The Confessional is generally seen as a failure by two camps-- the disciples of T. S. Eliot and New Criticism and those who maintain that the "I" is unstable and therefore cannot speak for itself. I agree that the "I" is unstable, but poetry, specifically confessional poetry, can be used as a tool to draw attention to the instability.
In the end, the purpose of this exercise allows us to take ourselves and the tools we use to define ourselves a little less seriously.
"Queer" itself cannot be said to be an identity, but the constant redefinition of the boundaries of the constructed self. By allowing the "I" or the "she" of my poetry to experience so many contradictory things makes her identity illegible, thus creating awareness regarding the instability of all identities.
Friday, March 28, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Oh, Gipson hour, how I wish you could last all day...
I need to be able to speak of a poetic tradition and there isn't one. I can simply say what I see is vogue in poetry now, and that is to claim that the confessional is dead as a result of the instability of the "I," but doesn't this ignore the assumptions that go into poems that aren't from an "I"? Isn't human interaction still an interesting subject even if it isn't stable or universal? Encountering queerness in all of its illegibility -- can't that count as an educative experience, something that undoes normalcy as quickly as confession might construct it? The self exhibited in poetry based around an I is not consistent, even if it assumes a universal. I don't think poets these days assume a universal, but are quite aware of their audience, who they're confessing to, and they're giving them power as the ones who judge these confessions, but the power is more along the lines of "see how many holes there are in this?" Reading about deviance reveals the deviance in all of us, reveals that our only similarity is that none of us are stable, completely something, whether that something is contained in an identity category or not.
Anne Hartman makes an interesting point about a confessional BIND of the 1950s. Homosexual poets would not necessarily want to confess to the "universal" public or be associated with something called "confessional" as a result of the forced confessions brought on by the Un-American Activities investigations of that time.
It's assumed that Ginsberg is addressing a specific counterpublic in Howl, but it's never assumed that Sexton was addressing women, and she wasn't-- she tried very hard to march in step with a universal that did not want her.
I need to include more in the body of my paper from that essay on the universal, but I failed to bring it with me...
Because the public that Sexton was addressing was considered "universal," and therefore, male, she is folded into a confessional bind whereby her femininity, mostly, became considered deviant.
I'm always ever so interested in the gendering of criticism itself-- the contexts of words applied to the poetry written by different genders, which poetry is considered "political" or "personal" or "important." I need to work this concern in somehow...
Anne Hartman makes an interesting point about a confessional BIND of the 1950s. Homosexual poets would not necessarily want to confess to the "universal" public or be associated with something called "confessional" as a result of the forced confessions brought on by the Un-American Activities investigations of that time.
It's assumed that Ginsberg is addressing a specific counterpublic in Howl, but it's never assumed that Sexton was addressing women, and she wasn't-- she tried very hard to march in step with a universal that did not want her.
I need to include more in the body of my paper from that essay on the universal, but I failed to bring it with me...
Because the public that Sexton was addressing was considered "universal," and therefore, male, she is folded into a confessional bind whereby her femininity, mostly, became considered deviant.
I'm always ever so interested in the gendering of criticism itself-- the contexts of words applied to the poetry written by different genders, which poetry is considered "political" or "personal" or "important." I need to work this concern in somehow...
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
I want to be gross with feeling! (Preface 37)
How does Chelsey Minnis construct her identity in Bad Bad?
She gives us no room to know whether the poet Chelsey in the poems is actually Chelsey, which is okay because she calls the self of the poems Chelsey, and what does this self have to say?
- playful defiance of poetic conventions...
- What kind of space do her ellipses create?
- Is Chelsey consistent, or is she playful in her inconsistencies?
"I do not wish to deny my own vanity, which is paramount...but I do wish to avoid 'author' photographs..."-- from "Preface 17"
"You can try to believe what I say in my poems, but your teachers will force you to admit it is not true..." from "Preface 32"
- She plays on the poetic tradition of suicidal female poets....
More later.
