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