Maio, Mayo..oooh, daffodils

Any self revealed in words or speech has to be a persona according to Maio/Trilling's thesis-- and this is something with which I would agree.

"The authentic self of the poet-- the private self devoid of his or her conscious or unconscious literary persona-- is of course a compilation of selves...Our distinction between authentic and sincere is helpful here. The personal poet's sincere self can be seen as one, or part of one, of these many selves; it is the persona presented publicly as poetic voice and is confined to the poem exclusively. A poem's speaker is not wholly the poet and consequently cannot even represent the authentic self, the assemblage of selves" (Maio 3).

My thesis also assumes that "a personal poem is distinguishable by its speaker" (4).

The choice to put something in a poem is the same as the choice we make the share or withhold other information in conversation, or even with ourselves. This is why poetry could serve as a public self-discovery for poets such as Sexton and Adrienne Rich-- they can choose to alter what they remember or know to be hard facts, but that choice is revealing as well, even if what it reveals is simply the walls to the world of the poem.

Anne Sexton was someone searching for who she was--writing allowed her to construct a self that she was relatively aware was unstable, not just mentally, but in terms of consistency. She looks for this self in terms of examining her own consciousness, looking at her self as man's "other," the victim of him putting skin on her bones, conceiving of her like an architect; and lastly, in terms of finding a self beyond the self that goes on thanks to the presence of a domineering, masculine God. There are moments where her revelation of the construction tears down the construction itself.

p. 72-73: re-vise his ideas?

"...she knew from her earliest attempts that for poetry to be distinguishable as art, it could not be only an authentic confession of one's self-perception. And this, finally, is why Sexton's 'I' is not an authentic one in her personal poetry: her willingness to craft a voice distinct from her conscious voice-- even the one used in session with the therapist-- one that is sincere, but one belonging entirely to the poem as its speaker rather than belonging to the authentic Anne Sexton who speaks as the 'I' of her poems" (73-74)

"...her shaping poetry from her life was more interesting to her than her life" (78).

I need a plan...

I only wrote a page today because I got stuck. Tomorrow...

1- re-read Maio on Sexton.
2- choose which poems best represent my thesis
3- explicate poems
4- conclude/discuss implications of this

5- move on to Adrienne Rich-- the process of revision-- how the re-vision of her personal history destablizes the lesbian category she seeks to create

6- move on to CA Conrad and Chelsey Minnis...re-read, mostly.

Tuesday...

7- write about CA Conrad/queer poetry...mostly in comparison with Adrienne Rich. How he uses language to destabilize. Introduce my own poetry into the mix, justifying with Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken..."

8- write about Chelsey Minnis, mostly about her persona being the only thing we have available about her, and the implications of that?

9- print out a pack of Xiu Xiu lyrics for bus ride. Pack.

ughhh

The Confessional is generally seen as a failure by two camps-- the disciples of T. S. Eliot and New Criticism and those who maintain that the "I" is unstable and therefore cannot speak for itself. I agree that the "I" is unstable, but poetry, specifically confessional poetry, can be used as a tool to draw attention to the instability.

In the end, the purpose of this exercise allows us to take ourselves and the tools we use to define ourselves a little less seriously.

"Queer" itself cannot be said to be an identity, but the constant redefinition of the boundaries of the constructed self. By allowing the "I" or the "she" of my poetry to experience so many contradictory things makes her identity illegible, thus creating awareness regarding the instability of all identities.

Oh, Gipson hour, how I wish you could last all day...

I need to be able to speak of a poetic tradition and there isn't one. I can simply say what I see is vogue in poetry now, and that is to claim that the confessional is dead as a result of the instability of the "I," but doesn't this ignore the assumptions that go into poems that aren't from an "I"? Isn't human interaction still an interesting subject even if it isn't stable or universal? Encountering queerness in all of its illegibility -- can't that count as an educative experience, something that undoes normalcy as quickly as confession might construct it? The self exhibited in poetry based around an I is not consistent, even if it assumes a universal. I don't think poets these days assume a universal, but are quite aware of their audience, who they're confessing to, and they're giving them power as the ones who judge these confessions, but the power is more along the lines of "see how many holes there are in this?" Reading about deviance reveals the deviance in all of us, reveals that our only similarity is that none of us are stable, completely something, whether that something is contained in an identity category or not.


Anne Hartman makes an interesting point about a confessional BIND of the 1950s. Homosexual poets would not necessarily want to confess to the "universal" public or be associated with something called "confessional" as a result of the forced confessions brought on by the Un-American Activities investigations of that time.

It's assumed that Ginsberg is addressing a specific counterpublic in Howl, but it's never assumed that Sexton was addressing women, and she wasn't-- she tried very hard to march in step with a universal that did not want her.

I need to include more in the body of my paper from that essay on the universal, but I failed to bring it with me...

Because the public that Sexton was addressing was considered "universal," and therefore, male, she is folded into a confessional bind whereby her femininity, mostly, became considered deviant.

I'm always ever so interested in the gendering of criticism itself-- the contexts of words applied to the poetry written by different genders, which poetry is considered "political" or "personal" or "important." I need to work this concern in somehow...

I want to be gross with feeling! (Preface 37)

How does Chelsey Minnis construct her identity in Bad Bad?

She gives us no room to know whether the poet Chelsey in the poems is actually Chelsey, which is okay because she calls the self of the poems Chelsey, and what does this self have to say?

- playful defiance of poetic conventions...
- What kind of space do her ellipses create?
- Is Chelsey consistent, or is she playful in her inconsistencies?

"I do not wish to deny my own vanity, which is paramount...but I do wish to avoid 'author' photographs..."-- from "Preface 17"

"You can try to believe what I say in my poems, but your teachers will force you to admit it is not true..." from "Preface 32"

- She plays on the poetic tradition of suicidal female poets....

More later.

Long time, no write; senioritis?

I've been so distracted, but now I need discipline. I've decided that 10:10-11:20 MWF and 2:30-3:20 TTh are now Gipson time, no matter whether my coursework is done. I've also decided that I'm going to have to be down with some Thursday night all-nighters until the Gipson due date.

Side note: Yesterday I found out that I have been accepted by Sarah Lawrence...

Anyway, after reading Anne Hartman's "Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg," I'm lead to believe that the true difference between the Confessional Poets and these confessional poets is the aesthetic-- the former assumes a universal and takes its aesthetic from modernism, while the latter assumes a constructed community of friends. However, this does not remove this poetry from the confessional bind. In all reality, Ginsberg is confessing in the same matter as those put on the stand by McCarthy...

Anne Sexton was in the place to confess that is ultimately different than Robert Lowell's subject position and Ginsberg's. "Woman" was already fairly established as an identity category, but it's not something one wanted to be in poetry. Therefore, through her femininity, Sexton attempted to carve out an identity-laden niche similar to that of Ginsberg and O'Hara's...her aesthetic might have been closer to Lowell's and she may have striven for Rosenthalian confessionalism, but her position...see the Maxine Kumin introduction.

"On Reclaiming 'The Universal'" by Suzanne Matson

"Surely we all know that "he" is neuter in this convention of written English, and that "he" is meant to be "universal." If he=the universal, does that mean, as it must, that the universal=he? What is implied by this learned reflex of reading female? Is the she erased, or is she translated?" (121).

Where this essay seems to fall short is that it basically splits the universal into the possibility of two gendered universals-- the male and the female. "The universal" does not need to be "reclaimed" by "the female" as much as disassembled with the recognition that poets, whether they assume their audiences or not, are addressing and creating counterpublics that may resonate with Butler's vision of coalition politics...

