Confession as a Dominant Aesthetic Mode

Recently, I did a video about the Confessional Poets for my other creative venture, the Vlog Poets. I hadn't been very familiar with those poets or their work, but I recognized something very quickly: if you're a poet, or an admirer of poetry living in the United States, you're familiar with the approach of the Confessional Poets, and you're probably a Confessional Poet, yourself. I would go so far as to claim that we're all Confessional Poets, an idea that has it's predecessor in J.M. Richard's similar claim about Modernism(which you'll find discussed in the linked article). The idea is simple: when people enter into a specific epoch, they can't help but be a part of that epoch based solely on their involvement in human culture.

An oversimplified example might illustrate my point: if you were born among Neanderthals and raised in a cave, chances are that you would paint a seal on the cave wall using charcoal and animal fat instead of painting, say, Bosch's detailed vision of Hell. The society we live in, in other words, is in itself, the precondition for the aesthetic productions of that society. May the future forgive us for enabling 19 Kids and Counting. Anyhow, extending this logic to the production of poetry, I want to argue, briefly, that we find ourselves on the far side of a particular cultural moment that has enabled (or, somehow, demands) "confession" as a productive aesthetic mode, figured primarily in so-called Confessional Poetry. I'm not a fan of asserting a historical narrative of stops and starts, or "breaks," which seem, to me, too highly specific to really account for the varied and unfolding series of events and their even more various repercussions, which we call history. Instead, I'll advocate for a soft, non-confrontational evolutionary model, in which those series of small modifications and reconfigurations bring us suddenly face to face with  a whole new "animal;" one that bears a family resemblance to that of the moments preceding it, but bears, also, unmistakable marks of newness and change.

Remember that what is called Confessional Poetry is dated to the publication of W.D. Snodgrass' book Heart's Needle, in 1959. The poem that shares it's name with the book begins, after the epigraph, with these lines:

            Child of my winter, born

            When the new fallen soldiers froze

            In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,

            When I was torn...

It is, to my mind, no accident that the first book to be called "confessional" begins a poem with an invocation of the social conditions in which the poet is writing, and specifically, with an invocation of a war. And this war, specifically, comes on the heels of another war in the same world region, which had ended just two years before the next started. Further, this is a war that the US will not win, that we were not excited to enter, and that many public intellectuals and artists would speak out against.  Notice in these introductory lines the collapse of the personal into the social. It seems as if the winter the soldier is dying in is the one the poet has called "...my winter..." and it seems to me that, if the soldier dies there, then the poet does have something to confess. Perhaps the framework of my larger argument can be seen in this point: the religious undertones of the word confess are inescapable, and it seems to me that a culture aware of the purging of ones guilt available to them in confessing are likely to confess; confess and never stop. In a different context, Michael Cobb says of a James Baldwin character that he uses a religious rhetoric that, "... is not therapeutic as much as it is strategic," (God Hates Fags, pg 54),"  and that "...the sacredness of religious rhetoric is":   

 

"... a limit of language, the expression of what cannot be expressed, as well as the literal  indication that something exists outside of language, and by extension, human culture."(Pg 64)

All of this appears in a discussion about Baldwin's attempts to work his way around his status as a queer, African-American man, but I think the ideological framework about religious speech is useful to us, here. If the "confessions" of Confessional Poetry aren't able to escape their religious connotations (and I think they can't), then it's relevant to see how a religious and confessional rhetoric can be employed in a way that nods towards the religious in a secular world. The question, for me, is what is the strategy involved? and, further, to what end is this strategy being employed? The use of confession in a largely secular world must be a particular, and new, function of language and poetry. There has, after all, long been the theory that art is a method of "dealing" with the loss of God, and that the "sublime" of images and artistic productions are second-class replacements for the sublimity of God, himself. So allow, then, the Vietnam War to stand for one of the modulations of human society that becomes a precondition for Confessional Poetry, and let the death of God, announced by Nietzsche in 1882, be another.

What should we let stand as the third modulation, the third conceptual construct that makes Confessional Poetry possible? I will follow Robert Lowell in suggesting that it is the most major artistic moment preceding his own: Modernism. In Lowell's Collected Prose, he registers the anxiety about following the Moderns that the Confessional Poets felt:   

"Were we uncomfortable epigoni of Frost, Pound, Eliot, Marianne Moore, etc? This bitter possibility came to us at the moment of our arrival. Death comes sooner or later, these made it sooner." (pg115)

With this, my tripartite scheme is complete. Confessional Poetry arrived in a cultural moment when: 1) poets and artists were experiencing a (guilt-evoking) war (it's not fun to be viewed as an intrusive imperial bully), 2) experiencing the anxiety about answering to, or moving beyond Modernism, and 3)speaking into a void where God's ear was not.    

