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.