, which is different from the engine
of shame.
In the end of her book, End of the Sentimental Journey,
Sarah Vap writes, "I am against being against the sentimental.
This helps me.
I cannot say that I'm for the confessional.
What I can say is that I am against being
against the confessional.
To be against the confessional is
to be against writing about women,
and women's bodies, people of color,
and the bodies of people of color, queerness,
trans bodies, differently abled bodies, individuality,
oppression, perversity, diversity, class, the domestic,
the non-normative, the personal, the political, the specific,
the urgent, the spiritual, the banal, the direct,
the relational, the screamed, the whispered.
To be against the confessional is to be against coming out.
Against emphatically bringing the unwanted
and repressed and hated and oppressed into public view
into the poem."
"Poetry," wrote Audre Lorde, "is the way
we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."
Alice Notley wrote, "Staying alert to all the ways
one is coerced into denying experience, sense,
and reason is a huge task."
I am not advocating for any one kind of poetry.
I want neither a prohibition of lived experience,
nor a tyranny of lived experience.
I want a poetry to lead us into less binary
ways of thinking and living and writing and reading.
I want a poetry that is catholic only in its lowercase sense,
liberal, diverse, inclusive, and all embracing.
Thank you.