Hi.
Golly, hot [INAUDIBLE].
I got stage fright.
No, I want--
Me too.
OK.
Could you find a male--
of the white male you described, did you
find any that were sensitive and came out
for what seemed to them very threatening
writing at the time?
Do you mean male poets or male critics?
Well, let's start with the critics.
Well, first of all, I will say you can be a woman
and be misogynist, sadly.
So a lot of those little snippets
from reviews that I read were written by women, not just
Helen Vendler.
I just like to--
it's easy to get in a fight with Helen Vendler for me.
So I think--
I mean, it's really interesting.
I was talking to my dad this morning,
and he told me something I never knew,
which was that he took a class with Rosenthal
in the '60s at NYU.
And I asked my father like, did Rosenthal
ever mention Allen Ginsberg?
And he was like, no, of course not.
Like that was completely not on the radar.
I mean, I looked at Rosenthal's anthology,
which was really like the exemplary anthology
of its time.
There's a two-part volume-- one of British poets,
one of American poets--
and I forget the exact--
I think there were 29 poets.
Five of them were women; all of them were white.
I think it was just not--
I'm not making any excuses for that.
I think that it has really taken and is still really a struggle.
I think that America had an idea of who a poet was,
and it was Robert Lowell.
It wasn't really anybody else.
There's a lot--
I mean, this lecture could've been many times longer.
There are fascinating relationships
between Lowell and Sexton and Plath and Snodgrass.
They taught each other.
They influenced each other.
The power dynamics between them--
Snodgrass was very supportive of Sexton
until he was very not supportive of Sexton.
Lowell was reading Snodgrass's work and Sexton's work
when he was writing Life Studies.
It's not so clear.
Like, first came Lowell and then came everyone else.
So it's a fascinating field to look into.
Who else?
Hi, Susan.
Did you like the intro that--
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, I love the intro.
And I love Renee's intro too the other day.
We made it seem like I didn't like Renee's intro.
I never said I didn't like introductions.
No.
This was awesome.
And one of the things--
It wasn't funny.
That's what I didn't like about your introduction.
You got every body vetting for me to be funny.
Yeah, she's funnier.
She was like-- this was not a GNAT-- a non-GNAT.
This is academic.
I know.
But what was great about it is I have
a lot of really smart stuff written down
that now I'll repeat and hopefully credit you.
Don't bother.
So the question I have is, you talked
about thinking about confessional poetry as being,
quote, "witness to a shared moment of cultural breakdown."
Yeah.
And that seems to me like the way--
or is that part of what's that disobedience about--
I'm not a big Robert Lowell fan, but For the Union Dead to me
is one of the most amazing poems of the 20th Century
because it situates the self in this complex web of race
relations and a post-World War II moment
in a kind of amazing way.
And I think that's where I see the personal sort of being
in line with disobedience.
Is that what you were thinking as well?
And maybe you can talk about other both confessional and
disobedient poems for us.
Yeah.
I mean, I've spent some time with Robert Lowell recently,
and it's been complicated.
I was never interested in Lowell.
I just couldn't hear it, and I couldn't appreciate it.
And his personal complaints seemed like--
I didn't identify with them.
They didn't move me.
I've come to have more empathy for him and certainly to feel--
it's just so fascinating to me to think
about the ways in which--
he absolutely was disobedient, and he absolutely
was taking a big risk.
I mean, he was a conscientious objector, but he--
a lot of the break that Rosenthal is noticing,
which I didn't really talk about,
is formal, which is interesting because Lowell was much more
formal than the poets who really came right before him.
So it was weird because he was going backwards and forwards.
And it's only in the poems at the end of Life Studies
that really do this thing.
But I'm losing the train of your question.
And my thought, I jumped off somewhere.
I think that it's confusing to me because, on the one hand,
I embrace and admire Lowell for the ways in which he broke
from tradition and sort of gave up this mantle of power
that he certainly had, although he didn't really give it up.
But in another way, I think it really pisses me off
to think about the fact that it was only
when somebody like Lowell was disobedient
that anybody noticed or cared.
And so, like I said, I think other people who were not
Lowell were doing-- like Ginsberg is just the easiest
example--
were doing wacky, crazy, disobedient, revolutionary,
subversive things.
And it didn't concern anyone because it didn't seem like--
it didn't seem like it was going to threaten America or poetry.
Ginsberg could do whatever the hell he wanted.
No one was worried about his soul or his spirit.
Or Sexton or Plath.
So I think-- and then in terms of disobedient poets,
the poets I list at the end, it's just so interesting to me
to think about why Alice Notley or Anne Carson are really
never--
I've never heard them called confessional.
But why not?
They write about themselves.
They include personal information in their poems.
They're subversive.
They're formally disruptive.
They do all these things.
And so-- yeah, that's why I guess
I have this fantasy of another category.
