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2018 The Personal, the Political, and the Confessional: Confessional Poetry and the Truth of the Body, 1959 to 2014 Natalie Perfetti-Oates

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE PERSONAL, THE POLITICAL, AND THE CONFESSIONAL:

CONFESSIONAL POETRY AND THE TRUTH OF THE BODY, 1959 TO 2014

NATALIE PERFETTI-OATES

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2018

Natalie Perfetti-Oates defended this dissertation on March 23, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Joann Gardner Professor Directing Dissertation

Reinier Leushuis University Representative

Linda Saladin-Adams Committee Member

Robert Stilling Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee chair Dr. Joann Gardner, who above all knows poetry. The depth and breadth of her wisdom were infinitely helpful, along with her patience and willingness to work with me across barriers of time and space. I am also grateful to my committee members Dr. Linda Saladin-Adams, Dr. Robert Stilling, and Dr. Reinier Leushuis for their support—in the form of their enthusiasm about my work, their time spent reading and commenting on my drafts, and their treatment of me as a scholar.

I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Patrick Osborne, for the many hours spent listening to me articulate my argument, for the advice about research and writing, and for the confidence in me throughout this project.

Lastly, I would like to thank my family. I am grateful to my mother Sheree Perfetti for her endless encouragement, and her willingness to help at a moment’s notice; my father Dominic

Perfetti for his unfailing understanding and empathy; and my siblings Sarah, Nic, and Emily for encouraging me not to give up. I appreciate my husband Michael Oates for more than I can articulate: for his love, for listening, and, for over and over, allowing me a room of my own to write.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... v

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1. THE CONFESSIONAL POETRY MOVEMENT AND THE (UN)HAPPY AMERICAN DREAM: SOCIAL CLASS AND THE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN LOWELL AND SEXTON ...... 17

CHAPTER 2. INVISIBILITY AND MASCULINITY: TRUTH AND THE MALE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN SNODGRASS AND LOWELL ...... 38

CHAPTER 3. UNDERWRITTEN BY WHITENESS: THE CANON AND THE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN LORDE AND RICH ...... 56

CHAPTER 4. BEYOND THE AMERICAN DREAM: THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS AND THE GLOBAL CONFESSIONAL BODY IN FORCHÉ AND OLDS ...... 76

CHAPTER 5. (STILL) UNDERWRITTEN BY WHITENESS: THE RACIAL POLITICS OF THE CONFESSIONAL BODY AND CONFESSIONAL POETRY OF COLOR IN CLIFTON AND OLDS ...... 93

CHAPTER 6. SUFFERING, SEXUALITY, AND MASCULINITY: TRUTH AND THE MALE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN OLDS AND MOSES...... 109

CONCLUSION ...... 127

References ...... 133

Biographical Sketch ...... 139

ABSTRACT

The power of Confessional poetry derives in large part from its reputation for telling the truth. Indeed, the very term “confessional” indicates the genre’s status as a discourse of truth.

Recent scholarship on Confessional poetry has focused on revealing how the genre is not as authentic or truthful as readers have assumed, and has countered assumptions from earlier critics that Confessional poems are uncritically autobiographical. The relationship between

Confessional poetry and truth does not entail the facts of the authors’ lives as previously assumed, yet, rather than disassociate Confessionalism from truth altogether, I seek to redefine the relationship. Instead of regarding Confessional poetry as a collection of individual confessions, we should understand the genre more broadly in terms of what U.S. culture considers to be confessional. The truth at the heart of Confessional poetry lies in its revelation of culturally significant information: the sites of our deepest emotions, the topics we vehemently disagree on, the places we feel most vulnerable, and the matters we really care about.

Confessions often have cultural significance as they tap into the systems of power that intimately shape people’s lives. The continuing genre of Confessional poetry in the United States reveals the truths of the body, and how the personal is political over generations. I carry out this argument through the poems of several generations of Confessional poets, and through the lenses of class, gender, and race, in order to find what we consider worth confessing, what we do not, and how the content of our confessions evolves or remains over time.

INTRODUCTION

Since its beginning in 1959, the genre of Confessional poetry has been intimately entangled with the notion of truth. Many of its first critics associated Confessional poetry with autobiographical truth, the unreserved expression of the poet’s personal experiences, and read it vis-à-vis the honesty of diary writing. M.L. Rosenthal’s 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life

Studies asserts that “Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal” (154). However, contemporary scholarship on Confessional poetry focuses on revealing how the genre is not as authentic or truthful as readers have assumed, and counters assumptions from critics that Confessional poetry is uncritically autobiographical.

Examples include Miranda Sherwin (2011), Lisa Narbeshuber (2009), Jo Gill (2007), Clare

Pollard (2006), and Gale Swiontkowski (2003). Referring to Anne Sexton’s lectures, Sylvia

Plath’s diary entries, or John Berryman’s preface to The Dream Songs, their research points out that the Confessional poets themselves rejected identifying with this genre, and the autobiographical readings it tends to inspire. Indeed, according to Sherwin, “Without exception, the confessional poets despised and resisted the label of ‘confessional,’ and all argued that their work was only nominally autobiographical” (7). This trend continues in contemporary

Confessionalism, such as that of Sharon Olds, who prefers to classify her work as “apparently personal poetry” (qtd. in Farish 61) rather than Confessional in order to distance her work from the diary writing associated with the term.

Scholars critical of the conflation between Confessional poetry and autobiographical truth advocate for a distinction between the “I” of the poem and the “I” of the poet. Gill’s study of

Sexton’s oeuvre asserts that “Sexton’s manipulation of the persona ‘I’ raises crucial questions

about the authenticity and credibility typically regarded as characteristic of confessionalism. It becomes impossible to read her poems in order to identify or evaluate the degree of (particularly biographical) truth implicit in each. Instead, we must acknowledge that, just as there are many

‘I’s, none of which is to be identified with the historical author, there are multiple truths” (444).

Narbeshuber makes a similar statement about scholars who read for an autobiographical self, or any single poetic persona, in the works of Plath: “despite the fruitfulness of these critics’ projects, they read for a unified consciousness in Plath’s poetry, a trend I additionally challenge”

(xi). In addition, Swiontkowski, whose research examines the theme of incest in the poems of

Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Sharon Olds, spends the first four pages of the book’s preface explaining that the Confessional poetry she analyzes should not be read autobiographically, but as a motif. She specifies that “In each and every case, I am examining the poem and not the poet. Even when I refer to the speaker of the poem by the author’s name, I am referring to the author’s persona, her created voice in that poem, and making no claim for autobiographical truth” (12). These scholars recognize the craft and complexity of Confessional poems. Although the power of Confessional poetry derives in large part from its reputation for telling the truth, its representations of life remain as constructed and stylized as that of any poetic genre.