How can I use the concept of the universal along with elements of queer theory?

I think tonight I will reread her first two books. Sexton, that is.

I want to live inside of Mary Oliver's Dream Work. These poems beg to be read and are the consolation I need today as I am faced with my own tendency towards attachment. This has little to do with Gipson directly, but I feel like Oliver's poetry is speaking to my own more than usual, and my poetry is part of the project. This poem is working on becoming ubiquitous, but I still want to post it in all of its relevance!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I need to be submitting to journals.

I am having a horrible time focusing today. I want to read all of Dream Work, work on my own poems, do yoga, bag the clothes I don't wear and take them to Goodwill. Maybe I am wasting my time by sitting here and trying to work when everything else seems so urgent.

From "A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes" by Dan Barden

"...the workshop promotes the idea to young writers that their writing is required reading, that an audience is guaranteed. When really, postworkshop, no one will ever be forced to look at their work again. It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again."


Anne Sexton, referring to W.D. Snodgrass, in a letter to Carolyn Kizer:

"His poems are all truth (so to speak) but not the real truth yet. (that is if you think the greatness of a poem depends on its intrinsic truth to the action)" (108)

In a letter to Anthony Hecht:

"I don't think L.I. Ferry really a good poem of mine...too sentimental. But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps I ought to allow my female heart more room...it seems to be the way I'm writing lately...my new poem too...but I'm going to harden up soon I promise myself...stop all the emoting around and get down to facts and objects" (127).


In a letter to Mrs. Willard Fuller:

"I feel, sometimes, sorry about my poetry...not as far as "the literary world" is concerned...but as far as the people in Wellesley and surrounding towns are concenred. It shocks them and I can understand why...they say it isn't anything 'like me'...'it is so depressing' or 'cruel'...and I know that it is, in truth like me inside. And, you see, 'inside' is the place where poems come from" (147).

From the Introduction to The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton by Maxine Cumin:

"In a terse eulogy Robert Lowell declared, with considerable ambivalence it would" seem, 'For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author.'" (Cumin xx)

"...in Sexton's poetry the reader can find the poet again and again identifying herself through her relationship with the male Other, whether in the person of a lover or...in the person of the patriarchal final arbiter" (xxx).

"Women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter, which, twenty years later, seems far less daring...Anne delineated the problematic position of women-- the neurotic reality of the time-- though she was not able to cope in her own life with the personal trouble it created" (xxxiv).

Oh, silly Anne...

The confessional reader's expectations are what are false! They expect the delivery of a snapshot of an authentic self that cannot be delivered because (our)selves are bound by language! If you write and genuinely think you are expressing (your)self, I suppose you are only in that this expression is the only self we really express into existence!

From Paul A. Lacey's "The Sacrament of Confession"

"Which is to say that, whatever the adjective 'confessional' tells us about subject matter, the noun it modifies, 'poetry,' points us once more to the questions of style and form. A poem gives shape to experience so that both the experience itself, in all its density and complexity, with whatever tastes, sights, feelings, and textures are peculiar to it, and the 'meanings'-- the insights, reflections, consequences, emotional and spiritual implications of the shaped experience-- become available to us" (Lacey 94-95).

"The poem, then, looks two ways, toward expression and toward communication. It organizes our responses as we write, but it also organizes responses in the audience we begin to imagine" (95).

"If the reader is being addressed in some special 'confessional' sense, what is his role? Is he hearing confession like a priest, granting or withholding absolution?" (96).

THIS IS THE KIND OF IDEA I'VE BEEN TRYING TO ESPOUSE ALL ALONG!!!!:

"The content, it must be insisted, does not make the poem truthful. Even the most autobiographical poet distorts or suppresses facts for the sake of making a fiction which will tell more of the essential truth. To reach its readers, the poem must persuade us that the truth it tells is worth the price it exacts; it must lead us to appropriate and satisfying reactions" (98).

Anne Sexton's poetry regarding power? Ohhh, I need to keep reading this but I really need to find the quote I went digging for, too. Damn.

Basically, Anne Sexton was looked at as trivial because her personal subjects intersected with femininity.

Confessional poetry differs from confession in that it is literary, but it is also the literary nature of the confession contained in the poetry that subverts confessional politics (but how?)

The Black Art (Anne Sexton)

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warn the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

A man who writes knows too much,
such spells and fetiches!
As if erections and congresses and products
weren't enough; as if machines and galleons
and wards were never enough.
With used furniture he makes a tree.
A writer is essentially a crook.
Dear love, you are that man.

Never loving ourselves,
hating even our shoes and our hates,
we love each other, precious, precious.
Our hands are light blue and gentle.
Our eyes are full of terrible confessions.
But when we marry,
the children leave in disgust.
There is too much food and no one left over
to eat up all the weird abundance.


I'm not sure how people read this poem and devalue how it is concerned with gender difference. Here is Paul Lacey's take:

First, he believe that the theme of "[t]he events of life are never enough, either as experience or meaning" is established in this poem (100).

He goes on..."The poem is not concerned primarily with distinguishing women from men or feeling from knowing; instead, it separates these ways of entering and valuing experience-- each conceived of as magical-- from the trivial data of experience itself. A writer is a spy or a crook, one who discovers or steals secrets, in the poem. He is also a perverter of order for the sake of nature" (100-101).

THE SEPARATION IS GENDERED. It doesn't necessarily reflect the way things are, but the way things are supposed to be. Sexton is considered "emotional" as her male confessional counterparts are considered "knowledgeable." She doesn't question these different perceptions, but instead reinforces them (?) Does she really? Sexton's poetry is written from an unwaveringly feminine place...

Anne Sexton wrote about traditionally feminine subjects and had the identity of a woman and her voice was mired with a concern for feminine things! She didn't pretend!

How aware was Sexton of the gendered review of her poetry? I need to read some letters...

I just walked outside to breathe and see the lunar eclipse. It's amazing how the Earth's penumbra makes the moon look like a massive cotton ball. It's a shame that the whole neighborhood smells like pork.

I love the tone of Anne Sexton's letters. I want to be her best friend.

From Letters:

"I do what I do because I don't know how to be someone else. Therefore I dedicate myself to write my best self, and in this minute to thank you for writing your best self so well and giving me a hand out of my foolish 'death bed'" (100).


Off to evening activities...

diversions

ILL:

Carol Mirakove's books, particularly Mediated
I'll see if I can get some kari edwards.


Ugh, I do not find myself connecting with these poets...I have trouble getting into poetry that lacks a certain immediateness, but it makes me happy that my poetics are much more accessible, or so they seem. I can't concentrate; can't work in my room because the overhead light blew and it stopped being sunny enough to read from window light. Downstairs is too bleak for work and I just want Devin to get here because he's supposed to be my distraction for the day, not intellectual/creative roadblocks. And why do I feel the need to write these things in here I'm not going to gain anything by admitting that my work ethic has become wrapped up in that lazy sort of poem, the kind that maybe alludes to the idea of what poetry once was, something not so obvious...

my work ethic has become something not so obvious, but occasionally I get things done, and at least I'm happy& creative?


I think I'll revise until he gets here. This will be finished (or something) at somepoint.

Oy.

Are safe spaces for the exploration of queer sexuality, which is, frankly, any and all sexuality, necessary to the proliferation of queer ideas?

