I Would Be Happy If

What does Adrienne Rich think of Foucault?

This whole thing is an attempt at a not-so-veiled justification of my own narcissistic poetics. Can I write this on the title page? Can this be my title?

From Samuel Maio's Creating Another Self: Voice in Modern American Personal Poetry

"Although 'subjective experience' serves as a useful phrase (in that it is sufficiently broad) to describe the representation of the poet's self in poetry, my thesis is that the poet creates a persona-- one called "I" or by a proper noun-- to act as the personal poet's speaker, and it is this speaker's self which is defined by the poem's 'images of the self,' and only to the extend they are depicted in the poem. Therefore the personal poet, consciously or not, substitutes for his or her literal, historical self a literary self as voice of the poem, one that is sincere but not altogether authentic" (Maio 2).

Um, isn't this the limitation placed on any construction of the self?

"Any personal poet assumes a voice-- as Sexton and Mazzaro did-- to present one's subjective experience focusing on self-exploration leading to self-definition. Personal poetry, then, is one of this created self, a poetry inclusive of that self's individual consciousness in relation to its subjective experience. The self of the confessional mode, as will be shown in the next chapter, usually attempts personal definition by means of a direct relationship to experience, the persona self by filtering experience through a mask, or persona..." (Maio 6)

"The second impersonality is that of the poet who, out of intense and personal experience, is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol."-- T.S. Elliot, from his first annual "Yeats Lecture." (Maio 9)

"I am not interested in the poem as a way of revealing a self that I think I know about to the outer world. I am interested in, certainly, finding out more about that self, and I think of myself as using poetry as a chief means of self-exploration"-- Adrienne Rich to Stanley Plumly (Maio 15)

ILL--Introspection and Contemporary Poetry by Alan Williamson

The Confessional Mode(according to Samuel Maio): employs "I" as the principal speaker, relates a personal incident of the poet's public self-- an incident either actual, that is, autobiographical, or created from the imagination-- usually intended as a means of self-identification, self-definition, and which often evokes pathos in the reader, although the incident depicted in a poem of this mode can be joyous as well. This "I" is the sincere voice of the poet (intended or not), one used as the primary instrument in presenting the poem. The poet who writes in the confessional mode of voice attempts to present the "I" as the self he or she wishes to define by the poem. (Maio 24)

"Sexton felt that she was authentically confessional-- when in fact she was not-- in those poems which exposed her hidden self, the unconscious Anne Sexton who understood the cause of the other Anne' anxiety. Confessional poetry for her must transcend mere reportage of one's selected personal history; it must act to force an articulation of one's repressed answers and insights. This explains her conviction that her creative and therapeutic acts were inextricable, that one augmented the other, but still she remains just "sincere" because of her conscious choices of that which is retained and deleted in her constructing the poem" (Maio 73).

"The difference between confession and poetry? is after all, art."- Anne Sexton, (Sexton 44).

"...Sexton views the personal poem as capable of having a diffuse application, even if the poem's voice addresses a single "you," a person identified in the poem as one of close relationship with the speaker..."but also can be viewed as a plural, more universal "you," leaving the poem as an "open letter". (Maio 74).


It matters little to the point of my project whether the confessional mode actually confesses the REAL reality. It's more concerned with the ways that the confessional mode, as an entity, can serve to subvert traditional confessional politics.

"That a poet, by using the confessional voice, could create a speaker sincerely admitting her hamartiain a way to affect emotionally or otherwise personally her audience beyond whom the poem is addressed-- the plural "you"-- marks for her the distinction between confession and art, or between authenticity and sincerity in Trilling's terms" (Maio 75).

"...readers know she is fictional, a character in the world of a poem used to elicit such an emotional response from them. The 'I' of 'The Double Image,' though, apparently is not a fiction, if only the speaker of a particular poem, and so can also evoke an emotional response in the reader. It, too, is sincere, and this is why it too is a persona, the confessional speaker revealing an instance from the poet's life, but fully aware that this revelation is confined to the medium of poetry" (Maio 78).

Sexton, to the Paris Review: " I don't adhere to literal facts all the time; I make them up whenever needed. Concrete examples give a verisimilitude. I want the reader to feel, 'Yes, yes, that's the way it is.' I want them to feel as if they were touching me. I would alter any word, attitude, image, or persona for the sake of the poem" (Maio 79).

Sexton considered herself "an actress in [her] own autobiographical play."

What does Sexton's stated relationship with her poems reveal about the construction of the self/an identity?

I want to look at her later poems where she gets gross and inappropriate?

We have a lot of self to find
in an era where the self can hardly
be said to exist. So here we write

poetry, stuff it with a different "I"
for each different moment and hope
that the process can be the project

(because we're never going to find it.)


Why, why, when people say "younger poets" or "contemporary poets" do they really mean old dudes, usually old white dudes, confessing shit we already know about the trials and tribulations of being a white dude?

I feel almost like I need a break. I want to hang a map on my wall and take a bath and sleep so I'm moments closer to when Devin will be here to distract me from the narcissism of this whole project.