I consider not why the term “Confessional” is inaccurate, but why Confessional poetry is often understood to be confessional in the first place. The relationship between Confessional poetry and truth does not entail the facts of the author’s lives as previously assumed, yet, rather than disassociate Confessionalism from truth altogether, I seek to redefine the relationship. The truth at the heart of Confessional poetry lies in its revelation of culturally significant information: the sites of our deepest emotions, the topics we vehemently disagree on, the places we feel most

vulnerable, and the matters we really care about. Confessions often have cultural significance as they tap into the systems of power that intimately shape people’s lives. My research focuses on confessions about the body, since it can be found at the center of many controversial cultural issues, such as sexual assault, abortion, poverty, and war, as well as sexism, classism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia. I argue that instead of regarding Confessional poetry as a collection of individual confessions, we should understand the genre more broadly in terms of what U.S. culture considers to be confessional. The continuing genre of Confessional poetry in the United States underscores the truths of the body, and how the personal is political over generations. I carry out this argument through the poems of several generations of Confessional poets, and through the lenses of class, gender, and race, in order to find what we consider worth confessing, what we do not, and how the content of our confessions evolves or remains over time.

The association between Confessional poetry and truth may be traced to the history of confession as a source of truth content. In The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Michel Foucault recognizes that “Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth” (58), and goes on to state that “the confession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth” (59). The concept of truth has different meanings in different contexts—varying in definition from a stranger to a significant other, a courtroom to a therapist office, or a church confessional to a Confessional poem. In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Adrienne Rich acknowledges the many definitions of truth, writing that “There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’—truth is not one thing, or even a system” (187). The concept of truth underlying Confessional poetry is not necessarily autobiographical, so much as

secretive: the kind of content ascribed truth value because it challenges cultural silences to share significant information. Individuals who have ten fingers and ten toes do not feel compelled to confess about it; ordinary and expected, this information does not constitute a truth of their bodies. Rather, confessional truths broach culturally controversial topics.

Foucault specifically links confession with sex, a prominent topic in Confessional poetry, and forbidden sex in particular. He observes that “The legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, perhaps, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias…” (38-39). Women’s sexuality, such as the woman’s self- pleasure in Anne Sexton’s “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,” or the lesbian sexuality in

Audre Lorde’s “On a Night of the Full Moon,” in addition to other stigmatized sexualities, such as is broached in Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis,” or Gabe Moses’s “How to Make Love to a

Trans Person,” indeed form a prominent motif in Confessional poetry.

Other topics in Confessional poetry that claim truth content include, for example, being mentally ill, socially outcast, or guilty of wrongdoing. Bodies suffering from mental illness materialize frequently in Confessional poems, from Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue” to Sexton’s

“Cripples and Other Stories” to Moses’s “Stimming.” The stigma attached to mental illness in mainstream culture associates it with truth, since the topic is often rendered unspeakable as an embarrassing personal flaw. Confessionalism also features individuals who do not fit into their given social roles, such as the struggle Robert Lowell’s persona witnesses for his father to be a successful breadwinner in “Commander Lowell,” or the struggle Anne Sexton’s undergoes to be a happy mother and housewife in “The Double Image,” and those who acknowledge their role in

oppression, such as Carolyn Forché’s recognition in “Return” of her country’s support for regimes that violate human rights, or Sharon Olds’s recognition in “On the Subway” of her persona’s complicity in a culture of systemic racism. Material that constitutes truth-telling in

Confessional poetry can shift over time, with new topics emerging, and others no longer resonating as secretive.1 Over generations, poetry classified as Confessional neither searches for atonement, nor reports the facts of the poet’s personal experience, so much as it gives voice to the forbidden by making the private public.

Defined for its propensity to bring private matters to light for a public audience,

Confessional poetry also serves as a lens through which to examine how the personal is political for different generations. Since the subject of the confession is most often the self, Confessional poetry is frequently characterized as solipsistic. However, as Judith Butler points out in Giving an Account of Oneself:

When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, it can start with itself, but it will find that this self is already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration; indeed, when the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist. The reason for this is that the ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation—or set of relations—to a set of norms. (Loc 150)

Butler confirms that the personal is indeed political. Therefore, the seemingly solipsistic “I” of the Confessional poem nevertheless speaks to the systems of power that govern gender as well as race and class. Contemporary scholars largely agree that as Confessional poems represent the self, they represent the cultural politics that constitute the self. My research focuses on how the personal is political over time, examining some ways this understanding has evolved, and

1 For example, the divorce discussed in Snodgrass’s 1959 collection Heart’s Needle, hailed as one of the first books of Confessional poetry, hardly reads today as scandalous at all. As Jay Rogoff notes, “What looked forbidden in his poetry, what made it new and startling at the time, has become the norm. The wrong turns that in the 1950s counted as dirty secrets of private life—divorce, adultery, and the emotional snarls they make of parent-child relationships— have become common American experiences and, therefore, common poetic subjects” (885).

remained constant. The evolution of this understanding continues to be important because it reveals the realities that are being validated and marginalized within each generation.

Although the precise origin of the phrase “the personal is political” remains unclear, it rose to prominence during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Carol

Hanisch’s 1969 essay “The Personal is Political” became one of the first to express the idea in print. Hanisch, who worked for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, uses the essay to respond to the critique by some of its members that the consciousness-raising women’s groups of the women’s liberation movement engaged in personal therapy more than political action. She replies to this charge by arguing that the personal problems many women experience are, in fact, political. According to Hanisch, “‘political’ was used here in the broad sense of the word as having to do with power relationships, not the narrow sense of electorial politics.” Kim

Whitehead links Confessional poetry to feminist poetry as a predecessor, yet argues that “While the Confessionalists’ introspection remained just that, feminist poets’ belief in ‘the personal as political’ required that they connect their self-reflections to public life” (9). However, many scholars, including Clare Pollard, Tanfer Emin Tunç, and Emily Boshkoff-Johnson, defy

Whitehead’s distinction by relying on the principle that the personal is political to carry out feminist readings of the genre.

Clare Pollard examines how Sexton’s poems resonate with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine

Mystique (1963) and the second-wave feminist movement to critique the role of the 1950s

American housewife. Analyzing poems such as “Her Kind,” “Consorting with Angels,” “Self in

1958,” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Pollard shows how Sexton’s poetry sounds personal, yet represents the housewife as a role rather than an identity, and “turns the carefully constructed propaganda of the American Housewife against itself” (2). Tanfer Emin Tunç takes

an ecocritical perspective to look at the motifs of body fluids in (Post)Confessional ecopoetry, and how they subvert normative expectations of womanhood. Her research includes Sexton,

Plath, and Rich, and examines motifs like menstruation, abortion, baby nursing, and crying. In so doing, Tunç argues:

The embodiment of the environment in women’s bodies (and vice versa) has not only provided feminist poets with the conceptual tools required to bridge the gap between the poet (i.e., the personal) and social awareness (i.e., the political), but has also created a framework for the understanding of female corporeal processes and women’s socio- cultural position in the American project. Even though all women clearly do not experience their bodies in the same way, feminist (post)confessional ecopoetics serves as a conduit between personal histories, and between women and the environment. (115) Tunç demonstrates how the personal is political in Confessional poems because they connect seemingly personal content to the regimes of power that govern gender identity. Emily Boshkoff-

Johnson’s research also focuses on the female body in Confessional poetry. Noting that the female body has been scrutinized in Western society for years, and had many meanings ascribed to it, Boshkoff-Johnson looks to Confessional poems from the likes of Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth

Bishop, and Sharon Olds to show what it means to have and live in a female body. Boshkoff-

Johnson points out how the poems relate the sensory experiences of having a body, and give women a voice about this embodiment when previously they have been silenced. Confessional poetry lends itself readily to feminist analysis, and other feminist readings of Confessional poems have been authored by scholars such as Kathleen Margar Lant, Sandra M. Gilbert

Francesca Haig, and Janet Badia.

