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.