Sometimes I want to punch Adrienne Rich in the mouth. More often than not I want to kiss the wound (and maybe I mean her mouth, not where I punched her...)


All men are not the problem, patriarchy, the system that privileges them, is...


All the maps are too large to hang on my wall...

I need to JSTOR/Muse some more recent readings of Sexton. So many of these are out of date and bore me.

This is unwieldy. I think I'm going to look up interviews with Xiu Xiu before I drop out of school and become a midwife/flight attendant.

I totally understand Foucault's position on the confessional...

I just can't successfully summarize it.

"The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, "demands" only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation. Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence..."(Foucault 60).

Okay...so, we as people feel as though we should confess because we believe that the truth will set us free. If the way we act is contrary to what appears to be common, we feel as though the way we act is invisible, ignored...and thus, as the doer of the deed, we don't exist without the acknowledgement of the deed. We want to exist...existence is measured by being acknowledged by those who have power? So we confess, and our audience now has the knowledge of "who we are" and can place a value judgment on it. The confessional machine, in this case, would be easy to subvert. Still compelled to have an existence in order to form communities or dispel fear of deviance, our confessions can use and reclaim language flung at us by those that judge us, be made unstable through literary or musical devices...that way, we are still constructing ourselves (which in a way ensures our survival), but making these selves slippery to "power..."

Again, I need to rearticulate the trouble with normal...

Being silenced by power is what normalizes. It reduces action to meaningless, easy-to-swallow identity categories...

So wait, with all of this silencing how can we silence this power?

Subvert the confession machine.

Critical theory gives me a headache. I want poetry.

Beauty is a reason to get up in the morning. I live to be in a dialogue with others through poetry...my poetry certainly makes me exist and is written to construct an "I," some form of me by combining ever-changing, disparate, and often conflicting actions...but really it is loving and getting carried away by the music of others' poetic "I"s that keep me going through the monotony of putting food on the table. Poetry is just another way of loving each other, and love really seems to be the only truly revolutionary act. Look at how every other strategy has backfired. I am going to keep writing about my indecipherable "I" so I can love.

I'm talking about loving people...

I'm so easily distracted!

The "I" may be a construct, but that doesn't make it any less important. Acknowledging that it is a construct changes its power...

Everything is a construct but you have to live within constructs in order to be able to survive. Confessional art has the power to reveal the harmful connotations of some of these constructs...

Um, yeah, new entry if I need...working on actual body of paper!

Plans and the consequences of breaking them...

Where did winter term go?

Right now, I'm laying on my bed, basking in the sunlight and trying to figure out how to manage my time so I can get this project done. I'm not traveling this week (but my boyfriend is) so I should be able to focus on getting this completed.

I'm headed to the Spearmint Rhino for a Coyote assignment at 9, but today's goals include organizing my ILL books into subject categories...and, well, I don't know. I feel uncomfortable micromanaging right now.

I feel like I'm in that place (again) where I'm uncomfortable with my project because it assumes a "best" way to live and a "best" ideology...a "best" way to create art. How can I shift the wording of my question and the focus of my research to make it sound like it is simply one way of looking at things...

but it is simply that. It's a queer evaluation. It's looking at the "I" without assuming it is permanent.

I need to go through this blog and ILL the books I noted that I ought to...

Oh, other things that I should probably be wary of confessing here: I'm skipping class for three days in March to go see Xiu Xiu in Salt Lake. I might try to get an interview with Jamie...it's totally and completely relevant to my Gipson project and I will work the experience of the show into my writing.

I have a boyfriend named Devin and he makes me want to write poetry again, so I have been. Lots.

I'll get stuff done today...

SO RELEVANT!

Eighteenth Annual Pacific Southwest Women’s Studies Association Conference
Students, Activists and Teachers Working Together

Feminist Reclamations/Queer Reclamations: The Adaptive Faces of Revolution

April 19, 2008
San Diego State University, San Diego

Call for Proposals
Revolutions have come to signify a myriad of different resistances to power formations throughout history. They have morphed and adapted to fit the diverse needs of people of different races, classes, genders and sexualities in distinctive geo-political locations. Feminism and Queer Theory have themselves contributed to new faces of revolution and new methods of reclamation. This conference is dedicated to exploring how the "faces" of revolution themselves have adapted to these changes and are continuing to adapt in this era of globalization. We solicit proposals from students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty members, community activists, and independent scholars for workshops, panels, roundtable discussions, individual presentations, artistic and multimedia presentations, performances, and practical applications.

In this re-conceptualization of revolution, we will take into account new technologies, scientific discoveries and discourses; (post)-colonialism and imperialism; art, literature, popular culture and new medias; and language, philosophy, and education with a focus on the lives and bodies of women and queers, who have historically been marginalized within discussions of reclamation and revolution. While we encourage presentations on the conference theme, proposals dealing with all areas of Women’s Studies research are welcomed.