I need to better define the confessional power play in order to better understand how Butler's ideas work in this-- destructing the universal power from the inside through some sort of restructuring. I think the best we can do is acknowledge the bind of self-expression and move on writing from our own perspectives knowing it is impure but sincere because every expression of self is limited by the language that determines it.

Can't work too much. Going to look up more intimate-voiced poets. I hate intellectual dead-ends.

From Judith Butler: Live Theory by Vicki Kirby

I have little to no desire to read Gender Trouble again, so this summary is making my life!

"Citing Michel Haar on this point, Butler nots that '[t]he subject, the self, the individual, are just so many false concepts, since they transform into substances fictitious unities having at the start only a linguistic reality' (1990b, 21)" (Kirby 27)

"Butler is clearly committed to a notion that language possesses a constitutive and regulatory force which causally implicates sex/gender and sexuality. And Irigaray's explication of masculinism and Wittig's analysis of heteronormativity illuminate this causal configuration and the repressive regimes within language which naturalize and enforce it. Given this, a question arises about the nature of subversion: how can these prohibitive regimes in linguistic and cultural practice be challenged if there is no escaping them?...If power inhabits the very spatial and temporal metaphorics that its overthrow requires...if power is coextensive with all of the strategies and transgressive tactic that we might use to free ourselves from it, then how are we to proceed?...In the next two chapters Butler will argue that the identity of power itself is inherently ambiguous for its apparent unity of purpose and causal intention are always vulnerable to perverse calculations and energies" (Kirby 27-28).

"Importantly, there is no mother, no self before the child learns to identify, or differentiate itself from (m)otherness. According to Lacan, the origins of life remain blurred and entangled until the acquisition of language, which allows the subject to assume an autonomy and self-possession through linguistic markers, such as the personal pronoun, 'I'. Thus, language comes to 're-present' this originary plenitude (the Real, or 'lack of lack') as a world of social significations within those binary valuations, ordered meanings, prescriptions and prohibitions the child must find its place" (Kirby 30).

I can't imagine that Judith Butler is a very happy person.

"For if the alien status and make-up of 'the other' cannot be contested because its ontological difference is naturally abject, in other words, if 'the other' is beyond or before the very power of cultural practice to makes a difference, then any attempt at subversion will be futile. Given this, Butler asks how those natural energies of the body which purportedly prefigure signification and culture can be comprehended and comparatively evaluated if the semiotic is truly outside signification" (39).

"'What cultural configuration of language, indeed, of discourse, generates the trope of a pre-discursive libidinal multiplicity, and for what purposes?' (1990b, 91)" (39).

"If power is constitutive and ubiquitous such that even the resistance to power is actually the (re)articulation of power, then the conventional identity of 'power' is significantly reconfigured. For what can it be measured against? And how do we think about justice, agency, and responsibility if individuals and their behaviours are animated by forces which they haven't authored?" (Kirby 41)

"For Butler, sexism and heterosexism operate as regulatory norms to organize the pluralities of bodies/desires into fictional coherence, a coherence which assumes factual status" (43-44).

Any iteration of the self is a construction of the self.

Need to find these passages in Gender Trouble itself(!):

"...to understand identity as a practice, and as a signifying practice,is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effect of a rule-bound discourse that inserts itself in the pervasive and mundane signifying acts of linguistic life. Abstractly considered, language refers to an open system of signs by which intelligibility is insistently created and contested" (Butler ?)

"Butler's insistence that the subject doesn't pre-exist these cultural regimes of identity formation is not meant to deny the subject's existence as the embodied expression of these converging and competing demands. Butler's understanding of the subject, identity and agency is therefore and implicated one which locates the possibility of contestation and change in the very structures through which subject formation and it corollaries are generated" (Kirby 45).

Oy. Devin will be here in a few hours, unexpectedly. Judith Butler makes me feel simultaneously depressed and artistically charged. Therefore, I am going to go read in the bath, shower, and then work on the physical body of my project (and hope that I do not get to the point where I need to visit my friend Judith.)

A new place to visit, perhaps?

What does the confessional mode reveal about the construction of the "I"? A whole damn lot.

Confessional poetry often seems to be looked at as a big "oops" in a literary history, but the personal voice-- the idea that our subjective experience informs our perspective and is therefore inescapable-- informs a significant amount of poetry today. The poetry may not be considered "confessional," per se, but it is certainly personal. Poets seem to realize that the personal experience of the poet is the place from which a poem starts, or as Philly Sound poet CA Conrad says, "Every SINGLE thing that went into making you as you are at this moment is in some way responsible for what kind of poetry comes out of you." This is apparent in his poetry, as well as the work of many other poets coming into prominence right now.

Maybe what is inherently problematic about the way people look at the confessional mode of writing is that they look at it in terms of Foucault, which assumes some degree of truth/authenticity.

What I'm looking at right now is not confession alone, per se, it is more at those poets who use an intimate voice to reveal an aspect of their subjective reality that may spark a debate regarding social change or the nature of the world.

By writing from a lesbian standpoint, Adrienne Rich helps to construct what the term "lesbian" means by selecting certain aspects of herself to write about-- her experiences loving Michelle Cliff as opposed to her rather wrecked husband, her experiences amongst communities of women. The term "lesbian" is made dynamic by Rich's changing experience as a lesbian, as well as through the voices of other lesbian-identified writers who share experiences that may stand direct opposition to Rich's. This is why "lesbian" is an insufficient descriptor of experience and should not be taken alone. Poetry that provides a window into experience that either claims to be lesbian (say, about a person who identifies as a lesbian but is having sex with a man) or an experience that may be codified as lesbian (a poem about a woman having sex with another woman) has the ability to reveal the unstable nature of identity categories and the the constructed nature of identity and the self as a whole.

In his Creating Another Self, Samuel Maio argues from a position that assumes an authentic, historical self exists. I would agree that a "historical self" exists as a perspective informed by past experiences, but that self is hardly "authentic" in any kind of autobiographical writing, not just poetry. The memory is fallible, and there are bound to be details that we choose to withhold. Just as Maio puts Sexton's poetry up to her letters to reveal how she constructs what he calls her "persona," we can easily look at these same documents to reveal how "the self" itself is constructed.

The Red Alert's Interview with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart

"All of the songs are about things that are going on in my life, or my family's life, or in politics. None of it is exaggerated or theatrical. It's just narratives."-- Jamie Stewart

Interview with Jamie Steward in Hybrid Magazine

"HM: Along similar lines, a lot of people that I've talked to about Xiu Xiu or have made listen to your music have said, "Is it real? Or is it a joke? Are they serious about this stuff?" because a lot of it is so dark and graphic. And I've even read other interviews with you where you've said the same thing, that people think it's funny, or that you're being insincere. And to me, it makes sense that people react like that because I think the whole purpose of humor is to alleviate pain; so some of the funniest things to us are the subjects that are the most painful. But that doesn't make it any less real or sincere. So…I mean, do you agree with that? Is that part of the goal of your music? Or am I missing the point entirely?

JS: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the only real goal that we have is to just write truthfully about the things that are happening to us-"us" meaning the people in the band and our families and the people who are close to us. I mean exactly what you just said: life is just really terrible sometimes. So terrible that it's kind of hilarious. [laughs] So, yeah, I agree entirely with what you're saying."


Yeah, I can't concentrate anymore. Sleep time.

I Would Be Happy If

What does Adrienne Rich think of Foucault?

This whole thing is an attempt at a not-so-veiled justification of my own narcissistic poetics. Can I write this on the title page? Can this be my title?

