confessional poetry

[JohnnyQ]

"We must remain until the roof falls in"

[Congratulations]

Confessional meets political? Yes, I say.

For the Union Dead

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

[Walden]

There was an old man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter named Nan
Ran away with a man;
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

--traditional

[djm]

There was a young man from Devizes
Whose balls were of two different sizes.
The one was so small,
It was no ball at all,
While the other won several prizes.

- old as Methuselah's

djm

[JS]

I know Bishop gets put in the confessional category with Lowell, but I think that's a bit of guilt by association, since they were close friends and both had difficult lives. The strategy of Lowell's poems, though, seems much closer to Bloomfield's nice, terse definition--he (RL) dramatizes his anxiety or obsession (or whatever's on the agenda) in a way that emphasizes his difference. That's the confessional part in RL, that he singles himself out by virtue of his complex sensibility, which includes but isn't limited to what he's confessing. (Nothing's ever not complex with RL, I think; class and history and family are always mixed up in there.) But Bishop can be almost self-effacing, conveying emotion as much by the effort it takes her to avoid it as by direct confrontation, and the strength of "In the Waiting Room" is that the experience doesn't seem strange, different, idiosyncratic, but something about life that we all realize, at some point.

Sorry about going on so long. I really like both these poets.

Good thread, all.

[feadogin]

Thanks for sharing that Elizabeth Bishop poem, Congrats. That is a really fascinating poem!

I don't know much about literary criticism & all, but I know what I like, and I like those confessional poets. Sylvia Plath & Anne Sexton were the favorite poets of my youth. Growing up in a very conservative middle-class town I always felt pressured to be cheerful & obedient as it were, and they were practically the only poets that I could relate to. They expressed what I was feeling & going through myself at the time.

To me they were rebel women who dared to tell the truth about the pressures women face and what women go through in our society.

J.

[Congratulations]

I know Bishop gets put in the confessional category with Lowell, but I think that's a bit of guilt by association, since they were close friends and both had difficult lives. The strategy of Lowell's poems, though, seems much closer to Bloomfield's nice, terse definition--he (RL) dramatizes his anxiety or obsession (or whatever's on the agenda) in a way that emphasizes his difference. That's the confessional part in RL, that he singles himself out by virtue of his complex sensibility, which includes but isn't limited to what he's confessing. (Nothing's ever not complex with RL, I think; class and history and family are always mixed up in there.) But Bishop can be almost self-effacing, conveying emotion as much by the effort it takes her to avoid it as by direct confrontation, and the strength of "In the Waiting Room" is that the experience doesn't seem strange, different, idiosyncratic, but something about life that we all realize, at some point.

Sorry about going on so long. I really like both these poets.

Good thread, all.

I don't think that makes Bishop less of a confessional poet. The way she links her personal experience into something universally human doesn't diminish the personal nature of it, in my opinion. Even though "In the Waiting Room" doesn't divulge something unflattering or saddening, it still taps into an internal, intimate realm that exists within a specific, personal event.

[JS]

I don't think that makes Bishop less of a confessional poet. The way she links her personal experience into something universally human doesn't diminish the personal nature of it, in my opinion. Even though "In the Waiting Room" doesn't divulge something unflattering or saddening, it still taps into an internal, intimate realm that exists within a specific, personal event.

Here's what I think the difference is. When I read Bishop, I'm more aware of the poem than the poet; although the biography is interesting (and her letters are marvellous!), I don't feel that I need any sense of the back-story to be fully involved. And the poems are as specific as they are interested in including the reader in a recognizably common experience. With Lowell, well, we're not exactly invited in. Reading him is like passing a house (a rather well-furnished house, with a lot of heirlooms and a very good library) and catching a bit of an ongoing drama as you glance in the open window, gestures, recriminations, raised voices... It's hard for me to read his poems and not think about him and what I know of the life--his class background, education, marriages, illnesses, public image... (Plath is similar in that the poems invite biographical investigation.)

[jim stone]

The Bishop poem describes a metaphysical or
religious experience, one that isn't particularly personal--
it doesn't depend on who she is or her history
but a local and immediate situation--the dentist's
office, the waiting room, the National Geographic.
This epiphany could happen to anybody and
probably has happened to many of us.

How then is it confessional? Unless a vast quantity
of poetry is confessional. But then the term threatens
to lose its meaning--if, for instance, anything that
describes the poet's experiences and feelings is
confessional.

[PallasAthena]

How then is it confessional? Unless a vast quantity
of poetry is confessional. But then the term threatens
to lose its meaning--if, for instance, anything that
describes the poet's experiences and feelings is
confessional.

I agree. It can be hard to define poetry concicely. I think quality does not necessarily relate to the theme in poetry. This is particularly true with "dark" or self-hating poems. They run the gammet from wonderful to beyond terrible.

I haven't read much of the poetry that, to my understanding, is generally considered "confessional" so I'd be reluctant to judge it, but I think there is a difference between a poem lamenting a failing and a poem in which hte poet is sort of saying "see how much I suck?"

[Bloomfield]

How then is it confessional? Unless a vast quantity
of poetry is confessional.

Exactly.

But then the term threatens
to lose its meaning--if, for instance, anything that
describes the poet's experiences and feelings is
confessional.

Meaning? What meaning?

This is where we started out isn't?

Stupid label. Who gives a flying pentameter whether someone is a confessional poet. That's just English Ph.D.s getting their sonnets off. And anyway, every poem written in English in since WWII is confessional in some form or other.

[Congratulations]

I have a loose relationship with schools of poetry, regardless. I think Dickinson and Whitman are modernists.

[Congratulations]

The Bishop poem describes a metaphysical or
religious experience, one that isn't particularly personal--
it doesn't depend on who she is or her history
but a local and immediate situation--the dentist's
office, the waiting room, the National Geographic.
This epiphany could happen to anybody and
probably has happened to many of us.

How does the universality of a person's experience make it less personal? Confessionalism is in the language, not the situation. Bishop frames the language of the poem in such a way as to boldly emphasize the--I repeat--intimate and supremely personal nature of the event of the poem, even if that event is something that most or all human beings have or will experience. To me, the deciding factor in this case is that Bishop reaches the heart of "In the Waiting Room" by starting with a dentist's office, with Aunt Consuela, with her own reactions to the articles in an issue of National Geographic, with the unsettling feeling she gets being surrounded by grown-up people, and arctics and overcoats: a series of very small, personal things that snowball into a huge, personal thing.

[Bloomfield]

I have a loose relationship with schools of poetry, regardless. I think Dickinson and Whitman are modernists.

I know what you mean about loose relationships. The only reason I started writing poetry was to meet girls. Well, more than "meet" them, if you know what I mean. But it didn't work. And that's how I became a confessional poet.

[Congratulations]

I have a loose relationship with schools of poetry, regardless. I think Dickinson and Whitman are modernists.

I know what you mean about loose relationships. The only reason I started writing poetry was to meet girls. Well, more than "meet" them, if you know what I mean. But it didn't work. And that's how I became a confessional poet.

All is revealed.