“These Are My Confession(al Poem)s”
On public vs. private poetry & the confessional genre
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I’m currently in the second week of a virtual writing workshop, and I’m struck by how the instructor’s not afraid to get personal in our writing exercises.
In addition to craft-based foci each week, the writing prompts specifically ask participants to reflect on challenging aspects of our lives, exploring subjects like family and relationship dynamics, instances of shame, and so on. (We get an array of options; no one has to write about anything that makes them uncomfortable if they don’t want to.)
At first, the experience of mining my memories to brainstorm toward the prompts felt challenging in an unexpected way. To some extent, I think I was just a little paralyzed by surprised. After all, poetry is so often de-personalized, especially the more “academic” you get.
In poetry craft discussions, we often talk about the “speaker”, not the writer. We reinforce that poetry doesn’t have to be factual or exact; it’s not autobiography, we say.
But poetry does draw on our experiences, directly or indirectly. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the line we toe between the deeply personal and the art we make from it.
On public vs. private poems
One idea I’ve found floating around workshops and articles is that there are two categories of poems: “public” and “private”.
Public poems are the ones you refine for an audience, hoping to share through publication, social media, or live performance. Private poems are mostly just for you, functioning as a type of catharsis or therapy more than art. Like journal entries, they are written because it feels good to get it down on paper.
Though I didn’t know the concept of public vs. private poems, I wrote private poems from 3rd grade through college. I wrote for myself, hardly workshopped, and didn’t put my poetry through the proverbial editing wringer I do now. My audience was strictly myself and a few close friends.
There were, of course, exceptions: a high school contest where I was required to read my piece aloud, a small open mic night I organized at my college barista job. But mostly, being public with my poetry scared the shit out of me (and still does!)
Making your confessions public
A few weeks back, I was listening to Rattle’s Critique of the Week.
About 25 minutes into the workshop, Tim Green, Rattle Editor-in-Chief, notes that the poem being critiqued feels more like a letter: deeply significant to the writer and whomever it’s addressing, but not written for a wider audience. Tim posits that the general public needs more storytelling, and in particular more detail to connect with a poem, bringing up the public poem vs. private theory.
A commenter asks whether this would be a “confessional poem” — but confessional poetry is not necessarily private poetry; Tim brings up Sharon Olds, who writes “confessionally” and on personal subjects, but for an audience to observe.
Olds notoriously shows the reader what’s happening, painting us a clear scene. Sometimes viscerally so. In an article about confessional poetry in The Independent, Christina Patterson writes:
“Very few poets match Sharon Olds in the discipline she brings to her best work… The anger is there — everywhere — with the pain and the shame, but you feel it much, much more powerfully because, in the poems, it’s under such tight control.”
Even with her stark honesty, you don’t feel like you’re reading Olds’ journal. There’s still that “tight control” of the narrative. It’s clear she’s written (or at least, edited) with the reader in mind.
In trying to write “public” poems, I’ve struggled with writing in a way that doesn’t 100% let the reader in.
After writing for myself for so long, I tend to add inside jokes, or puns that only I can understand, or references to other events in my life. Like a little wink to myself. (Like the title of this article, which is a reference to a song from 2004 that I probably only think is funny because it reminds me of middle school dances.)
But the reader, I’ve learned, doesn’t know what to make of life references or abstractions. They want insight and honesty, without the imagery being garbled by content without context.
Confessional poetry as a genre became popular in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Some of the poets commonly associated with confessional poetry are Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass. In contrast to the tell it slant mantra, confessional poetry requires giving it to the reader straight. No chaser.
From Poetry Foundation:
“Confessional poets wrote in direct, colloquial speech rhythms and used images that reflected intense psychological experiences, often culled from childhood or battles with mental illness or breakdown… They grounded their work in actual events, referred to real persons, and refused any metaphorical transformation of intimate details into universal symbols.” — An Introduction to Confessional Poetry
What’s so revolutionary about the confessional poets wasn’t that they talked about hard subjects, but that they talked about hard subjects in a way that engaged readers, making them feel seen.
It’s hard to delve deep and write about real, actual life—with all of the regrets, shames, and hurts that come with it. As I go through my writing workshop, I’m noticing that the more intimate the subject, the more I shy away from writing about it reflexively.
Yet, the confessional public poet’s challenge becomes exactly this: tackling emotional or “confessional” material, like mental illness or childhood or trauma or death, and recalling them in blistering detail (without slipping into abstraction or sentimentality).
In the end, some things I’m just not ready to write about. The details I’d need to include — or figure out how to refine, or replace — are too cringeworthy to recall.
Not everything is ready to become art.
Go on and confess — but figure out what kind of poem you’re writing
All of a writer’s experiences are potential poetic material.
But if you’re writing on an emotional subject and you want it public, how well you let the reader in — to the details of the moment, the hard truths that may be revealed — can make-or-break the poem.
I get the feeling that, for many readers, deep, personal poems need to be especially polished, so that readers don’t mistake them for private, their eyes glazing over at the overage of “I” statements.
If you want to make the details of your life into art, you can’t do it halfway.
Think Usher, “Confessions Pt. 2”. Think Plath’s “Daddy”. Think Old’s “Take the I Out”. Show us what happened. Show us how it was.
Just one thing: don’t hold back.