From Samuel Maio's Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry

"Although 'subjective experience' serves as a useful phrase (in that it is sufficiently broad) to describe the representation of the poet's self in poetry, my thesis is that the poet creates a persona-- one called "I" or by a proper noun-- to act as the personal poet's speaker, and it is this speaker's self which is defined by the poem's 'images of the self,' and only to the extend they are depicted in the poem. Therefore the personal poet, consciously or not, substitutes for his or her literal, historical self a literary self as voice of the poem, one that is sincere but not altogether authentic" (Maio 2).

Um, isn't this the limitation placed on any construction of the self?

"Any personal poet assumes a voice-- as Sexton and Mazzaro did-- to present one's subjective experience focusing on self-exploration leading to self-definition. Personal poetry, then, is one of this created self, a poetry inclusive of that self's individual consciousness in relation to its subjective experience. The self of the confessional mode, as will be shown in the next chapter, usually attempts personal definition by means of a direct relationship to experience, the persona self by filtering experience through a mask, or persona..." (Maio 6)

"The second impersonality is that of the poet who, out of intense and personal experience, is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol."-- T.S. Elliot, from his first annual "Yeats Lecture." (Maio 9)

"I am not interested in the poem as a way of revealing a self that I think I know about to the outer world. I am interested in, certainly, finding out more about that self, and I think of myself as using poetry as a chief means of self-exploration"-- Adrienne Rich to Stanley Plumly (Maio 15)

ILL--Introspection and Contemporary Poetry by Alan Williamson

The Confessional Mode(according to Samuel Maio): employs "I" as the principal speaker, relates a personal incident of the poet's public self-- an incident either actual, that is, autobiographical, or created from the imagination-- usually intended as a means of self-identification, self-definition, and which often evokes pathos in the reader, although the incident depicted in a poem of this mode can be joyous as well. This "I" is the sincere voice of the poet (intended or not), one used as the primary instrument in presenting the poem. The poet who writes in the confessional mode of voice attempts to present the "I" as the self he or she wishes to define by the poem. (Maio 24)

"Sexton felt that she was authentically confessional-- when in fact she was not-- in those poems which exposed her hidden self, the unconscious Anne Sexton who understood the cause of the other Anne' anxiety. Confessional poetry for her must transcend mere reportage of one's selected personal history; it must act to force an articulation of one's repressed answers and insights. This explains her conviction that her creative and therapeutic acts were inextricable, that one augmented the other, but still she remains just "sincere" because of her conscious choices of that which is retained and deleted in her constructing the poem" (Maio 73).

"The difference between confession and poetry? is after all, art."- Anne Sexton, (Sexton 44).

"...Sexton views the personal poem as capable of having a diffuse application, even if the poem's voice addresses a single "you," a person identified in the poem as one of close relationship with the speaker..."but also can be viewed as a plural, more universal "you," leaving the poem as an "open letter". (Maio 74).


It matters little to the point of my project whether the confessional mode actually confesses the REAL reality. It's more concerned with the ways that the confessional mode, as an entity, can serve to subvert traditional confessional politics.

"That a poet, by using the confessional voice, could create a speaker sincerely admitting her hamartiain a way to affect emotionally or otherwise personally her audience beyond whom the poem is addressed-- the plural "you"-- marks for her the distinction between confession and art, or between authenticity and sincerity in Trilling's terms" (Maio 75).

"...readers know she is fictional, a character in the world of a poem used to elicit such an emotional response from them. The 'I' of 'The Double Image,' though, apparently is not a fiction, if only the speaker of a particular poem, and so can also evoke an emotional response in the reader. It, too, is sincere, and this is why it too is a persona, the confessional speaker revealing an instance from the poet's life, but fully aware that this revelation is confined to the medium of poetry" (Maio 78).

Sexton, to the Paris Review: " I don't adhere to literal facts all the time; I make them up whenever needed. Concrete examples give a verisimilitude. I want the reader to feel, 'Yes, yes, that's the way it is.' I want them to feel as if they were touching me. I would alter any word, attitude, image, or persona for the sake of the poem" (Maio 79).

Sexton considered herself "an actress in [her] own autobiographical play."

What does Sexton's stated relationship with her poems reveal about the construction of the self/an identity?

I want to look at her later poems where she gets gross and inappropriate?

We have a lot of self to find
in an era where the self can hardly
be said to exist. So here we write

poetry, stuff it with a different "I"
for each different moment and hope
that the process can be the project

(because we're never going to find it.)


Why, why, when people say "younger poets" or "contemporary poets" do they really mean old dudes, usually old white dudes, confessing shit we already know about the trials and tribulations of being a white dude?

I feel almost like I need a break. I want to hang a map on my wall and take a bath and sleep so I'm moments closer to when Devin will be here to distract me from the narcissism of this whole project.

Sometimes I want to punch Adrienne Rich in the mouth. More often than not I want to kiss the wound (and maybe I mean her mouth, not where I punched her...)


All men are not the problem, patriarchy, the system that privileges them, is...


All the maps are too large to hang on my wall...

I need to JSTOR/Muse some more recent readings of Sexton. So many of these are out of date and bore me.

This is unwieldy. I think I'm going to look up interviews with Xiu Xiu before I drop out of school and become a midwife/flight attendant.

I totally understand Foucault's position on the confessional...

I just can't successfully summarize it.

"The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, "demands" only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence..."(Foucault 60).

Okay...so, we as people feel as though we should confess because we believe that the truth will set us free. If the way we act is contrary to what appears to be common, we feel as though the way we act is invisible, ignored...and thus, as the doer of the deed, we don't exist without the acknowledgement of the deed. We want to exist...existence is measured by being acknowledged by those who have power? So we confess, and our audience now has the knowledge of "who we are" and can place a value judgment on it. The confessional machine, in this case, would be easy to subvert. Still compelled to have an existence in order to form communities or dispel fear of deviance, our confessions can use and reclaim language flung at us by those that judge us, be made unstable through literary or musical devices...that way, we are still constructing ourselves (which in a way ensures our survival), but making these selves slippery to "power..."

Again, I need to rearticulate the trouble with normal...

Being silenced by power is what normalizes. It reduces action to meaningless, easy-to-swallow identity categories...

So wait, with all of this silencing how can we silence this power?

Subvert the confession machine.

Critical theory gives me a headache. I want poetry.

Beauty is a reason to get up in the morning. I live to be in a dialogue with others through poetry...my poetry certainly makes me exist and is written to construct an "I," some form of me by combining ever-changing, disparate, and often conflicting actions...but really it is loving and getting carried away by the music of others' poetic "I"s that keep me going through the monotony of putting food on the table. Poetry is just another way of loving each other, and love really seems to be the only truly revolutionary act. Look at how every other strategy has backfired. I am going to keep writing about my indecipherable "I" so I can love.

I'm talking about loving people...

I'm so easily distracted!

The "I" may be a construct, but that doesn't make it any less important. Acknowledging that it is a construct changes its power...

Everything is a construct but you have to live within constructs in order to be able to survive. Confessional art has the power to reveal the harmful connotations of some of these constructs...

Um, yeah, new entry if I need...working on actual body of paper!

Plans and the consequences of breaking them...

Where did winter term go?

Right now, I'm laying on my bed, basking in the sunlight and trying to figure out how to manage my time so I can get this project done. I'm not traveling this week (but my boyfriend is) so I should be able to focus on getting this completed.

