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.