Maio, Mayo..oooh, daffodils

Any self revealed in words or speech has to be a persona according to Maio/Trilling's thesis-- and this is something with which I would agree.

"The authentic self of the poet-- the private self devoid of his or her conscious or unconscious literary persona-- is of course a compilation of selves...Our distinction between authentic and sincere is helpful here. The personal poet's sincere self can be seen as one, or part of one, of these many selves; it is the persona presented publicly as poetic voice and is confined to the poem exclusively. A poem's speaker is not wholly the poet and consequently cannot even represent the authentic self, the assemblage of selves" (Maio 3).

My thesis also assumes that "a personal poem is distinguishable by its speaker" (4).

The choice to put something in a poem is the same as the choice we make the share or withhold other information in conversation, or even with ourselves. This is why poetry could serve as a public self-discovery for poets such as Sexton and Adrienne Rich-- they can choose to alter what they remember or know to be hard facts, but that choice is revealing as well, even if what it reveals is simply the walls to the world of the poem.

Anne Sexton was someone searching for who she was--writing allowed her to construct a self that she was relatively aware was unstable, not just mentally, but in terms of consistency. She looks for this self in terms of examining her own consciousness, looking at her self as man's "other," the victim of him putting skin on her bones, conceiving of her like an architect; and lastly, in terms of finding a self beyond the self that goes on thanks to the presence of a domineering, masculine God. There are moments where her revelation of the construction tears down the construction itself.

p. 72-73: re-vise his ideas?

"...she knew from her earliest attempts that for poetry to be distinguishable as art, it could not be only an authentic confession of one's self-perception. And this, finally, is why Sexton's 'I' is not an authentic one in her personal poetry: her willingness to craft a voice distinct from her conscious voice-- even the one used in session with the therapist-- one that is sincere, but one belonging entirely to the poem as its speaker rather than belonging to the authentic Anne Sexton who speaks as the 'I' of her poems" (73-74)

"...her shaping poetry from her life was more interesting to her than her life" (78).

I need a plan...

I only wrote a page today because I got stuck. Tomorrow...

1- re-read Maio on Sexton.
2- choose which poems best represent my thesis
3- explicate poems
4- conclude/discuss implications of this

5- move on to Adrienne Rich-- the process of revision-- how the re-vision of her personal history destablizes the lesbian category she seeks to create

6- move on to CA Conrad and Chelsey Minnis...re-read, mostly.

Tuesday...

7- write about CA Conrad/queer poetry...mostly in comparison with Adrienne Rich. How he uses language to destabilize. Introduce my own poetry into the mix, justifying with Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken..."

8- write about Chelsey Minnis, mostly about her persona being the only thing we have available about her, and the implications of that?

9- print out a pack of Xiu Xiu lyrics for bus ride. Pack.

ughhh

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.

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...

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.

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?

I think tonight I will reread her first two books. Sexton, that is.

I want to live inside of Mary Oliver's Dream Work. These poems beg to be read and are the consolation I need today as I am faced with my own tendency towards attachment. This has little to do with Gipson directly, but I feel like Oliver's poetry is speaking to my own more than usual, and my poetry is part of the project. This poem is working on becoming ubiquitous, but I still want to post it in all of its relevance!

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I need to be submitting to journals.

I am having a horrible time focusing today. I want to read all of Dream Work, work on my own poems, do yoga, bag the clothes I don't wear and take them to Goodwill. Maybe I am wasting my time by sitting here and trying to work when everything else seems so urgent.

From "A Rant Against Creative Writing Classes" by Dan Barden

"...the workshop promotes the idea to young writers that their writing is required reading, that an audience is guaranteed. When really, postworkshop, no one will ever be forced to look at their work again. It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again."


Anne Sexton, referring to W.D. Snodgrass, in a letter to Carolyn Kizer:

"His poems are all truth (so to speak) but not the real truth yet. (that is if you think the greatness of a poem depends on its intrinsic truth to the action)" (108)

In a letter to Anthony Hecht:

"I don't think L.I. Ferry really a good poem of mine...too sentimental. But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps I ought to allow my female heart more room...it seems to be the way I'm writing lately...my new poem too...but I'm going to harden up soon I promise myself...stop all the emoting around and get down to facts and objects" (127).


In a letter to Mrs. Willard Fuller:

"I feel, sometimes, sorry about my poetry...not as far as "the literary world" is concerned...but as far as the people in Wellesley and surrounding towns are concenred. It shocks them and I can understand why...they say it isn't anything 'like me'...'it is so depressing' or 'cruel'...and I know that it is, in truth like me inside. And, you see, 'inside' is the place where poems come from" (147).

From the Introduction to The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton by Maxine Cumin:

"In a terse eulogy Robert Lowell declared, with considerable ambivalence it would" seem, 'For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author.'" (Cumin xx)

"...in Sexton's poetry the reader can find the poet again and again identifying herself through her relationship with the male Other, whether in the person of a lover or...in the person of the patriarchal final arbiter" (xxx).

"Women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter, which, twenty years later, seems far less daring...Anne delineated the problematic position of women-- the neurotic reality of the time-- though she was not able to cope in her own life with the personal trouble it created" (xxxiv).