I'm headed to the Spearmint Rhino for a Coyote assignment at 9, but today's goals include organizing my ILL books into subject categories...and, well, I don't know. I feel uncomfortable micromanaging right now.

I feel like I'm in that place (again) where I'm uncomfortable with my project because it assumes a "best" way to live and a "best" ideology...a "best" way to create art. How can I shift the wording of my question and the focus of my research to make it sound like it is simply one way of looking at things...

but it is simply that. It's a queer evaluation. It's looking at the "I" without assuming it is permanent.

I need to go through this blog and ILL the books I noted that I ought to...

Oh, other things that I should probably be wary of confessing here: I'm skipping class for three days in March to go see Xiu Xiu in Salt Lake. I might try to get an interview with Jamie...it's totally and completely relevant to my Gipson project and I will work the experience of the show into my writing.

I have a boyfriend named Devin and he makes me want to write poetry again, so I have been. Lots.

I'll get stuff done today...

SO RELEVANT!

Eighteenth Annual Pacific Southwest Women’s Studies Association Conference
Students, Activists and Teachers Working Together

Feminist Reclamations/Queer Reclamations: The Adaptive Faces of Revolution

April 19, 2008
San Diego State University, San Diego

Call for Proposals
Revolutions have come to signify a myriad of different resistances to power formations throughout history. They have morphed and adapted to fit the diverse needs of people of different races, classes, genders and sexualities in distinctive geo-political locations. Feminism and Queer Theory have themselves contributed to new faces of revolution and new methods of reclamation. This conference is dedicated to exploring how the "faces" of revolution themselves have adapted to these changes and are continuing to adapt in this era of globalization. We solicit proposals from students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty members, community activists, and independent scholars for workshops, panels, roundtable discussions, individual presentations, artistic and multimedia presentations, performances, and practical applications.

In this re-conceptualization of revolution, we will take into account new technologies, scientific discoveries and discourses; (post)-colonialism and imperialism; art, literature, popular culture and new medias; and language, philosophy, and education with a focus on the lives and bodies of women and queers, who have historically been marginalized within discussions of reclamation and revolution. While we encourage presentations on the conference theme, proposals dealing with all areas of Women’s Studies research are welcomed.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail, preferably as Word attachments, to: PSWSA08@gmail.com

Proposals must include: Title; abstract (100 word maximum); contact person’s name, address, e-mail, and phone number; presenter name(s) with academic and/or community affiliation; format (e.g., workshop, panel, roundtable discussion, artistic presentation, or performance), and audio/visual equipment requirements. (Equipment requests must be included with original proposal.)

Proposal Deadline: Friday, February 29, 2008.

For more information, visit http://pswsa.nwsa.org or contact Monica Bradley at PSWSA08@gmail.com or (813) 361-2777.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR ATTENDANCE AND PRESENTATION.

found @: http://community.livejournal.com/womens_studies/348847.html?style=mine#cutid1

Potpourri. Probably not the fragrant kind. Alas, disillusioned again.

"Introduction" of Confessional Politics edited by Irene Gammel

"[K]ey concepts" for the essays in the book (maybe borrow for project if helpful?):

confessional interventions- "signal women's abilities to disrupt confessional frames and unsettle the confessional reader's secure expectations"

confessional modalities- "serve to investigate the power and limits of women's ability to maneuver and shift positions within the frame of institutionalized confessional politics"

confessional inversions- "a deliberate play with the very sexual identities imposed by confessional frames." (Gammel 8)

"In the process of reclaiming their lives, women whose sexualities were traditionally dismissed under the rubric of 'other' or 'deviant' disentangle themselves from conventional snares through a process of confessional inversions, by using the very negative terms used to dismiss them in confessional frames imposed on their self-narratives" (9).

"...women's participation in confessional politics is much more complex than the one-dimensional power play described by Foucault" (9)-- no shit! Many people's participation is much more than a "one-dimensional power play," which is why it can be so subversive...


From "Sexuality and Textuality Entwined: Sexual Proclamations in Women's Confessional Fiction in Quebec" by Lori Saint-Martin:

"The realm of personal and sexual has always been literary for men...and confessional for women. Women attempting to write honestly about their sexuality, as they have begun to do only fairly recently, have had a difficult time of it. Despite patterns developed not without struggle) by male writers, there has been no space and no language for women to write about sexuality" (Saint-Martin 29).

In Quebec, a "hybrid genre" has developed that could be called "confessional fiction." "It simultaneously invites a literal reading based on the name of the author...and points to the self-consciously fictional nature of the work. This hybrid genre provides a safe space for women to explore their sexuality while both enabling and disrupting the reading of the text as autobiography..." (29).

It will be interesting to see what her points are, because this hybrid seems a lot like how poetry is approached...poetry and music almost seem made for the subversion of the confessional...I need to read on...

"What I call confessional fiction is fiction which foregrounds the most personal and intimate details of the female narrator's life..." (31)

confessional mode of feminist writing- "a type of autobiographical writing which signals its intentions to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the author's life" -- Rita Felski (ILL the test that this comes from!!)-- Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change

"[Quebec confessional fiction] often deploys the irony, indeterminacy, and linguistic play that feminist confessions tend to avoid...I would argue that these self-consciously literary elements do not block reader identification but situate it on another level, on the level of writing rather than on the level of experience. Rather than simply increasing distance between author and reader, they create a literary space where women's sexuality and women's experiencecan be inscribed" (32).


Can't write about Chelsey Minnis for Gipson, but I just want to curl up and read her and other folks who have nothing to confess.

Now for something completely different:

An Interview with Frank Sherlock

"Academy, meet the street. Street, meet the academy. Talk to each other already. I would like to talk more about blue collars, but they’ve gotten so hard to find here. In the boom of Sixth Boroughness, the homeless population has doubled in the last four years. But I appreciate the notion of appealing to blue collar types because I like to talk to ghosts. My favorite poems are written w/ Slovenian philosophers and Irish bartenders. I am attracted to the genius they’re willing to share. The poems I put my name on are collaborations of encounter. I’m a thief without record, and so I continue to steal. But when they work, the poems are acts of exchange. I have never really written a poem all by myself.
America has enough specialists. Narrowing in becomes a kind of cultural compulsion that I’ve never been so much interested in. If the poems do appeal across academic/everyday folk divides, I’d like to think it’s because they write poems with me, and can hear/see traces of themselves in the speech, in the voiceprints. Maybe that’s the appeal. But a lot of people seem to like my shoes too, so you never really know." -- Frank Sherlock

Sidenote: I am pissed about confession's negative connotations. I want to reclaim it as something that is not taken from me (or anyone else), but something that is proclaimed, without shame. The shame is what is problematic for me, especially if literary confession and confessional music are totally busting up this negative confessional machine!

Mad Poets Interview with CA Conrad

"What? What is this question? What? I’m still queer, so the book didn’t make me heterosexual. Was that a goal? I don’t think so. But I’m one of the few queers who will actually admit that our odd race of deviants are going to subvert this world. It’s only a matter of time. Oh yes, you hear stories all the time of queers wanting to get married, wanting to settle down, blah blah blah, have babies and prove how NORMAL we are. Oh yes, you hear these things. But we’re not normal, we’re odd, and some of us will hide it. But we’re not normal, and yes we’re here to confiscate the things the national mind holds pure. Even those (especially those) who pretend to want a normal life do this. As an honest queer I’m telling you I’m always ready to take a giant shit on the holiest of cloth you offer. What the hell was the question again?"-- CA Conrad

CA Conrad interview by Ben Malkin
"Q:
...at your reading you said you'd shit glitter, but still, your work rails against stereotypes, ~I was wondering what your take on flamboyancy in the gay community was...

