Transcript Confessional Poetry - Victoria University, Australia

Dr Rose Lucas
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".
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
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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?
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)
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
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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.
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
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1928-1974 USA
Model
Early marriage, children
A number of mental breakdowns
Divorce
Long periods in psychotherapy
Suicide
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/prm
MID/15297
Upper class Boston, descended from the
Mayflower
 Professional Writer
and teacher
 Manic-depressive
(bi-polar)
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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
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
1926-1997 San Francisco
 Beat Poetry (Jack
Kerouac, William S.
Burroughs)
 Buddhist
 Peace and Counter
culture movements
 Gay rights
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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