I mean, I feel like I spent a year trying
to think about and write about and teach
about confessional poetry in order to reclaim it
or in order to like, here's why I don't
mind being called confessional.
And ultimately, I think it was the Catholic thing that I
finally realized and the misogyny that I was like,
this is not even the right question.
The question is not do I reclaim or reject.
The question is much more subtle and diverse than that,
which is how do we make these categories?
What are they useful for?
And ultimately-- not-- nothing--
I mean, they're useful.
I'm not useful.
I don't know.
I'm just bleh.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm diffusing.
OK.
Right behind you.
Oh, you have an--
OK, yes, Sam and then Brett.
Good.
That was amazing, Rachel.
Thanks, Sam.
You had me in tears.
Oh.
But I'm still emotional about it, and I did have a question.
Also thinking about what you just said,
what is it that's confessional?
Why are some poets not considered that?
For the list that you read at the end and Ginsberg,
I'm thinking that also in those poets, most of them
have this tremendous musicality.
And in the body, in the work, in the presentation,
but also there's like a physicality in those poems
that I don't necessarily find in the local
or even in some of the more Protestant poets.
[CHUCKLES] I don't really mean that.
But had you thought about that or have
any thoughts about that?
Yeah.
And there's so much stuff I didn't include,
like there was a whole section, and I'm
really interested in this.
I highly recommend Maggie Nelson's book
called Women, the New York School, and Other True
Abstractions.
It's a genius book.
And largely because of reading that book
but also talking to my friend David Powell--
I mean, really like hours of conversations-- like why isn't
Frank O'Hara confessional?
I don't understand.
He writes about all these things.
And one of the things I think-- there
are reasons that I can say, not just critical gatekeeping
or whatever.
There are reasons that I think Gwendolyn Brooks isn't really
a confessional poet.
I think she's-- and Adrienne Rich too.
I think they're really writing for a "we"
and out of a "we" rather than an "I, you."
And that's very simplistic, if that's
a more subtle conversation.
And I think that Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler and--
I'm forgetting so many people right now.
They are writing in the tradition of dropping pearls,
and they are writing to a coterie.
They're writing to a friendly audience.
They're not writing to some asshole workshop
teacher who is trying to say horrible things about them.
And there's a big difference.
I think that a lot of the gay male
poets and a lot of the poets at the New York School,
there's this feeling which is so charming to us
now of writing to a coterie--
writing a poem that only some people
will understand all of it.
It's a very coded type of poetry where certain people reading
the poem are going to understand everything about it
and other people reading the poem
are not going to know what they're talking about.
And that's very different than this part
of confessional poetry in which everyone
is going to understand every single goddamn thing that's
in the poem.
It's that kind of shock and accessibility that I think
is different certainly between Sexton and between O'Hara.
But again, I actually don't find Plath to be very confessional
most of the time.
She's very performative rather than writing
from direct lived experience.
She's always like-- she's very mythic.
And so I think she just got lumped in there,
and we associate confessional poetry with her
probably more than any other poet even though, to my mind,
she's not a very confessional poet in a lot of these ways.
I think that conflation has to do
with a real anxiety about Plath and about femininity
and particularly, I think, about female rage and ambition.
Can you remind me what your question is?
[LAUGHTER]
What?
I wasn't.
Well, I love what you just said.
I was thinking about Plath now, but I was also thinking about
June Jordan and Audre Lorde-- the incredible physicality
in their work that there's a bodily response to it,
and Ginsberg as well, that I think is antithetical to some
of the non--
it's not about the thinking head.
It's about the body.
Yeah.
And I don't know--
I'm so interested in whether that quality, which I also-- it
really draws me to poems.
And depending on whether you like these kind of poems
or not, you even think that-- you either think that that's
manipulative and easy or you think it's brave and difficult.
But whether that quality and my visceral response to it
has to do with the content or has
to do with the vulnerability of the speaker
or has to do with that risk, I really
want to reject the notion that shame
is a necessary component of confessional poetry,
although maybe it is.
Because I think that that's why Allen Ginsberg is not
really considered confessional because he's just not ashamed.
And so I think there's a lot of work coming out
right now, especially by writers of color,
especially by LGBTQ writers, that are really pushing
the boundaries of content and address,
especially including sexual content that
are resisting shame.
And I think that it's very exciting to see that.
In some ways, what is transgressive about that kind
of poetry is that they're just-- they're like, no, no,
not going--
I heard of shame.
I know that's there.
I know you want me to feel it, but I'm not going
to write from that position.
Tony had a question.
We'll do Tony and then [? Leonora ?]
and then we'll ask you questions individually.
Love the thought.
Thank you.
I was wondering if the thing of sense of shame,
if it's not evolving of our patriarchal society
to a more matriarchal society and that the shame isn't there
anymore as it was when there was this great patriarchal
situation.