A:
Effeminate gay men are an endangered species these days, everyone going going GOING to the gym, deepening the voice. Quack quack! I say, Quack quack! Where are you Nairy Fairy boys hiding!? I SEE you IN THERE

It's okay to relax. It's okay to NOT BE SO FUCKING SERIOUS ALL FUCKING DAY LONG! I Love glitter, as you mentioned. Glitter is so dear to me. And I have a pair of giant glitter glasses that I like to wear once in a while. And I was talking to an old friend just before the reading you're referring to, and she said, "Oh no. Please don't wear those glitter glasses to your poetry reading. No one will take you seriously." Not take me seriously? Can someone please, SPECIFICALLY point out why glitter is not taken seriously? TELL ME DAMMIT, I WANT TO KNOW WHY GLITTER IS NOT TAKEN SERIOUSLY!? Is it because children like glitter? And because children aren't taken seriously? And girls? Girls are NEVER taken seriously. Well I TAKE GLITTER SERIOUSLY BECAUSE I SAY WE NEED TO TAKE CHILDREN AND ESPECIALLY LITTLE GIRLS SERIOUSLY! C'mon MAN! It's GLITTER! Glitter is so gorgeous on you, put some on, you'll see!...

Not fitting in, HOORAY FUCKING HOO-FUCKING-RAY! There's an anthology of queer working class writers that came out not long ago I'm proud to be in. Talk about NOT FITTING IN! GEESH! If you're working class and queer you better keep it to yourself! The queer Movement as it is right now has DECIDED from the pressures of being inside this fucked-up empire of consumerism that in order to BE included we must prove our ability to SHOP! And if you ain't got the bucks to shop than you just don't have a say in nearly anything going on.

So we create our own space. And in that space say FUCK YOU! And speaking out as queer and poor is speaking out for poor folks everywhere. It's a space to have yet another beautiful truth take hold. Rodrigo Toscano said to me when that anthology first came out that THAT was an avant-garde. And I thank him for saying so, because I was busy beating people over the head with the fact that THIS BOOK was here and not going anywhere, and missed all the best parts of what it really was, and is. And will be. (That anthology is titled EVERYTHING I HAVE IS BLUE)."

Note: ILL Everything I Have is Blue

"You said when you met Marsha P. Johnson (the first to throw the stone at Stonewall) at Pride in Tompkins Square in the '90s that she was homeless and that the movement had left her behind; do you think it's the movement's responsibility though to house its participants? Penny Arcade says calling a community based on your bedroom habits troubling to begin with...do you think there really is a gay community at this point? (when so many of the concepts that symbolized the original movement [you had to have wit, culture, & intellect to even enter the club at one point, whereas now Chelsea has turned into tons of muscle-bound non-thinkers] have been lost...)"...

Note: the answer to this question blows my mind and is a lot to copy, but it also makes me ABSOLUTELY certain that I need to write to CA Conrad TOMORROW.

"Favorite intimate voiced poets? There are many! What a great time to be alive and Loving poetry! Let me limit myself to nine names Ben, nine at the top of my head who DO THIS: Carol Mirakove, Frank Sherlock, hassen, Kevin Varrone, John Coletti, Magdalena Zurawski, Joe Massey, kari edwards, Divya Victor, gotta stop! Said I'd stop! Nine, and I could go on with more more MORE, and read and read and READ them out loud with you..."

I would rather be reading The Power of Now right now, but see, self-discipline?

From "Introduction" of Confessional Politics: Women's Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media, edited by Irene Gammel:

"From many different angles, the essays in this collection investigate the association of confession with femininity; they examine its function as a gender-specific discourse, as they probe its many genres and subgenres" (1).

"Many "real-life" stories encode an awareness of the confessional reality principle, of possible appropriation and recolonization of their life stories; suspicion and skepticism mark their self-representation, signaling that theirs is not the unmediated cry from the female heart. Women encode boundaries and warnings, signaling their desire to create their own safe space in which to articulate their personal and sexual lives, while defying confessional entrapments. They tell and retell their personal stories by simultaneously enacting, and reacting against, confessional modalities that wish to contain them" (2).

"Since the circulation of sexual self-representations confronts women almost inevitably with a confining frame, the essays in this collection examine how women, in turn, take charge of this challenge and experiment with ways of subverting traditional confessional readings, of dodging the conventional readings designed to contain them in traditional confessional paradigms" (2).

"...confessional readings frequently entail a process of devaluation of the female voice. The female voice relating personal experience, like the sinner's and the patient's, belongs not to the realm of the abstract and official langue but to parole, to familiar and intimate speech, and this characterized by a low degree of formality and authority, as it is perceived as ephemeral or trivial" (4).

"Moreover, the term confessional itself, as the collection shows, is characterized by a fundamental bidirectionality: women are subjected to confessional readings, but many women also use confessional conventions self-consciously, deliberately manipulating the confessional machine that wishes to entrap them" (5).

This book is going to be very helpful, as it asks a lot of questions I want to ask...but it only does so from a feminist standpoint. I think coming into some of these articles with a queer eye, so to speak, may help me to expand the ideas I would like to put forth in my final project.

As for Poetry I Need To Read For Context In Other Poetry: going to look up some Alice Notley, some Frank Sherlock.

I need to put in at least 3 hours on this tomorrow, too.

CA Conrad, mostly. And a quip about becoming a flight attendant.

Interview with CA Conrad

"You want to know how I write poems? Okay. I touch living things. The more trees I touch the more I dream, the more I dream, the more I write. And walking walking walking walking walking. I'm not a fucking novelist, I'm a poet, the air, the people, the trees, birds, roaches, used condoms (there's the semen again), everything outside is for our lives to investigate, rub against mentally or otherwise. As I said in my first answer, "If you start a poem you start from where you are, which is where everything wound up." Every SINGLE thing that went into making you as you are at this moment is in some way responsible for what kind of poetry comes out of you."

"Forebears though. I'm going to assume you mean in this lifetime. Kafka is without a doubt the ONLY non-poet who fits this. Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, Anne Sexton. These are a few of the poets whose work was available to me when I was a kid."

-- CA Conrad

I think I would like to focus on the Philly Sound poets, or at least CA Conrad and Dorothea Lasky, for the poetry part of my project. I need to read more of their work, and I hope to finish Conrad's Deviant Propulsion tonight. There is something so fantastic about allowing my project to be an interaction with living poets. I just want to read more about Conrad on his poems, too. Is he necessarily the "I"? He feels that way. And his poems are postmodern and queer and they make me want to keep writing poetry, which is an exciting feeling in the winter when everything is hibernating.

Connections for this project are being made in my head that can't translate to words yet, but it's a Monday night and I'm at my laptop and not out trying to fit four years of college social experience into one, so something must be going right!

I think I might move to my bed and finish the book and do yoga and daydream more about becoming a flight attendant if I don't get into grad school.

Oh, silly confessional mode!

Confessional Poetry is obviously different from the idea of the confessional (as in kneeling to a priest or talking to a psychoanalyst or therapist or whatnot), but it functions in a similar way. Poetry reveals a larger-sense "Truth," so not every detail of the poem has to or necessarily comes from the poet's life. What matters is this truth either serves to assimilate this detail; to make the person/identity it is associated with it normal(ized), or to destroy the notion of a perfect, fixed identity category by revealing its glitter and blemishes.