The Confessional body, a body represented in Confessional poetry with the characteristics of the genre, is written by both men and women, as well as by poets who are working class, middle class, upper class, black, white, queer, straight, transgender, cisgender, and more. Historically, writers have associated women with the body, and men with the mind.

However, men’s bodies are gendered too, and although men’s bodies appear less frequently in

Confessional works, for them the personal is also political, since many of the personal problems men face—from being pressured to be the breadwinner of the family to feeling ashamed at not being strong or tough enough—stem from a larger politics of gender. To avoid an analysis of men would deny the politicization of their bodies, and ignore the issues broached by this politicization. The same principle applies to poets of different classes, races, and sexualities. It is important to consider both the bodies that have been visible in Confessional poetry, and those that have not, either because they have been in power, like white Americans, or because they have been marginalized, like transgender Americans. Therefore, I employ feminism to examine

Confessional poems that represent a range of bodies, and interact with multiple regimes of power, exploring the body politics that govern U.S. culture and how they impact the individual.

My research focuses on Confessional poetry, yet extends the genre beyond the historical movement spanning the late 1950s and early 1970s, since, as I contend, this style of writing continues in contemporary poetry. Most scholars agree that the Confessional Poetry Movement began in 1959 with Robert Lowell’s publication of Life Studies, and W.D. Snodgrass’s publication of Heart’s Needle, and most concur that Snodgrass and Lowell, along with Sexton and Plath, qualify as Confessionals. The beginning of the Confessional Poetry Movement was largely concentrated in Boston, where Lowell, Sexton, and Plath all connected during Lowell’s creative writing seminar at Boston University. Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde prove controversial Confessionals; their work overlaps with Confessional poetry a great deal in terms of form and content, yet takes a distinctly more political approach to its subject matter. Some scholars include Rich in the Confessional Poetry Movement, and others do not, whereas Lorde, often categorized as a Black Arts Movement or Postcolonial poet, is rarely associated with the

genre, even though her work often deals with personal experience.2 Later poets, such as Sharon

Olds, also fall on the border of Confessionalism, excluded by those who consider Confessional poetry a historical movement (one that has already ended), and included by others who consider their work to carry forward essential aspects of the genre. I define Confessional poetry according to its aesthetics rather than its timeline, since this style of writing continues today in such schools as Poetry of Witness and Spoken Word. For me, Confessional poetry is an intimate, seemingly autobiographical style of lyric poetry that employs raw, striking imagery, and broaches forbidden social topics.3 Writers who produce such work qualify as Confessional, whether they published poems in 1959 or 1999. In this way, I am able to engage with canonized Confessionals like Anne

Sexton as well as contemporary Spoken Word poets like Gabe Moses to analyze the subjects of confession across generations of U.S. culture.

Despite the confessions that animate Confessional poems, a critical aspect of

Confessionalism is that the poetry is seemingly autobiographical. The intimate nature of the poems appears to imbue them with an authenticity not found in other poetic schools. However, even when the poems refer to the facts of the poets’ lives, such as Lowell’s allusion to his third wife Caroline Blackwood in his poem “Redcliffe Square,” or Forché’s to her friend Terrence Des

Pres in her poem “Ourselves or Nothing,” they remain works of literature, and, as Olds explains, are only “apparently personal” (qtd. in Farish 61). Therefore, when I argue ‘Lowell writes this’ or ‘Forché writes that,’ I mean the Confessional poem, and not the confession itself. Poets who write Confessionally often pay close attention to craft, yet their technique tends to be overlooked

2 Scholarship on Confessional poetry rarely includes nonwhite writers, even poets such as Audre Lorde and Lucille Clifton, whose work often exhibits a Confessional aesthetic. My research will explore how whiteness underlies the canon. 3 The term “Confessional” with an upper-case ‘C’ refers to the genre of poetry, while the term “confessional” with a lower-case ‘c’ means characteristic of a confession.

by critics. For example, as Keith D. Leonard points out, “most scholarship on Lorde comes from an identity-politics perspective and is generally interested in validating her complex coalition politics” (761); however, he observes, “it usually does so at the expense of examining her poetics” (761). I do examine the confessional aspect of Confessional poetry in order to make a historical argument, yet I also consider the craft of each work to show that Confessional poetry is in fact poetry—a literary representation rather than a diary confession.

To its first critics, Confessional poetry seemed especially confessional because it arose in contrast to Modernism. Modernism dominated the American literary scene for the first half of the twentieth century, and was still influential in the 1950s when the Confessional Poetry

Movement began. In response to Ezra Pound’s challenge to “make it new,” many Modernist writers broke from the Romantic tradition of first-person, lyric poetry to include multiple, shifting perspectives in their works. Pound’s collection The Cantos, for example, published between the 1920s and 1960s, shifts perspective repeatedly, and features the fragmentation and collage characteristic of high Modernist poetry. Pound also advocated the primacy of the image, as seen in his 1913 poem “In a Station of the Metro,” and its poignant image of petals on a wet, black bough. The famously short poem notably leaves out the poet’s reaction to the petals on the bough, and focuses on direct treatment of the image itself. Modernism especially encouraged the impersonality of the poet, as did T.S. Eliot in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual

Talent,” which argues that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (946-947). Similarly, New

Criticism advocated focusing solely on the poem itself without connecting it to the author, or the outside world, at all. Famously using a first-person perspective, and seeming to feature the personality of the poet, Confessional poetry defies most, if not all, of Modernism’s mandates.

Imagery is very important in Confessional poems as well, but in a way that expresses rather than escapes the emotional content of the moment. Many of the topics of Confessional poems, such as suicide, abortion, or divorce, were already controversial during the 1950s and 1960s, but seemed especially raw when written in contrast with Modernism’s intellectualism.