Proposals should be submitted via e-mail, preferably as Word attachments, to: PSWSA08@gmail.com

Proposals must include: Title; abstract (100 word maximum); contact person’s name, address, e-mail, and phone number; presenter name(s) with academic and/or community affiliation; format (e.g., workshop, panel, roundtable discussion, artistic presentation, or performance), and audio/visual equipment requirements. (Equipment requests must be included with original proposal.)

Proposal Deadline: Friday, February 29, 2008.

For more information, visit http://pswsa.nwsa.org or contact Monica Bradley at PSWSA08@gmail.com or (813) 361-2777.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED FOR ATTENDANCE AND PRESENTATION.

found @: http://community.livejournal.com/womens_studies/348847.html?style=mine#cutid1

Potpourri. Probably not the fragrant kind. Alas, disillusioned again.

"Introduction" of Confessional Politics edited by Irene Gammel

"[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).

It will be interesting to see what her points are, because this hybrid seems a lot like how poetry is approached...poetry and music almost seem made for the subversion of the confessional...I need to read on...

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

confessional mode of feminist writing- "a type of autobiographical writing which signals its intentions to foreground the most personal and intimate details of the author's life" -- Rita Felski (ILL the test that this comes from!!)-- Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change

"[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

Sidenote: I am pissed about confession's negative connotations. I want to reclaim it as something that is not taken from me (or anyone else), but something that is proclaimed, without shame. The shame is what is problematic for me, especially if literary confession and confessional music are totally busting up this negative confessional machine!

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)."

Note: ILL 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..."

I would rather be reading The Power of Now right now, but see, self-discipline?

From "Introduction" of Confessional Politics: Women's Sexual Self-Representations in Life Writing and Popular Media, edited by Irene Gammel:

"From many different angles, the essays in this collection investigate the association of confession with femininity; they examine its function as a gender-specific discourse, as they probe its many genres and subgenres" (1).

"Many "real-life" stories encode an awareness of the confessional reality principle, of possible appropriation and recolonization of their life stories; suspicion and skepticism mark their self-representation, signaling that theirs is not the unmediated cry from the female heart. Women encode boundaries and warnings, signaling their desire to create their own safe space in which to articulate their personal and sexual lives, while defying confessional entrapments. They tell and retell their personal stories by simultaneously enacting, and reacting against, confessional modalities that wish to contain them" (2).

"Since the circulation of sexual self-representations confronts women almost inevitably with a confining frame, the essays in this collection examine how women, in turn, take charge of this challenge and experiment with ways of subverting traditional confessional readings, of dodging the conventional readings designed to contain them in traditional confessional paradigms" (2).

"...confessional readings frequently entail a process of devaluation of the female voice. The female voice relating personal experience, like the sinner's and the patient's, belongs not to the realm of the abstract and official langue but to parole, to familiar and intimate speech, and this characterized by a low degree of formality and authority, as it is perceived as ephemeral or trivial" (4).

"Moreover, the term confessional itself, as the collection shows, is characterized by a fundamental bidirectionality: women are subjected to confessional readings, but many women also use confessional conventions self-consciously, deliberately manipulating the confessional machine that wishes to entrap them" (5).

This book is going to be very helpful, as it asks a lot of questions I want to ask...but it only does so from a feminist standpoint. I think coming into some of these articles with a queer eye, so to speak, may help me to expand the ideas I would like to put forth in my final project.

As for Poetry I Need To Read For Context In Other Poetry: going to look up some Alice Notley, some Frank Sherlock.

I need to put in at least 3 hours on this tomorrow, too.

CA Conrad, mostly. And a quip about becoming a flight attendant.

Interview with CA Conrad

"You want to know how I write poems? Okay. I touch living things. The more trees I touch the more I dream, the more I dream, the more I write. And walking walking walking walking walking. I'm not a fucking novelist, I'm a poet, the air, the people, the trees, birds, roaches, used condoms (there's the semen again), everything outside is for our lives to investigate, rub against mentally or otherwise. As I said in my first answer, "If you start a poem you start from where you are, which is where everything wound up." 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."

"Forebears though. I'm going to assume you mean in this lifetime. Kafka is without a doubt the ONLY non-poet who fits this. Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman, Anne Sexton. These are a few of the poets whose work was available to me when I was a kid."

-- CA Conrad

I think I would like to focus on the Philly Sound poets, or at least CA Conrad and Dorothea Lasky, for the poetry part of my project. I need to read more of their work, and I hope to finish Conrad's Deviant Propulsion tonight. There is something so fantastic about allowing my project to be an interaction with living poets. I just want to read more about Conrad on his poems, too. Is he necessarily the "I"? He feels that way. And his poems are postmodern and queer and they make me want to keep writing poetry, which is an exciting feeling in the winter when everything is hibernating.

Connections for this project are being made in my head that can't translate to words yet, but it's a Monday night and I'm at my laptop and not out trying to fit four years of college social experience into one, so something must be going right!

I think I might move to my bed and finish the book and do yoga and daydream more about becoming a flight attendant if I don't get into grad school.