From Laurence Lerner's "What Is Confessional Poetry?":

"It is not difficult to see why this material is called "confessional"...First, there is the factual element: she provides plenty of biographical detail, identifies the members of her family, states the time and place of many of the episodes, not attempting to disguise the fact that all these things happened to the poet-outside-the poems...Second, there is the sordid, often degrading nature of the experiences: she confesses to pain as well as joy, and (more difficult) to experiences that deprive her of dignity in her suffering-- precisely what one is normally most ashamed to own up to...And then there is a peculair and disturbing intensity in the language, an attempt to render raw and disturbing experience through ugly and disturbing images that do not always seem to be under control...and along with this, a deliberate jokiness, a shrugging off of her own suffering as something melodramatic" (Lerner 229).

"Sexton herself sometimes insisted that confession is not art, and that a poem needs to depart from factual truth and raw emotion" (Lerner 229).

I think confessional poetry is art (obviously), but with all poetry the content needs to bow to what best serves the world of the poem. Poetry, music, and art may provide emotional release, but they are not a therapist's couch, nor is laying on the couch of a therapist a form of art. It is that this is art that makes it so powerful a tool for both assimilation and subversion, and I would like to argue mostly subversion. It is something to be appreciated, enjoyed, consumed. The fact that it directly communicates these "truths" makes it more...effective than simply telling your therapist that you are odd in "x" ways, and she/he/sie documents and categorizes.

Music isn't a direct communication unless it has text or is supported by opera dramaturgy, so its ability to confess manifests itself in different ways.

Current question about confession in music: can it not be an outpouring of emotion the way it feels in poetry, or does it have to have a certain degree of calculation/manipulation. How much of the lament was absolutely calculated by Tchaikovsky, how much of it came naturally because we naturally feel lament? We naturally feel music coursing through our veins, just as natural as the language of poetry. Still, even in those terms, how does the audience of musical confession have to be privileged with a musical education? I mean, one can understand lament without knowing lament has a form, a tradition. This is helpful to know as a composer because the composer can manipulate this so that it is felt universally by an audience.

And I think I need this theorizing to accompany my creation of art because in the process of doing this I started a poem (a little too Iris Murdoch in the "what it means to be good" sense, but I'll take it), and a string quartet that kind of accompanies it. Is this (indisputable) fact enough to unify the elements of my project?

I am so in love with the CA Conrad poem "Editorial Statement" that I want to tack it to every tree on campus. Go read it: POEM!

I'm currently working on the fourth chapter of Marcia J. Citron's Gender and the Musical Canon. Things are starting to feel like they're coming together. This is exciting.

Link(s?)

http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/conrad.html

Also, ILL Dorothea Lasky's Awe

http://minoramerican.blogspot.com/

http://www.apogeepress.com/authors_mccarthy.html

Borrow Michelle Tea's The Beautiful from Terteling.

Reference Post 1/29/2008

Interlibrary Loan:

The Kristeva Critical Reader-- The Kristeva Reader is limited to her writings from the 1970's.

The Human Voice by Anne Karpf

Meredith Monk by Deborah Jowitt

Impressions That Remained- Memoirs of Ethel Smyth

Poems by Minnie Bruce Pratt; Stacey Waite; Chelsey Minnis; Jillian Weise, CA Conrad

I need to focus and spend a minute (by which I mean a WHILE) focusing on the confessional poetry aspect of this. I need to write about the connections (and misconnections) I have and haven't been making. I'm starting to fear that this project has a too-sprawling focus.

I've decided that I want to look at the blues a little bit, even if just for experience sake. Tonight I'm going to download some Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, and I want to look at The Gossip's Beth Ditto's performance in the context of a blues tradition. I need to read more by/about Ditto and delve more into The Gossip's music.

I wish I could somehow make Meredith Monk magically more confessional so I could talk more in terms of modern- era art music that at least brushes shoulders with the acceptable (somewhat oppressive) art music canon, but unless I can get my hands on a recording of Education of the Girlchild (or whatever the title is?), this idea is pretty doomed.

As for poetry...feeling indecisive. I want to look at someone fresh-- I like Jillian Weise, her poetry is exactly what I'm looking for and there's an essay in one of Mattilda's books (Nobody's...crap. the one that's anti-assimilation...) that I could relate it to, somehow. Part of me feels like I need to google "queer poets now" and see what comes up in terms of first published books or chapbooks or crazy dykes doing readings in basements.

I wrote a poem tonight about being sick of writing sex poems but not really thinking flowers could be as subversive. Maybe I'm not giving flowers enough credit.

Basically, I have a busy three weeks or so ahead of me, and in the great words of Apollinaire, "je ne veux pas travailler; je veux fumer..." or a similar sentiment. Though I'm starting to feel really one with my project again, which is a fantastic feeling. I just need to make it as important as yoga or cleaning out my humidifier every three days.

Oh, back to thinking about the canon and art music and what not: ETHEL SMYTH. Need to read more about her correspondence with Virginia Woolf, all of the work Elizabeth Wood has done on her music. And holy crap, her Mass in D is giving me MAJOR goosebumps....

With faith this will all come together, somehow. And I am oozing faith...

Notes on Listening to the Sirens, Chapter II

"The Germanic-- or, at any rate, post-Beethoven-- understanding of the symphony involved a quasi-narrative progression from initial strife to final victory and redemption, , celebrated in a high-energy triumphal ending. Ending with a lament flew in the face of this understanding" (Peraino 85).

"So if we want to pursue the question of confession encoded in this movement, we should ask what does Tchaikovsky do in this finale that might signify a practice? And what might that practice be that was so very personal and perhaps unspeakable for Tchaikovsky?" (Peraino 86)

"If there is a moment of confession in the Adagio lamentoso, it is a confession to the performer and music reader (not necessarily the listener), and it is not with the initial "eye music" but rather with this ironed-out return" (Peraino 86).

"And why reconsititute a rent musical subject near the end of the lament? Is this a disentangling of the lovers as they are thekn down off their enmeshed crosses? Such literal explanations actually work against the psychological lore that surrounds this movement, suggesting not disclosure but rather dissociation and further sublimation into elaborate but silent madrigalisms" (Peraino 88).

"Rather than invoking the interpretive paradigms of individual narrative for Tchaikovsky's symphonies, Taruskin proposes that we should adapt the ideas of metonymy and topos from Wye Jamison Allanbrook's studies of Mozart's rhythmic gestures and their basis in class-encoded social dances" (Peraino 89)

"It is an attempt, as Allanbrook put it of the Mozartean method, 'to move an audience through representations of its own humanity.' In Tchaikovsky's time such a method was known as realism." - Taruskin, in a quote on Peraino 89

"The lament has a long history in musical traditions both folk and elite, and in both the lament is fundamentally vocal and specifically gendered: women sing laments as a particularly intense emotional display" (Peraino 89)

"Returing to Tchaikovsky's Adagio lamentoso, the music presents two different version of its lament theme-- one "queer" and the other "straight"-- which nonetheless sound identical. The motion is from needless complexity to simplification-- from fracture to coherence-- but most importantly from private to public identification" (Peraino 91).

