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...