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.