"Without the dramaturgy of opera, however, such a knot must be manifested in instrumental performance. The two versions of the lament theme provide just such a performative manifestation, each producing a subtly different experience for both the audience and the performers." (Peraino 91)

"Like the traditional laments of women, his can also be understood as mediating between the dead past and the living present, and between subjective and social reality. The queer and straight orchestrations of the wails illustrate two sides of lamenting: one is a physically wrenching private act, the other a sentimental public ritual. Taken together, the two orchestrations suggest the disclosure of something unspeakable about the practice of a man lamenting as if he were a woman about about the practice of a symphony finale singing a lament as if it were a triumph" (Peraino 92).

The confession of the music is revealed by placing the music up against cultural symbols and meanings. Look more into the Mozartean method-- what does Wye Allanbrook do? When is this method not appropriate to use? How much does intent, or implied intent, come into play? I suppose it comes to play just as much in poetry-- yes!

I need to read some Julia Kristeva right now. I have a lot of thinking and TONS of reading to do on this to make connections in my head before I blog them out..

Notes on Listening to the Sirens, Chapter II, 1st read through

On Tchaikovsky's letter to his nephew regarding the programme behind the Sixth Symphony: "The playfully cryptic hint at a secret autobiographical program for his new composition illustrates the intersection of verbal prohibition and a compulsion to tell that produces truth. A musical revelation, over which he sheds tears (of penitence for Augustine, of catharsis for Freud), is also a work that makes him happy and productive; the confession here is a musical production that sounds the truth" (81).

My only problem with Peraino's analysis so far is that the intent is everything. I suppose all confession is fueled by intent, but because one intends to unleash a secret in musical form, is it necessarily perceivable? On the flip side, if one aims to create absolute music, the composer is still there...music cannot be entirely absolute or come from an entirely objective perspective. How much of the author exists in the composition without the intent for confession? Does the confession necessarily have to be verbal? Would musicologists have theorized about Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony displaying a confession of his sexuality and/or possible suicide had Modest Tchaikovsky not published a letter revealing his intent for confession?

On evidence that Tchaikovsky had somewhat accepted his sexual nature: "Despite this evidence, Jackson and other scholars have held fast to the idea that the Adagio lamentoso confesses Tchaikovsky's guilt and abjection regarding his sexual proclivities. Jackson argues that, 'the biographer of a composer cannot rely exclusively upon the literary evidence of letters and diaries (as Pozansky has done)....As a non-verbal medium, music provides an ideal vehicle for expressing ideas, anxieties, and emotions that must never be articulated in words' (emphasis added)" (85).

WHOA, okay, awesome next paragraph. A bite: "So, according to the epistemology of the closet, Tchaikovsky's homosexuality (that is, knowledge) 'must never be articulated in words," but, according to psychoanalysis, it must nevertheless be confessed. Music is the confession: understanding Tchaikovsky's music, then, means knowing his sexuality" (85).

I am writing Judith Peraino a thank-you note.

Before reading Peraino's analysis on how/if the Adagio lamentoso constitutes the confession of an act (such as homosexuality) as opposed to the expression of a feeling (such as guilt), I gave the movement a cursory listen, no score. A descending motif is sounded by one instrument group and repeated overlapping by another, which creates tension in the beginning, but when repeated in the basement registers of bass instruments at the end, a similar motif sounds absolutely resigned. The climax of this piece is the closest I have every experience to a musical orgasm, but the release never comes. The build-up is divine, but rather than bursting, it falls back down into a decline, and the resigned ending that echos the motifs of the beginning. I would like to look at the score, and intend to email Dr. Derry as soon as I am done reading Peraino's analysis.

Actually, I want a score in front of me before I read her analysis, because so far, I disagree. Before I argue, I need to read more about her foundations of the confessional and psychoanalysis at the beginning of the chapter; it's fantastic information that I'm going to be able to use and it's going to save me SO MUCH TIME in doing my research (I'll probably go on an ILL-ing spree on Monday).

This blows my mind, but it's bedtime!

Plan Post: 1/17-oh, who knows, Sunday?

Self-discipline is a fickle beast. Somehow, I've managed to integrate daily meditation and exercise in my life, but I can't seem to keep up with my Gipson goals. Right now I'm literally locked in my bedroom, but I've managed to write a blog entry and play Scrabble on Facebook for the past, oh, 2 and a half hours. My back is crying "yoga, yoga!" and there's that nagging voice inside my head that is letting me know that this paragraph simply functions to make excuses.

So what did I get done last week? I've read a little bit of both Peraino and Rich, but not anywhere near my goal amount. The second chapter of the Peraino book is all about the confessional and music, so I'm pretty jazzed to take notes on it tonight. I'm obsessed with the poem "Transcendental Etude." I also wrote the rough draft of an introduction to my project that references texts as diverse as Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and the introduction to Michel de Montaigne's Complete Works. I will send copies to my advisors this week, as I would be getting worried if I were them.

I've also worked on a poem that is seriously suffering from the lack of synonyms for "to hover above."

This week, I want to zero in on exactly what it is I want to write about. Using the second and third chapters of Peraino, I would like to critically listen to some music, evaluate her ideas and see how they mesh with mine. While I know it is important for me to keep reading, I need to be writing more-- both poetry and music. I'm weighing the benefits of purchasing Finale 2008 for my laptop so I can compose in peace. My biggest goal is simply to take the time to do my work, to make it as important as meditating and exercising. This week will be the test to see whether I can be my own taskmaster. Otherwise, advisors, expect and email asking for harsh deadlines and other spirit-squashing punishments.

Hopefully there will be notes in here later.

Plan Post 1/9-1/13

So, I’m back. It’s a new term; the fate of where I’ll be writing next year is officially in someone else’s hands, and my only class (besides the music classes that feel as natural as going to bed at night) is all internet work, no attendance policy. This means that if I conjure up some self-discipline, the rough draft of this baby should be on its feet by the end of winter break!

Before I get too excited, I need to explore some of the obstacles facing my project. I have a thesis, but no real way to integrate the creative and academic aspects of the topic in a way that I see fit. I believe that the poems and compositions that I include need to be able to stand alone rather than merely be illustrations of the theory. Luckily, what I’m waxing poetic about in the academic part comes largely from my own experiences as a reader, writer, and musician. I would like the project to be more than a random smattering of things related to my three concentrations; to use the words pounded into my skull fall term, it needs a center of gravity. I suppose I can hope that one magically pops up, but I never seem to have that sort of luck.

The other obstacle is focus. My analysis I’m doing is decidedly queer, but does that limit me to queer-identified subjects? Queer-identification is somewhat antithetical to some aspects of what I’m trying to do, but key to others. Really, what I am looking at is identity categories overall, not just queer identification. I need to think about this more, listen to more Antony and the Johnsons and read more Adrienne Rich.

As for reading goals this week, I would like to:

Finish the poetry (p. 91-161) in Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose

Read through Chapters 1 (Songs of the Sirens) and 2 (A Music of One's Own) of the Peraino book (p. 11- 110)

My writing goal is to take inventory of what I have in my Gipson binder and evaluate the kind of revisions that need to be made. Also, think about gaps in the project. Free write about what I would like the end result to look like. I also need to be doing some more creative writing. I need to borrow a new book of writing prompts to get me going...I've been using the same exercises for the past two and a half years and they don't spark my own ideas in quite the same way as they used to.

I also need to be composing. This is tricky because I compose best without distraction. I don't have Finale on this laptop, and it seems ridiculous to buy it when I can use it over in Langroise for free. It's just that every time I go to compose in the lab, a million distractions present themselves. I need to learn how to ignore them.

I am going to go submit some poems to the National Undergraduate Literature Conference!