Confessional Poetry of the 1970S from Argentina and the United States Julia Eva Leverone Washington University in St
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Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Spring 5-15-2016 A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United States Julia Eva Leverone Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Part of the American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Latin American Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Leverone, Julia Eva, "A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United States" (2016). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 811. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/811 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Program in Comparative Literature Dissertation Examination Committee: Ignacio Infante, Chair Mary Jo Bang Charles Hatfield Tabea Linhard Paul Michael Lützeler Elzbieta Sklodowska A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United States by Julia Leverone A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2016 St. Louis, Missouri © 2016, Julia Leverone Table of Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Gelman, Urondo, Rich, and Sexton’s Entrances into the Confessional Mode in the Early 1970s ................................................................................................................................... 17 Chapter 2: The Poet as Subject and Multitudinous Self: The “I” and the Audience .................... 59 Chapter 3: Politics by Other Means: The Indirect Poetics of Acknowledgment of Olga Orozco and Elizabeth Bishop .................................................................................................................. 102 Chapter 4: Engaging the Other: Inclusivity and Expanded Scope in Adrienne Rich and Francisco Urondo ........................................................................................................................ 144 Conclusion: Confession, Relation, and the Abyss ...................................................................... 184 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 190 Appendix: Primary Collections Discussed in the Dissertation ................................................... 205 ii Acknowledgments The completion of this dissertation was made especially possible with a Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. I would like to give special thanks to Conor Burke, my family, my committee, and my program chair, Professor Lynne Tatlock. Thanks are also due for the advice from my friends and colleagues Catherine Williamson, Tana Juko, Dr. Jessica Hutchins, and Dr. Nicholas Tamarkin. For their help in my archival research, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Finally, I would like to thank my undergraduate advisor, Professor José Antonio Mazzotti, at Tufts University where the very beginnings of this project took form. Julia Leverone Washington University in St. Louis May, 2016 ` iii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United States by Julia Leverone Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2016 Professor Ignacio Infante, Chair Daring to confront difficult socio-political realities on the page, Argentine and United States poets writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s strove against systems of silence. Implementing direct and indirect poetics, each set of poets embodied, in differing and overlapping ways, elements of the confessionalist mode, at once relational and witnessing. Their poetry in collections from these particular years reflected the risk in their auto-positioning as subjects within their poems and with complex relationships with their audience, and in their usage of language, sometimes fragmented, protective, or urgent. They committed personal experience to the page, and in conveying their experience through narrative and lyric techniques, they opened their lines to provide access to masses of readers who had known the same difficult truths and shared in those realities. These poets, here represented by Juan Gelman, Olga Orozco, Francisco “Paco” Urondo, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich, conducted a risk- taking socio-political poetics of relation demanding awareness and change. In the United States, the experiences that Bishop, Rich, and Sexton wrote of in their work of this historical moment pertained to socially taboo issues—mental illness, alcoholism, abuse, marital strain, non-normative sexuality, and unequal gender treatment—an address of which that iv had been fought for in the protests and movements in the 1960s. In Argentina, Gelman, Orozco, and Urondo were writing of the increasing harms being committed by state military forces against citizens and that threatened their own lives as subversives working counter to the interests of their national government. These years constituted a time of darkening hope, as Argentina headed into successive military dictatorships. In response, Gelman and Urondo, along with other authors, developed a more pointed, witnessing, unmistakable, yet emotional and intimate style of writing that paralleled that of the United States poets. Differing from all four of these poets slightly, I also observe the indirect poetics of acknowledgment of Bishop and Orozco, who wrote concurrently with the others, yet communicated autobiographical and socio- political truths through more buried and protective technical means. This dissertation observes the literary commonalities and discrepancies in these national poetries that upheld the dual ethic of art and socio-political witness. I world the terms “confessional,” “conversational,” and “testimonial,” cross-applying them to the different national poetics and showing how each implemented aspects of the modes. I set forth with the assumption that confessionalism is relational and necessarily enacts vulnerability, skepticism, a critical stance, and risk in its very practice of communicating experience both personal and shared. The trajectories in American literature and through events affecting both nations as well as the globe—including protest movements for identity rights—led these Argentine and United States poets to a fascinatingly common space despite their very disparate stakes for writing, which later in the decade would lead to exile and death in the country to the south. These brave writers harnessed devastating fact and made socio-political art by representing multitudes of others with a belief and insistence on the power of language, knowledge, and relation. v Introduction The function of the act of confession in twentieth-century poetry minimally retains the qualities of the Catholic confession and the tones of guilt and absolution this implies, and it does not quite align with legal confession either, the product of interrogation. On a basic level, the confessional act in confessional poetry does share a discursive nature with confession’s traditional contexts, dependent upon the transfer of information about personal experience from the confessant to the confessor. In this dissertation, I advance the critical discussion on confessionalism as a mode of relation, primarily working forward from the contributions of Jo Gill, Jeremy Tambling, Michel Foucault, Thomas Travisano, and Zachary Pickard. In confessional poetry, I see the truth confessed as not only individual; when the poet conveys personal experience, fraught and difficult to admit, he or she does so in part to evoke the memory of experiences his or her readers possess themselves, to call that memory forth. I see confessionalism as a testimony of the self—distinct from the testimonial mode, as I will show— who is a representative for silenced others. Confessionalism is political, and seeks, upon establishing connection, justice for the pervasiveness of harmful experiences that have largely gone unacknowledged by a public, even one that contains multitudes of individuals who have experienced those very harms. The Argentine poets Juan Gelman, Olga Orozco, and Francisco “Paco” Urondo wrote concurrently with U.S. American confessional poets Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich, a starting point for my comparative justification. No Argentine poets have ever been considered to have been writing within the confessionalist mode, though their literary production