Confessional poetry is still being written today, as seen in contemporary schools of poetry such as Poetry of Witness and Spoken Word. Poetry of Witness began with Forché’s

1970s human rights work in El Salvador prior to the Salvadoran Civil War, and her 1980s poems inspired by those experiences. Forché later defined the genre in her 1993 anthology Against

Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, which features poems that testify to injustices ranging from the Armenian Genocide, the Spanish Civil War, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Holocaust, and more. In this genre, poems confront political realities via the personal voice of the poet. Forché often merges the personal and political in her own poems, such as

“Photograph of My Room” (1981) or “Return” (1981), which resonate with Confessionalism because they employ striking imagery that intimately features the body. Forché herself makes a distinction between this poetry and what is commonly seen as Confessional: “Witness, then, is neither martyrdom nor the saying of a juridical truth, but the owning of one’s infinite responsibility for the other one (l’autri). It is not to be mistaken for politicized confessionalism”

(“Reading the Living Archives” 168). Indeed, she believes that “The celebration of the personal…can indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of the individual” (“Twentieth Century

Poetry of Witness” 17). Since Confessional poetry usually entails a poetry of the self, Forché isolates it from Poetry of Witness that, as a poetry of witness, inherently values the other.

Politicized Confessionalism is not necessarily Poetry of Witness, but Poetry of Witness can be

Confessional, as in “Photograph of My Room” or “Return.” Even as poems bear witness to tragedy or oppression, they may yet employ the intimate, seemingly autobiographical style of raw, striking imagery and publicization of forbidden social content that defines Confessionalism.

Confessional poetry also overlaps considerably with the genre of Spoken Word, since both schools feature a poetry of the self. Spoken Word poetry started to emerge in U.S. culture during the 1970s and 1980s, and flourished beginning in the 1990s and 2000s. According to

Susan Somers-Willett,

Because most slam poems engage a first-person, narrative mode which encourages a live audience to perceive the performance as a confessional moment, one of the most defining characteristics of slam poetry is a poet’s performance of identity and identity politics…Indeed, the prevalence of identity poems performed at recent National Poetry Slams caused one veteran of the scene to note the progression of slam ‘from a lyrical collaborative art to that of an art of self-proclamation’ (Van Cleve). A great deal of the work appearing in recent slam and Spoken Word anthologies and films confirms the trend of proclaiming one’s identity for an audience. (52)

As poems of identity, Spoken Word works correlate with Confessional ones by featuring a poetic

“I” and appearing to share the poet’s personal experiences. In fact, the performance aspect of

Spoken Word reinforces this autobiographical element, since the body of the poet implicitly serves to affirm the truth value of the poetic persona. Similar to Confessional poems, the

“confessions” in Spoken Word rarely ask for atonement. On the contrary, Spoken Word poetry, influenced by the Black Arts Movement, commonly celebrates the poet and, in pursuit of social justice, makes a critique of society. Spoken Word poets also broach forbidden topics, such as in

Moses’s “How to Make Love to a Trans Person” (2013) or “The Other Side of the Knife” (2014).

The form of Spoken Word poems differs in many ways from the written medium of Confessional ones. Traditional Confessional poems pay close attention to craft and rely on stanzas, line breaks, and punctuation, whereas Spoken Word performances rely more closely on speed of delivery, volume, and tone of voice, although both command attention by using startling imagery. Further

differences divide the genres, yet many Spoken Word works, like Moses’s “Teeth” (2011) or

“Stimming” (2013), fit into the aesthetic of Confessional poetry to show that the genre did not end in the twentieth century.

Confessional poems from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries reflect the influence of the changing social movements and emerging cultural studies during this period.

Both whiteness studies and masculinity studies arose during the 1990s. Peggy McIntosh’s

“White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1989) and Toni Morrison’s Playing in the

Dark (1992) popularized the study of whiteness, while R.W. Connell’s Masculinities (1995) and

The Men and the Boys (2000) pioneered the study of masculinity. In The Men and the Boys,

Connell observes that “The new feminism of the 1970s not only gave voice to women’s concerns, it challenged all assumptions about the gender system and raised a series of problems about men” (3). Third-wave feminism also emerged in the 1990s, born out of critiques of the second wave as a movement that primarily focused on cisgender, straight, white, middle-class women. As a result, third-wave feminism embraces intersectionality by accommodating theories of women from diverse races, classes, and sexualities, and diversifying the term “woman” by questioning essentialist notions of gender and sex. In addition, the LGBT movement has become more and more active, and, during the 2010s, has called attention to transgender visibility and activism. The influence of these cultural forces can be seen on Confessional poems published from the 1980s to the 2010s, which show an increasing awareness of privileged and marginalized identities in relation to U.S. and global politics. White bodies appear more often as racialized, men’s bodies appear more often as sexualized, and transgender bodies appear for the first time.

This effect is particularly prominent in Spoken Word poems published during the 2010s, when speaking about the self simultaneously involves speaking about social justice.

Since identity is intersectional, I explore the truths of the body and examine how the personal is political through the lenses of class, gender, and race. In fact, my analysis begins with a discussion of social class, because, as Christopher Renny and Carolyn Whitson point out,

“‘Class’ is almost always ignored in the contemporary critical discourse of ‘race, class, and gender’” (72). While finding the truths confessed to in Confessional poetry, I also find what does not qualify as a truth despite significantly shaping the culture of the time. Toni Morrison affirms the value of studying the cultural forces hiding in plain sight in her book Playing in the Dark, when she suggests studying race by looking at whiteness. Morrison writes: “What I propose here is to examine the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblacks who held, resisted, explored, or altered these notions” (11).

Focusing on class, race, and gender, I look to Confessional poetry as a finger on the pulse of U.S. culture with regard to various issues, examining how those issues change or remain over generations. These chapters see Confessional poets break silence on a number of topics, ranging from suicidal mothers to white guilt to transgender sex, and, in so doing, tap into the systems of power that intimately shape people’s lives.

Chapter One finds that the truth of the upper middle and upper class bodies represented by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton during the 1950s and 1960s is that they do not fit into the image of contentment projected by the 1950s American Dream, and it exhibits the confessions of unhappiness felt by these individuals while otherwise maintaining the lifestyle of the Dream.

Chapter Two, which focuses on gender, argues that men’s bodies do not constitute a truth of their characters as much as women’s bodies constitute a truth of theirs. During the 1950s, 1960s, and

1970s, the works of Confessional poets, such as W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell, testify to this, since their imagery of men’s bodies is frequently either absent or deferred through

symbolism. When men’s bodies do appear in Confessional works, the truth of them is that they are disempowered because it deviates from the cultural expectations of hegemonic masculinity.

Chapter Three analyzes race to explore how Confessional poetry reveals the personal to be political, finding that representations of white bodies may be read as personal (even as they engage political topics), whereas representations of black bodies are exclusively read as political.

A comparative analysis of the 1970s poetry of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich shows that whiteness, which infuses terms like “personal” and “private,” underlies the canon of

Confessional poetry.

Chapter Four argues that representations of social class on the Confessional body become more political, revealing the truth of the body in the suffering of others, during the 1980s as the

American Dream becomes more exaggerated. Carolyn Forché and Sharon Olds critique yuppie culture by contrasting those bodies living the 1980s Dream of luxury with those living—and dying—in poverty, starvation, and violence. In Chapter Five, the Confessional poetry of Lucille

Clifton and Sharon Olds from the 1980s and 1990s illustrates that blackness is still excluded from the idea of the personal that underlies the canon of Confessionalism. Olds’s poems suggest that whiteness is slowly becoming more visible as racial during this time, yet a false binary can still be found between black and Confessional writing. Chapter Six shows that beginning in the

1980s and continuing into the 2010s, men’s bodies emerge, more regularly and more revealingly, to be a truth of their characters in Confessional poems, as exhibited by Sharon Olds and Gabe

Moses. However, when men’s bodies do appear, the truth of them is either disempowered or sexualized, since imagery of men weakened, suffering, or dying, as well as naked or eroticized forms a motif throughout their works.