And that's one part of the question.
The other I was curious about, [INAUDIBLE] Ted Hughes
and his [? presumably ?] rewrite of Sylvia Plath.
Yeah.
And also all the flurry of the papers after that
and access to them and so forth, which
was controlled and very patriarchal.
Yeah.
So two things-- one, I have not encountered the world
you are describing in which the patriarchy is even
diminished at all.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean, I went back and I reread most of Adrienne Rich's prose,
and I was like, nothing has changed.
I don't know.
I know things have changed.
I know but I do not by any stretch of the imagination
believe we live in that post-feminist age
or post-patriarchy.
I just don't see that.
I mean, I-- sometimes I--
anyway.
So that's one thing.
I would like that to be true.
It's not been my experience so far, and it's really--
my experience is one of tremendous privilege
in so many ways.
So for me to say it's not really so much been
my experience in some ways is irrelevant, and in other ways
it's pretty significant.
The second thing is that I think there's over 200 books in print
about Sylvia Plath.
We are obsessed with Sylvia Plath,
and I'm glad that people are obsessed with Sylvia Plath.
When I got to graduate school, nobody
admitted that they like Sylvia Plath
or that they read Sylvia Plath.
It was like shh, like if you said that, I don't know,
you're going to get thrown out.
And now there's been this great resurgence of interest in her
as a poet, not just in a myth, not just as a person,
and not just about her suicide, which I think is great.
The stuff about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath,
I read so much about that, and it's fascinating.
Sometime I should ask [INAUDIBLE]
to print a bibliography of the films and the books
and the essays about that because you could just
spend five years reading that.
I ultimately-- to be honest, Plath
was never a huge influence on me even though I had read her.
And going back to her, I feel much closer to Anne Sexton
than to Plath poetically.
But other than to say that I did actually
have nightmares about Ted Hughes,
I don't know what to say.
That is a fascinating relationship
that I think sadly we will really
never know what happened there.
Hi.
I don't know exactly what my question is, but I feel--
Good because I'm going to forget it--
[LAUGHTER]
I was really struck by your introduction
about the story about your mother
and setting the stage for this.
And if you don't mind, I would like to come back to that
because I'm really interested.
And maybe that goes into this other lecture
you mentioned about ethics--
what happens around-- so confessional or not,
however we want to call it-- when we are involving these
people personal--
not personal, but we are potentially
robbing them or hurting them or misrepresenting them.
And I'm curious what your insights
are on that since you've been writing about this topic.
Yeah, I told Hannah in the car.
I was like, someone's going to ask me, how you never
go back to the beginning.
Yeah, that's a profound question,
and I'm really glad you asked it.
It's not a simple answer, but I'll try a little bit.
Yeah, I think I kept looking to confessional poetry,
to the history, to the practitioners, to the poems,
to the response, as I said, to make it OK for me to have
been a poet who has done this.
And ultimately, I did not get far with confessional poetry
in that--
I got far with confessional poetry in the sense
that I really believe that poetry
is a place that one should be subversive and provocative and
disruptive.
That I feel really great about.
I do not feel that it's OK to hurt other people,
and certainly this kind of poetry does.
And you're absolutely right.
Every time you not only misrepresent someone
but just represent someone, you subjectify them.
And so the lecture I didn't give,
which is really very much about developing
a set of ethical guidelines and the cheat sheet for that,
is that I did come across some ethical guidelines that
made sense to me, and it comes from a Greek notion
of parrhesia.
And you can look up Foucault and he gives a series of lectures
on discourse and truth.
And the concept of parrhesia very briefly
is that the poet speaks in her own voice
and takes responsibility for what
she is saying and says everything without resorting
to rhetorical modes.
And when you employ parrhesia for it to work,
for it to function as parrhesia, you only punch up.
You never punch down.
So the king or the tyrant or the leader cannot employ parrhesia.
It's only something that someone of less power
does to someone of more power, and it
has to be in the service of the people.
It's not in the service of the self.
And so whether or not my book Mothers
fulfills those ethical guidelines, I don't know.
And, for example, whether or not the fact
that I write and have written about my children,
that's not punching up.
I think it's a really, really complicated question.
I think that writing these lectures has--
well, first of all, I've been writing poems again.
But also I do think that this has
been two years of trying to think through what happened
between me and my mother.
I feel functional.
I don't feel absolved.
And I don't think that it would be appropriate
for me to seek absolution.
And I think that coming to that place,
I've only been able to do that through these lectures
and through reading poems like "The Double Image"
by Anne Sexton and looking back through--
I don't want to be Joyce.
I don't want to be Anne Sexton's mother.
But when I reread that poem-- and I strongly recommend it--
I was just sobbing by the end.
I mean, there's something in that poem
that is so deep about mother-daughter relationships.
So like, should she not have written them?
I don't know.
That's the closest I can come.