Confessional Poetry

1. Confessional Poetry Dr Rose Lucas

2. What is Confessional Poetry M.L. Rosenthal wrote in a review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in 1959 that the confessional approach in poetry can be differentiated from other modes of lyric poetry based upon its use of “shameful confidences” which went "beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment".

3. What is Confessional Poetry A poetic of • Personal confidences/confessions • Breaking of taboos around mental illness, sexuality, suicide • Link also to the notion of the religious confession – a cathartic expiation of ‘problem’ • Link to the therapeutic confessional of psychoanalysis – a private sphere of complete openness between poet and reader

4. Confessional Poetry • What is the point of confessional poetry? • Does it help anyone other than the poet? • What are your responses as a reader? • What kinds of new territories for poetry and expression did it open up? • Why has it been so influential? • What is the relationship between the ‘raw’ voice of the confessional poem and the inevitable contrivance of art? Is this voice any more ‘true’ than in any other kind of poety?

5. Confessional Poets Poets associated with the Confessional: • Sylvia Plath Ariel (1965) • Robert Lowell Life Studies (1959) • John Berryman The Dream Songs (1964) • Anne Sexton To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) • Alan Ginsberg Howl (1957) • W.D. Snodgrass Heart’s Needle (1959) • Sharon Olds The Wellspring (1996)

6. Sylvia Plath 1932-1963 Born in Massachusetts, Smith College, Fulbright Scholar to Cambridge, 1955. Married Ted Hughes (later poet laurete) in 1956 Suicided in 1963, after marriage split-up

7. Ariel • Ariel, Plath’s last collection of poems, written in a creative intensity, in the months leading up to her suicide. • Highly reflective of a desperate and depressive state of mind.

8. ‘Daddy’ You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-- Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. ….. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM

9. Anne Sexton • 1928-1974 USA • Model • Early marriage, children • A number of mental breakdowns • Divorce • Long periods in psychotherapy • Suicide

10. ‘Her Kind’ I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15297

11. Robert Lowell • Upper class Boston, descended from the Mayflower • Professional Writer and teacher • Manic-depressive (bi-polar)

12. ‘Waking in the Blue’ The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore, rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head propped on The Meaning of Meaning. He catwalks down our corridor. Azure day makes my agonized blue window bleaker. Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. Absence! My hearts grows tense as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. (This is the house for the "mentally ill.") What use is my sense of humor? I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties, once a Harvard all-American fullback, (if such were possible!) still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties, as he soaks, a ramrod with a muscle of a seal in his long tub, vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing. A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap, worn all day, all night, he thinks only of his figure, of slimming on sherbet and ginger ale-- more cut off from words than a seal. This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's; the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie," Porcellian '29, a replica of Louis XVI without the wig-- redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale, as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit and horses at chairs. These victorious figures of bravado ossified young. In between the limits of day, hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle of the Roman Catholic attendants. (There are no Mayflower screwballs in the Catholic Church.) After a hearty New England breakfast, I weigh two hundred pounds this morning. Cock of the walk, I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey before the metal shaving mirrors, and see the shaky future grow familiar in the pinched, indigenous faces of these thoroughbred mental cases, twice my age and half my weight. We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhy7ST5PnV8

13. ‘Skunk Hour’ Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill— we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he’d rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind’s not right. A car radio bleats, “Love, O careless Love. . . .” 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— only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air— a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, And will not scare. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15279

14. Alan Ginsberg 1926-1997 San Francisco • Beat Poetry (Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs) • Buddhist • Peace and Counter culture movements • Gay rights

15. ‘Howl’ • 1956, subject of obscenity trial for depiction of homosexuality • I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan- sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- tionless world of Time between, • http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15308