Underlying each chapter is the idea that Confessional poetry offers readers a window into the relationships between truth, power, and the body in U.S. culture to map the knowledge each generation constitutes as a truth of the body. Through an understanding of what a generation considers confessional, or a truth to be confessed, we can learn the issues of significance, and how these issues change, disappear, remain, or renew over time. We learn what is too important to say unless it is confessed: what people are ashamed of, what they hope for, what they die for, what they take pleasure in, what they hate, or what they want to change. We also learn what is invisible to them: what they may not consider important even though it inexorably shapes their lives. In addition, Confessional poetry reveals how the personal is political for different generations. As Confessional poems exhibit the self, they exhibit the cultural politics that constitute the self. Judith Harris writes that “Like the revelations of history, confession serves as an antidote to the extreme harm that civilized silence can do” (260). Confessional poetry has served many purposes for its authors and audiences, yet one of its meanings can be found in the genre’s ability to challenge cultural silences in order to give voice to the taboo.

CHAPTER 1

THE CONFESSIONAL POETRY MOVEMENT AND THE (UN)HAPPY AMERICAN DREAM: SOCIAL CLASS AND THE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN LOWELL AND SEXTON

In 1957, Elizabeth Bishop addressed a letter to Robert Lowell revealing her jealousy at

Lowell’s bold use of personal experience in his new poetry. She confesses:

I am green with envy of your kind of assurance. I feel that I could write in as much detail about my Uncle Artie, say—but what would be the significance? Nothing at all… Whereas all you have to do is put down the names! And the fact that it seems significant, illustrative, American, etc., gives you, I think, the confidence you display about tackling any idea or theme, seriously, in both writing and conversation. (Words in Air 247)

Bishop refers to Lowell’s illustrious family lineage to point out that since the members of his family tree figure prominently in United States history, Lowell’s seemingly autobiographical poems are automatically invested with larger importance.4 Scholars such as Miranda Sherwin and Deborah Nelson have commented on the success of the Confessional Poetry Movement in conjunction with Lowell’s status as a man, and moreover, a Lowell—suggesting that if subsequent Confessionals had published their works without the precedent set by Lowell’s Life

Studies (1959), their writing may not have been able to achieve such institutional acclaim.

Indeed, W.D. Snodgrass’s collection Heart’s Needle, published just before Life Studies, also appears to refer Confessionally to his family, yet M.L. Rosenthal coined the term “confessional” in his review of Lowell’s work, and critics most commonly identify Lowell (and not Snodgrass) as the father of Confessional poetry. As such, Lowell’s class status played a notable role in the success of Life Studies and the inauguration of the Confessional Poetry Movement. This history establishes a relevant association between Confessional poetry and the politics of social class.

4 Lowell boasts patrician roots through both his paternal and maternal lineage. His father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, descended from a Boston Brahmin family whose heritage includes federal judges, famous poets, clergymen, and a war hero. His mother, Charlotte Winslow, hailed from another historic family that traces its ancestry back to the Mayflower and, according to legend, the first passenger to step onto Plymouth Rock.

Researchers have long recognized that Confessional poetry engages with U.S. politics and culture. Miranda Sherwin states “that confessional writing is not a private, apolitical art, but rather one that demonstrates a deep engagement with the politics of literary influence, of gender relations, of psychoanalysis, and of American culture more broadly” (16). Glenn Freeman echoes

Sherwin’s sentiment, pointing out that, although previously considered ahistorical and apolitical by many critics, Confessional poetry in fact arose “as a particular response to emerging social conditions in mid-twentieth century America and offered poets a productive form of sociopolitical commentary” (80). Michael Thurston, researching Lowell’s representations of monuments in his poems, also politicizes the Confessional Poetry Movement. He argues that

“The circumstances to which these poems respond range from the Korean War and the cold war

(for Snodgrass) to the violences visited upon women by social expectations promulgated in didactic classical narratives (Sexton) and Western literary and popular culture (Plath), but each poet responds by…resisting oppressive conditions and discourses” (105). All of these scholars assert the political nature of Confessional poetics, yet none discuss its politics of social class.

Their work engages politics in terms of war and, most commonly, gender, omitting how each poet’s representation of social class affects this engagement and shapes the genre.

Some scholars have carried out class analyses of Confessional poetry. Josh

Schneiderman, for example, analyzes the cultural anxiety expressed in Lowell’s poem “For the

Union Dead,” which suggests that, during the Cold War, the Puritan search for salvation transformed into U.S. culture’s capitalist pursuit of wealth. Steven Gould Axelrod focuses on another of Lowell’s poems, “Skunk Hour,” as influenced by the cultural critique F. Scott

Fitzgerald employed in The Great Gatsby. Axelrod notes that most scholarship on the poem focuses on its psychological or spiritual content, stating: “I would like to propose an alternative

strategy for reading ‘Skunk Hour,’ one that highlights its economic, political, and cultural dimensions—its portrayal of classes in conflict during a time of stress and change” (69).

However, beyond Axelrod and Schneiderman, scholarship on Lowell infrequently engages the topic of social class, and the subject surfaces even less in research on other Confessionals including W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich.5

The works of the Confessional poets reveal what mainstream American culture considers the truth of the body, and how each generation considers the personal to be political. Few

Confessional poems situate their writing in the context of social class, and fewer still address it directly. Among confessions about sexuality and suicide, divorce and depression, family and religion, class status does not appear to be an important aspect of identity. Nonetheless, class plays an integral role in the Confessional Poetry Movement because its popularity during the late

1950s and the 1960s stems from its disclosure of the unhappy underbelly of life within the

American Dream. Indeed, during the “tranquilized Fifties,” Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) depicts the upper class bodies in his inner circle as being disempowered by career failure, early death, or mental illness, while Sexton’s poetic persona embodies doubt, ennui, and mental illness, as she feeds her children “their careful slice of suburban cake” in To Bedlam and Part Way Back

(1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), and Live or Die (1966). The truth of the upper middle and upper class bodies represented by Lowell and Sexton is that they do not fit into the image of contentment projected by the 1950s American Dream.

The American Dream, a term first coined in 1931, has subsequently played a role in the national narrative to define the hopes and goals of each generation. As Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and

5 Miriam Marty Clark examines how Rich’s use of lyric transgresses boundaries between private versus public and addresses social suffering. Piotr Gwiazda also discusses social class, albeit briefly, while analyzing the common bond forged amongst readers in Rich’s collection An Atlas of a Difficult World. Overall, however, such research is rare and studies on Rich’s gender and sexuality politics predominate the critical discourse about her writing.

