From the confessional

Sherry Chandler today has a very insightful post about the use of first person narrative in poetry as well as approachable poetry in general. Go read it now: I’ll wait.

Debates such as this are why I do not call myself a poet. I just write poetry. A lot of what I have to say doesn’t belong in my novels. Prose and fiction demand an objectivity I sometimes can’t muster, as well as a structure beyond the moment. The same could be said of this blog. So I scribble poetry to release the thoughts onto paper; snippets of my past and the somewhat twisted reality I live.

While I’ve never published a novel, I published quite a bit of poetry in college. I was quite proud of it, and the compliments I received for it. Until I showed the clips to my professor in English Comp who informed me it was “just confessional” in a tone that implied it was one step lower than stripping in public. I stopped submitting my work and didn’t show it to anyone else for 25 years.

Is the label “confessional poetry” as big an insult as my professor implied? David Yezzi has this to say in “Confessional poetry & the artifice of honesty” in The New Criterion Online: There’s nothing particularly novel about placing the artist at the center of the starry universe (or about the artist placing himself there); it’s a vanity at least as old as Romanticism. It is this Romantic image of the poet as a personally suffering channeler for emotion and experience that clings to Plath and to her fellow confessional poets Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and Robert Lowell. That two of the four were suicides (all were analysands) cruelly adds to our fascination with them.

His title succinctly sums up his opinion. (Ironically, Romanticism is my favorite musical style, too.) Yet my favorite poets could be considered confessional in that they speak from deeply personal experiences: Marge Piercy, e.e. cummings, Alicia Ostriker. Each one is brilliant. I don’t feel like a voyeur reading them like I do with Sylvia Plath, the quintessential exhibitionist.

Is it really just the subject manner? Or is it something else? Sherry has this to say on the subject:

The first person pronoun seems to be blamed for everything from bad confessional poetry to arrogant language poetry. It’s a way to focus, I suppose. But I’ve always thought it’s easy enough to write “she” where you had written “I” and continue on being as egocentric as ever. In the end this seems to be an argument about the message of poetry and not about the language. Flaccid language makes bad poetry. Good poetry is made with vibrant language, regardless of pronouns. Great poetry? I wish I knew.

When Sherry speaks, I listen. The great ones are beyond labels, and the rest of us do the best we can to avoid what Yezzi calls “vanity.”

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