She gives us no room to know whether the poet Chelsey in the poems is actually Chelsey, which is okay because she calls the self of the poems Chelsey, and what does this self have to say?
- playful defiance of poetic conventions...
- What kind of space do her ellipses create?
- Is Chelsey consistent, or is she playful in her inconsistencies?
"I do not wish to deny my own vanity, which is paramount...but I do wish to avoid 'author' photographs..."-- from "Preface 17"
"You can try to believe what I say in my poems, but your teachers will force you to admit it is not true..." from "Preface 32"
- She plays on the poetic tradition of suicidal female poets....
More later.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Long time, no write; senioritis?
I've been so distracted, but now I need discipline. I've decided that 10:10-11:20 MWF and 2:30-3:20 TTh are now Gipson time, no matter whether my coursework is done. I've also decided that I'm going to have to be down with some Thursday night all-nighters until the Gipson due date.
Side note: Yesterday I found out that I have been accepted by Sarah Lawrence...
Anyway, after reading Anne Hartman's "Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg," I'm lead to believe that the true difference between the Confessional Poets and these confessional poets is the aesthetic-- the former assumes a universal and takes its aesthetic from modernism, while the latter assumes a constructed community of friends. However, this does not remove this poetry from the confessional bind. In all reality, Ginsberg is confessing in the same matter as those put on the stand by McCarthy...
Anne Sexton was in the place to confess that is ultimately different than Robert Lowell's subject position and Ginsberg's. "Woman" was already fairly established as an identity category, but it's not something one wanted to be in poetry. Therefore, through her femininity, Sexton attempted to carve out an identity-laden niche similar to that of Ginsberg and O'Hara's...her aesthetic might have been closer to Lowell's and she may have striven for Rosenthalian confessionalism, but her position...see the Maxine Kumin introduction.
"On Reclaiming 'The Universal'" by Suzanne Matson
"Surely we all know that "he" is neuter in this convention of written English, and that "he" is meant to be "universal." If he=the universal, does that mean, as it must, that the universal=he? What is implied by this learned reflex of reading female? Is the she erased, or is she translated?" (121).
Where this essay seems to fall short is that it basically splits the universal into the possibility of two gendered universals-- the male and the female. "The universal" does not need to be "reclaimed" by "the female" as much as disassembled with the recognition that poets, whether they assume their audiences or not, are addressing and creating counterpublics that may resonate with Butler's vision of coalition politics...
How can I use the concept of the universal along with elements of queer theory?
Side note: Yesterday I found out that I have been accepted by Sarah Lawrence...
Anyway, after reading Anne Hartman's "Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg," I'm lead to believe that the true difference between the Confessional Poets and these confessional poets is the aesthetic-- the former assumes a universal and takes its aesthetic from modernism, while the latter assumes a constructed community of friends. However, this does not remove this poetry from the confessional bind. In all reality, Ginsberg is confessing in the same matter as those put on the stand by McCarthy...
Anne Sexton was in the place to confess that is ultimately different than Robert Lowell's subject position and Ginsberg's. "Woman" was already fairly established as an identity category, but it's not something one wanted to be in poetry. Therefore, through her femininity, Sexton attempted to carve out an identity-laden niche similar to that of Ginsberg and O'Hara's...her aesthetic might have been closer to Lowell's and she may have striven for Rosenthalian confessionalism, but her position...see the Maxine Kumin introduction.
"On Reclaiming 'The Universal'" by Suzanne Matson
"Surely we all know that "he" is neuter in this convention of written English, and that "he" is meant to be "universal." If he=the universal, does that mean, as it must, that the universal=he? What is implied by this learned reflex of reading female? Is the she erased, or is she translated?" (121).
Where this essay seems to fall short is that it basically splits the universal into the possibility of two gendered universals-- the male and the female. "The universal" does not need to be "reclaimed" by "the female" as much as disassembled with the recognition that poets, whether they assume their audiences or not, are addressing and creating counterpublics that may resonate with Butler's vision of coalition politics...
How can I use the concept of the universal along with elements of queer theory?
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