Paul Nolte point out, “The United States developed early on an image of itself as a consumer society and a consumer economy” (123). Indeed, some define the Dream in terms of happiness, yet most of its definitions are rooted in materialism. The most well-known vision of the

American Dream arose during the 1950s, and centers on the nuclear family—husband, wife, two children, and a dog—in a suburban house with a white picket fence and a car in the driveway.

The details of the Dream vary even within generations, yet, for many citizens during the 1950s, home ownership manifested as a defining feature. In his book The American Dream: A Cultural

History, Lawrence R. Samuel notes that “As the central repository for what many considered ‘the good life,’ the suburban home became central to the American Dream during the postwar years”

(56). The surge in the U.S. economy following World War II helped to make this aspiration attainable, including economic incentives such as low mortgage interest rates and the Veterans

Administration home loan program. Family was an important aspect of the Dream during this time, since, as Samuel affirms, “The American dream house was designed around the breadwinner and housewife model of the postwar years” (112). In this paradigm, the husband worked to pay for the house and provide for the family while the wife managed the household and raised the children. This one-income household, along with the house and car in the suburbs, linked the lifestyle of the Dream firmly to social class.

Social class constitutes a multifaceted identity, subject to the dynamics of ever-changing economies and cultures. Although certainly related to capital, class status does not necessarily equal an individual’s annual income or net worth at a given time; class also encompasses the lifestyle one is able to take on as well as the members of one’s social circle. Social class refers to the three-tiered model of, broadly defined, the upper class, which pertains to living in luxury, the middle class, which pertains to living comfortably, and the lower or working class, which

pertains to living in poverty. This study does not seek to define the class status of each

Confessional poet, but to examine social class as represented by the Confessional poets in their works. Although social class is subject to nuance, tangible markers appear in their poetry that signify class status to readers. For example, in the twentieth-century United States, allusions to wearing fur coats and drinking martinis indicate association with the upper class, while allusions to going to sleep hungry or having no shoes indicate association with the lower class. An individual’s social circle, marked, for instance, by references to living in a poor neighborhood or inheriting an illustrious family heritage, also prove telling because social class is also related to one’s social network.

Despite the relationship between Confessional poetry and social class, the Confessional poets do not speak about social class directly or frequently in their poetry. Representations of class do not appear as commonly on the Confessional body as representations regarding gender or sexuality. For canonized Confessionals, class status often acts as an invisible aspect of identity.6 The Confessional Poetry Movement, which arose in 1950s and 1960s Boston society, largely represents the domestic life of middle and upper class individuals whose class identity seems comfortable to them rather than confessional. Nonetheless, class relates to many

Confessional themes and emerges in Confessional topics such as family, death, mental illness,

6 None of the poems in Lowell’s Life Studies focus on social class directly, yet many fail to mention to it at all, including “Inauguration Day: January 1953,” “For George Santayana,” “To Delmore Schwartz,” “Father’s Bedroom,” and “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage.” Sexton does not represent social class in the majority of her poems from To Bedlam and Part Way Back: “You, Doctor Martin,” “Kind Sir: These Woods,” “Torn Down from Glory Daily,” “The Bells,” “Elizabeth Gone,” “Venus and the Ark,” “Her Kind,” “Where I Live in This Honorable House of the Laurel Tree,” “For Johnny Pole on the Forgotten Beach,” “Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn,” “Ringing the Bells,” “Elegy in the Classroom,” “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further”; All My Pretty Ones: “The Truth the Dead Know,” “Lament,” “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph,” “The Starry Night,” “Old Dwarf Heart,” “With Mercy for the Greedy,” “The Fortress,” “Woman with Girdle,” “Water,” “The Black Art,” “Letter Written During a January Northeaster”; and Live or Die: “The Sun,” “Three Green Windows,” “Consorting with Angels,” “Protestant Easter,” “For the Year of the Insane,” “KE 6-8018,” “Wanting to Die,” “Your Face on the Dog’s Neck,” “Self in 1958,” “Suicide Note,” “The Addict,” and “Live.”

pain, and/or the body. Furthermore, Confessional poetry engages the politics of social class by reflecting and critiquing the American Dream, as demonstrated in the works of Lowell and

Sexton.

Robert Lowell

Widely considered the father of Confessional poetry, Robert Lowell’s upper class status as a Lowell and his seemingly autobiographical representations of the Lowell family in Life

Studies (1959) demonstrate how social class relates to the rise of the Confessional Poetry

Movement. Lowell’s prior success from his collections Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and The

Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951), combined with his bold departure from the Modernist aesthetic in those works, helped secure the positive critical reception of the new style exhibited in Life

Studies. The book’s representation of Lowell’s upper class lifestyle also played a crucial role.

Published in 1959, the domestic scenes in Life Studies take place within the lifestyle that defines much of the decade’s Dream. Established in Boston, the primary residence of the Lowell family,

Life Studies often differs from the suburban setting of the 1950s Dream. Nonetheless, its depiction of Lowell’s family, whose heritage can be traced back to the Mayflower, presents readers an image of those who have attained the American Dream of rising to success. Lowell’s

Confessionalism often seems to intimate family wealth, such as in “My Last Afternoon with

Uncle Devereux Winslow,” when he tells readers “Family gossip says Aunt Sarah / tilted her archaic Athenian nose / and jilted an Astor” (Life Studies 67). Lowell’s alliteration of the capital letter A in “Aunt,” “Athenian,” and “Astor” in this line imbue the first term with the power and prominence associated with the second and third. His description of Aunt Sarah’s nose as

Athenian likens her profile to a bust (usually modeled after citizens of importance and influence), and invests it with the prosperity of Greek society during its Golden Age. Despite the

family’s wealth, Lowell’s poems do not represent life as idyllic; rather, Life Studies confesses to many of the causes for unhappiness among those living the American Dream by juxtaposing the family’s eminent social stature with a frank discussion of their problems, failures, and shortcomings. One of the book’s major motifs concerns how the men in the upper echelon of

Boston society do not live up to their role in the Dream: the patriarch as the pillar of stability and source of income for his family. As seen in “Commander Lowell,” “Terminal Days at Beverly

Farms,” “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” and “Waking in the Blue,” Lowell instead represents these men as disempowered by career failure, early death, or mental illness.

In “Commander Lowell” (1959), Lowell’s poetic persona describes his father to reveal that despite his upper class status, he fails to live up to the role of breadwinner. The poem resonates with a similar confession made to readers in “91 Revere Street,” relating the mother’s dominance over the father and the father’s inability to prosper in a career. “Commander Lowell” remembers that “Father was once successful enough to be lost / in the mob of ruling-class

Bostonians. As early as 1928, / he owned a house converted to oil” (Life Studies 77). However, the poem does not focus on this early success, discuss his modern house, or share happy memories with his wife and son. Instead, it shows readers how the speaker’s father does not conform to the upper class masculinity expected of his social circle. In stanza two, Lowell writes:

Having a naval officer for my Father was nothing to shout about to the summer colony at ‘Matt.’ He wasn’t at all ‘serious,’ when he showed up on the golf course, wearing a blue serge jacket and numbly cut white ducks he’d bought at a Pearl Harbor commissariat . . . and took four shots with his putter to sink his putt. ‘Bob,’ they said, ‘golf’s a game you really ought to know how to play,

if you play at all.’ […] Cheerful and cowed among the seadogs at the Sunday yacht club, he was never one of the crowd. (Life Studies 75)

Many of the lines in “Commander Lowell” end in slant rhymes, such as “bought” and

“commissariat,” which echo Lowell’s characterization of the father, since they do not quite fit.