This returns us to a matter of strategy. Who, under these conditions, to confess too? Everyone. And what changes when everyone might hear our confessions? Everything.    It is my contention that the shift towards a Confessional, personal, model has been semi-permanent, and that the poets, the artists, and society, are still trying to figure their way out of the logical trap imposed by confession as an artistic mode. The trap is this: in Postmodernity, if the dominant narratives are to be believed, we live in a period of extreme and complete heterogeneity. All things are only recognizable in their differences from other things, and are not any typical things in themselves. If this is the case, then, a Confessional poetry would be unsatisfactory because it represents an invocation of the notion of a "self" that, at least provisionally, is relatable to other, isolated, but existent, selves. That's why Ezra Pound sounds like this:   

II

The wind moves above the wheat-

With a silver crashing,

A thin war of metal.

I have known the golden disc,

I have seen it melting above me.

I have known the stone-bright place,

The hall of clear colours.

and someone like, say, Philip Shultz, writing in his book, Failure, sounds like this:    

My wife's younger brother took heroin and died

in the bed he slept in as a boy across

the hall from the one she slept in as a girl.

He sold pot he grew in their basement.

She'd leave work to take him to the clinic

but she understood she had to save herself.(pg 25)

The first sounds melodramatic and old. The images therein can be related to our own experience only in tenuous ways. We assume he means, by "golden disc," the sun, and that the "metal" sounds of "war" ascribed to the wind above the wheat is a sort of symbolism. On the aural level, especially in the melodramatic repetition of the iambic phrase I have, I have, I have. The second example, though, appeals to us on the aural level, and also at the level of the image, and in a larger conceptual framework in which the feelings an individual would feel experiencing these things are understandable by someone reading this poetic account of those experiences. I've known people on drugs, I've seen pot, I've been in basements. I know what it's like to leave work. Is that all, though? Is Confessional Poetry simply a sign of our own narcissism -- I can relate to this, and, therefore, it's important -- or our own self-involvement? What, after all, about the lines by Shultz makes them poetic, and not simply oddly shaped prose? The attempts to answer to these dissatisfactions with the Confessional mode have been diverse: prose poetry, conceptual poetry, New Formalism, and endless varieties of hybrid poetries have proliferated as poets, frustrated with what has become a new status quo, have struggled to move beyond the Confessional impulse.    For my part (and I think I'm now in a clear minority), I'm content to continue letting the Confessional mode have its day. I say this because I think that the move from poetry about the world to poetry about an individual's "inner-world" seems to me the logical endpoint of poetic innovation for the moment. Almost any other poetry represents only a manipulation of form, leaving content quite unaffected. In the most radical experiments, those in which, say, a computer writes a poem for you, it is still necessary for the "poem" to be represented by a particular construction made of lines and words. Words are inevitably indicators of our condition as human beings: they are symbol systems we've created for just these sorts of representations, after all.

Much in the same way some grammatical and spelling errors can slip by Microsoft Word, or autocorrect gets it totally wrong, a computer generated text is a construction imbued with meaning only when released back into a social context. For now, at least, our guilt, anxieties and passions are the stuff of poems. And I think we're better for it.   

Again, we're all Confessional poets now. At least that's what I think, tonight.   

** An addendum: An article in the Guardian, today, discusses a Scandinavian author who's just finished publishing a 6 volume autobiography described as "a scorchingly honest, unflinchingly frank, hyperreal memoir of the life of one man...". The term "hyperreal" has been employed more often lately to describe a "return" or, perhaps, an introduction, to an aesthetic that is clearly, at least in part, a response to the vagaries of non-representational and conceptual art. As the debate about the book continues, it's likely that the concept of the hyperreal (especially the concept as introduced by Jean Baudrillard) will be gain a more public and non-academic audience. 

Consider the author's admission about his family's reaction to the portrait of his grandmother: "... they said I was lying." The mode of Confession relies on anxiety about the status of truth and of authenticity for its valence, which is, also, it's biggest problem. The more fervently one confesses, the more intimate the truth they divulge, the more flat the admission feels. I remember reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and being unmoved. Partly, this was because Didion herself seemed unmoved, as she mechanically recited the facts surrounding the death of her husband, and subsequently, of her daughter. Our anxieties about authenticity have lead us to this point: we divulge everything, digging into ourselves like someone going through a trunk looking for that specific thing that might be at its core. It is possible, though, that we might not find whatever bauble it is that might anchor our sense of ourselves and give meaning to the narratives we tell. That we might end up disappointed, tired, and looking into an empty chest. Remember that 3 of the six major Confessional poets, in the end, committed suicide, after years of staring into themselves.