It was March of 2020 when I wrote a long email to an undergraduate professor to inform him that I planned to turn my back on the craft upon which he’d built an unlikely forty-year career. It was part of a plan I’d hatched to graduate a semester early, an epiphanic decision that had dawned on me at five in the morning on a bus from Chinatown to Durham, on the return leg of a trip I’d timed poorly on the cusp of nation-wide lockdown. In light of these “uncertain times,” I was going to exert my waning sense of free will by quitting poetry forever.
I was emotional and defiant as any self-involved twenty-year-old confronting a crisis larger than her own life, and the strange circumstances had given me an especially electric urgency. My logic was that the sooner I graduated, the sooner I could escape from the town I’d been living in for the past fifteen years and its looming threat of permanent stasis. Rattled, like everyone, by the rapid decline of face-to-face contact, the vision of an online year-long senior thesis in poetry looked bleak. And the truth was—as I explained to the professor in a tone I thought gentle and gracious—something had felt off for a while. I exaggerated and told him that he was the best poetry teacher I’d ever had, and that I deeply respected the work of my classmates, but something wasn’t clicking. For some time I felt like I had been forcing out poems that I thought he would like, and ones I thought my peers would like, and ended up with these awkward, dead things that nobody liked—at least I didn’t like them. I was starting to develop a misfit complex. I desperately wanted to write poetry that was explosive and alive and complicated, but also ones people wanted to actually read! But I hadn’t figured out how. I wanted to stop trying, at least for a long time.
In hindsight, I think my professor was under a lot of unrelated stress when he scolded me over the new-fangled technology of a Zoom call. He told me that this was a horrible and selfish decision, intermittently showering me with praise that he’d never bothered to voice before. He informed me, with actual tears I could just make out in the grainy webcam footage, that I was burning all of my bridges and had no chance of ever getting accepted into an MFA program. I felt guilty that I had inadvertently harmed his ego, but shrugged off the threat: my interest in continuing my education in poetry had already completely dissolved. Eight months later, I quietly filled out an application for graduation online and drove my belongings ten hours north. By the time lockdown restrictions began to ease up in the city, I hadn’t thought of writing a poem in months. It felt like a clean break.
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Poetry was something I’d once chosen to direct my every creative impulse into, something I used to structure a feeble sense of identity and purpose from ages seventeen to twenty. Yet it was easy for me, like almost anyone, to eventually find a reason to hate it. It was difficult and flimsy, indirect and tiresome, pretentious and corny. It was a form that almost no one in the 21st century bothered to read. Worst of all, I thought, was that the poetry that did sell was masturbatory, self-indulgent, and narrow-minded.
Like any person who grew up on Tumblr, my earliest encounter with poetry was Rupi Kaur’s photogenic Milk & Honey collection and all of her e-poet imitators. I felt very smart once I’d weaned off of the pre-digested lower-case mush for crunchier, slightly more abstract traditions of Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney by my freshman year of college. The more I read, and began to write, the more ambitious I imagined poetry could be. I’d already fallen under the influence of my faux-literati friends and boyfriends who would never dare degrade their minds by reading contemporary titles when I came to the conclusion that poetry written exclusively about the self was garbage. I went so far as to conflate confessional with cliché, because it was all anyone seemed to be writing these days. Poems about identity and trauma, which for the other boring white girls in my undergraduate workshops, seemed to consist only of bicurious hypotheticals, on-campus sexual assaults, and a nostalgia for their grandmother’s cooking.1 No matter how talented my peers were, I quickly dismissed their repetitive subject matter behind their backs, and what I thought was the tiresome rhythm of “I, I, I.”
I congratulated myself for not wanting to write about getting raped or trying to slit my wrists or anything else ugly and true. I fantasized about a hoard of genius hidden just beneath the material of my personal tedium or personal horror—if I could just figure out how to get to it. I began to write unruly, wordy, conceptual poems that no one could make heads or tails of, and then complained about my professors and classmates only giving me feedback like “cool image,” or “is this about your dad?” I focused hard on original “phrasemaking” and internal rhymes, never bothering to think about what meaning my poems might actually be transmitting. I didn’t want to think about where they came from. I wanted only to think about “craft,” whatever that meant—the wobbly ideal of what poetry could be, something that could transcend the dull, tired Self.
I was an asshole about it. Once, in response to a prompt option to write a poem entirely of nonsense, I put a slew of random words fed to me by friends into carefully-punctuated quatrains and cheekily titled it “Confessional.”
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Confessional writing, a designation first coined by critic M. L. Rosenthal in his 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies collection, was subversive in its time. Rosenthal compared the “cosmic equations and symbols” and "music of universal forlornness” of the Romantic poets to modern-day poets who cast aside tight traditional verse in service of “the most naked kind of confession.” Lowell, followed by the likes of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman, removed the mask to bare their “actual face.” They dove boldly into taboo subjects of the 50s and 60s; they dispersed the illusion of domestic happiness in American culture in their treatment of their ugly individual psyches. Writing as a vehicle for self-examination was irresistibly interesting, perhaps because it begged for a voyeur. It took such a hold that the two became synonymous. This was an opening of possibility, a sophisticated form of immediacy and directness: the poet no longer had to hold the reader at arm’s length. They could slap you in the face or kiss you on the mouth. Lowell himself called it “a breakthrough back into life.”
But I was not the first to mistrust confessional writing, nor would I be the last. It could easily be deemed narcissistic, hyperbolic, self-victimizing, contrived. From a different angle, Foucault even criticized it as a practice in service of regulatory power, finding its oppressive parallels in religion, law, and medicine. The poets in a 2017 roundtable for LitHub titled “Confessional Writing” Is a Tired Line of Sexist Horseshit” took a similar issue with the semantics—objecting to the idea that vulnerable or effeminate subject matter (like periods or self-harm) should be framed as crimes or sins.
But I’m not sure if Lowell, or even those who spilled their guts before him (Ginsberg), meant to hold up that old system of morality. I don’t think they believed that confession would ever be followed by absolution. I think they simply understood that the opaque shape of a poem, and the darkness it held, could make a single voice more clear, more total. Forgiveness or not, that any confession demands a listening ear.
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