Indeed, the father appears distinguished in his blue serge jacket, yet does not seem to belong with the other gentlemen on the golf course who all know how to play golf. These lines refer to him as

“Bob” rather than “Father,” signifying the loss of his status as patriarch and his expected role within the Dream.

The poem continues: “He was soon fired. Year after year, / he still hummed ‘Anchors aweigh’ in the tub— / whenever he left a job, / he bought a smarter car” (Life Studies 76). Lowell characterizes the father with the whimsy of a child singing in the bath tub rather than the stability of the patriarch supporting the household. The speaker’s father attempts to compensate for one aspect of the Dream (a job as breadwinner) with another (a shiny car), yet continues to fail.

Lowell confesses: “In three years / he squandered sixty thousand dollars” (Life Studies 76). As such, the title of the poem “Commander Lowell” reads ironically because of his inability to command, or succeed. The poem chronicles his failure as breadwinner and head of his household.

Lowell returns to the theme of the father’s career failure in his poem “Terminal Days at

Beverly Farms” (1959). The poem takes place in the suburbs of Boston, where the speaker’s father lives with his wife in a house complete with a garden and shiny car. Lowell tells readers,

“his best friend was his little black Chevie, / garaged like a sacrificial steer / with gilded hooves, /

… / The local dealer, a ‘buccaneer,’ / had been bribed a ‘king’s ransom’ / to quickly deliver a car without chrome” (Life Studies 78-79). The father’s lifestyle includes many of the material

possessions associated with the Dream, yet, despite his wealth, he fails to be the breadwinner.

Lowell writes that “Each morning at eight-thirty, / inattentive and beaming, / loaded with his

‘calc’ and ‘trig’ books, / his clipper ship statistics, / and his ivory slide rule, / father stole off with the Chevie / to loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem. / He called the curator / ‘the commander of the Swiss Navy’” (Life Studies 79). The first several lines of the stanza, which point out that the father leaves at 8:30 each morning laden with various tools and supplies, imply his departure for work. However, line seven reveals that he leaves “to loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem,” a misdirection that serves to highlight the father’s unemployment. His reference to the museum curator as “the commander” indicates his nostalgia for his previous career in the Navy.

Describing that he “stole off” to loaf each morning, the stanza additionally implies his shame at his employment status.

In “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” Lowell also depicts the father as disempowered by death. The poem focuses on the death of the speaker’s father, but specifically on how he suffers while appearing to live a perfect life. His body reflects the luxury of having attained the Dream:

After his Bourbon ‘old fashioned,’ Father, bronzed, breezy, a shade too ruddy, swayed as if on deck-duty under his six pointed star-lantern— last July’s birthday present. He smiled his oval Lowell smile, he wore his cream garbardine dinner-jacket, and indigo cummerbund. His head was efficient and hairless, his newly dieted figure was vitally trim. (Life Studies 78)

Lowell’s description associates the father’s appearance with the power and wealth of the patriarch. The stanza not only connects his smile with the Lowell last name, identified with one of the wealthiest historical families in Boston, but links his form and complexion with an expensive wardrobe and cocktail. The father’s body appears healthy given his tanned skin, fit

figure, and smiling face. Lowell even uses the adverb “vitally” to illustrate his good health.

However, as the last stanza explains: “Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting. / His vision was still twenty-twenty. / After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling, / his last words to

Mother were: / ‘I feel awful” (Life Studies 79). Readers learn that his smile, a motif in

“Commander Lowell” as well, masks his pain. The father struggles to maintain the strength of the patriarch even while dying.

Life Studies represents the early death of the patriarch again in Lowell’s poem “My Last

Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” (1959). The poem’s setting hearkens to the ideal of home and family, underwritten by financial stability, that composes the American Dream.

Lowell notes that “The farm, entitled Char-de-sa in the Social Register, / was named for my

Grandfather’s children: / Charlotte, Devereux, and Sarah. / No one had died there in my lifetime…” (Life Studies 66). He portrays the farm as idyllic, telling readers “Fontainebleau,

Mattapoisett, Puget Sound… / Nowhere was anywhere after a summer / at my Grandfather’s farm” (Life Studies 65). Lowell reinforces the image of the Dream with descriptions of sunflowers, rows of poplars, and pitchers of iced tea, as well as the wealth underlying it with references to martinis, billiards, and even an Edwardian cuckoo clock, before introducing Uncle

Devereux.

In the poem’s last stanza, Lowell represents Uncle Devereux: surrounded by perfection and affluence, yet “dying at twenty-nine” (Life Studies 69). His body is a contrast between perfection and powerlessness, similar to the body of the speaker’s father. Lowell writes:

He was as brushed as Bayard, our riding horse. His face was putty. His blue coat and white trousers grew sharper and straighter. His coat was a blue jay’s tail, his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle.

He was animated, hierarchical, like a gingersnap man in a clothes-press. He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin’s disease…. My hands were warm, then cool, on the piles of earth and lime, a black pile and a white pile…. Come winter, Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color. (Life Studies 69)

While Uncle Devereux’s clothes reflect his upper class status, his body reveals his weakness.

Lowell’s characterization of the Uncle’s coat and trousers as sharp and straight imbues them with the strength and wealth associated with the patriarch. His white pants also indicate his elitism;

Lowell identifies white as the color of cream “from the top of the bottle,” portraying Uncle

Devereux as the figurative “cream of the crop.” However, the description of his face as putty implies the weakness in his constitution. In contrast to the crisp colors of his clothes, Uncle

Devereux’s body appears a deathly gray. His suffering seems particularly confessional given his access, as an upper class citizen, to the life of happiness and comfort promised by the American

Dream. Despite otherwise living the Dream, he is not living well. Like the figure of the father,

Uncle Devereux appears in Life Studies at a moment of decline.

Lowell’s poem “Waking in the Blue” (1959), set at the upscale McLean Hospital where many of Boston’s wealthy (Lowell included) were committed for mental illness, also features upper class men in positions of diminished power. The figure of authority in the setting, “The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore” (Life Studies 86), is notably younger than the gentlemen in his charge. The poem, which describes a morning at McLean’s, reveals many of its patients as infantilized. Stanza three introduces readers to one such patient: “the hooded night lights bring out ‘Bobbie,’ / Porcellian ’29, / a replica of Louis XVI / without the wig— / redolent and roly- poly as a sperm whale, / as he swashbuckles around in his birthday suit / and horses at chairs”

(Life Studies 86-87). In “Commander Lowell,” the shift from “Father” to “Bob” indicates the

descent of the speaker’s father from power; the colloquial “Bobbie” in this poem sounds even younger. Lowell’s portrayal of Bobbie combines regal with silly. The first lines of the stanza introduce him as a member of the Porcellian, one of Harvard’s distinguished final clubs, and compare his likeness to a bust of King Louis XVI. However, shortly after he takes on the figure of the fool by “swashbuckl[ing] in his birthday suit” and “hors[ing] at chairs.” These lines also refer to Bobbie as “roly-poly,” an adjective suggestive of baby fat. After surveying some of the patients at McLean’s, Lowell declares: “These victorious figures of bravado ossified young”

(Life Studies 87). The oxymoron of “ossified young” implies that while the patients have aged, they have been shaped into men who are vulnerable and powerless. The primary confession of

“Waking in the Blue” does not concern mental illness itself, but how mental illness affects those who appear to live in the luxury of the American Dream.

In contrast to their role as head of the household, the men institutionalized at McLean’s can no longer even live in their own households. “Waking in the Blue” exhibits their isolation. In the poem’s first stanza, the speaker confides: “Azure day / makes my agonized blue window bleaker. / Crows maunder on the petrified fairway. / Absence! My heart grows tense / as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill. / (This is the house for the ‘mentally ill.’)” (Life Studies 86).

The blue skies he wakes to, ordinarily a symbol for happiness and serenity, intensify his unhappiness by emphasizing how he does not fit in with the beautiful morning. He wakes to

“Absence!” and laments his loneliness in a house not his own. The speaker further emphasizes this loneliness by illustrating his isolation from the other patients. He grins at fellow patient

Stanley who does not respond—“more cut off from words than a seal” (Life Studies 86)—and asks himself “What use is my sense of humor?” (Life Studies 86). Some of the other poems in

Life Studies touch on the same theme, such as “Home After Three Months Away,” which

explores the guilt of being gone while hospitalized, or “Skunk Hour,” which explores the solitude of being mentally ill. The discussion of mental illness in “Waking in the Blue” shows not only the speaker’s unhappiness at being apart from his family, but his failure to function as the head of his household. According to Deborah Nelson, “In some sense, representing the demise of patriarchal authority constitutes one of Life Studies’s more important confessions....

Left without a patriarchal model, Lowell spends much of Life Studies searching for an inhabitable masculinity” (62). The shortcomings revealed in Life Studies illustrate the link between Confessional poetry and social class during its emergence in the late 1950s.

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton’s poetry first appeared shortly after Lowell’s publication of Life Studies, and quickly became one of the central voices of the Confessional Poetry Movement during the

1960s. The suburban lifestyle at the heart of the American Dream informs the backdrop of

Sexton’s Confessionalism, and her early poetry often centers on the nuclear, upper middle class family, as exemplified in poems from To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones

(1962), and Live or Die (1966). As Ken Fuchsman observes, “With the rise of the consumer culture in the twentieth century, affluence spread into the home in new ways, and the scope of the American dream was expanding. An ideal of companionate marriage appeared. Husbands and wives were supposed to find fulfillment—material, spiritual, and sexual with their spouses”

(289). He emphasizes that “The American dream now consisted of career success, family happiness, and romantic union” (289). According to Edward Brunner, poets wrote domestic verse in the early 1950s, although these kinds of poems did not become visible or celebrated until the Confessional Poetry Movement began. The Confessional poems celebrated for their domestic themes do not themselves celebrate the domestic; instead, themes of the broken nuclear

family, with alcoholic husbands, suicidal mothers, and estranged children, dominate

Confessional domestic verse. Sexton’s early poetry also features the broken nuclear family, frequently critiquing the decade’s vision of the ideal wife, mother, and homemaker. Indeed,

Clare Pollard, who studies Sexton’s work in context with the housewife ideal, contends that

“Sexton turns the carefully constructed propaganda of the American Housewife against itself”

(1-2). In such poems as “For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God,” “The Double Image,” “The

House,” and “Cripples and Other Stories,” Sexton presents women living unhappily within the

American Dream. In spite of their middle or upper class comfort, they struggle as homemakers, experience ennui, and suffer from mental illness.

Sexton’s poem “For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God” (1962) questions both the image of God and the image of the 1950s homemaker. The first stanza introduces readers to Eleanor

Boylan as an embodiment of the perfect suburban housewife, and a foil to the speaker who does not fit into this role:

God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer. Eleanor, who is more beautiful than my mother, is standing in her kitchen talking and I am breathing in my cigarettes like poison. She stands in her lemon-colored sun dress motioning to God with her wet hands glossy from the washing of egg plates…. It’s casual but friendly, God is as close as the ceiling. (87-88)

The stanza shows Eleanor engaged in homemaking, as she washes dishes and brings religion into her kitchen through her conversation with God. Both the egg plates she washes and the sun dress she wears, items associated with entertaining, indicate her comfortable middle class status.

Eleanor additionally fits the picturesque vision of the 1950s American Dream with her beautiful appearance. Her character serves as a foil to the speaker, engaged in the unwholesome and

unhealthy act of smoking. In contrast to Eleanor, the speaker does not consider God a figure who can be addressed and is “as close as the ceiling.” She goes on to confess: “Though no one can ever know, / I don’t think he has a face” (88). Her admission that “no one can ever know” implies that her doubt about God might be socially unacceptable. Nonetheless, this tone of doubt pervades the poem, undermining the notion of the perfect housewife as well. The speaker characterizes Eleanor as naïve rather than happy, relating that, as Eleanor speaks to God, “She tells him like a drunk / who doesn’t need to see to talk” (87). Entreating “Oh Eleanor, Eleanor, / tell him before death uses you up” (88), the speaker expresses her doubt about Eleanor’s ability to remain content. The lines imply her own lack of fulfillment with the role of the homemaker, which seems to leave her restless. As Eleanor talks to God, the speaker doubts the given realities of each.

“The Double Image” (1960) also debunks the image of the ideal housewife. Featuring the motif of mother and daughter portraits with matching false smiles, the poem examines how the speaker’s mental illness affects her relationship with her mother, as well as her own identity as a mother in her relationship with her daughter Joyce. The poem functions as an expression of pain within the idyllic lifestyle of the American Dream. When writing about readjusting to her life after her institutionalization, Sexton’s speaker recalls: “All that summer I learned life / back into my own / seven rooms, visited the swan boats, / the market, answered the phone, / served cocktails as a wife / should, made love among my petticoats / and August tan” (39). The scenes

Sexton presents echo the picturesque imagery used to describe Eleanor Boylan in “For Eleanor

Boylan Talking with God,” and include the same wifely duties of caring for the home and entertaining guests while being hospitable and well-dressed. The poem suggests a similar socioeconomic status as well, indicated by the house’s seven rooms and the leisure time

associated with the August tan of the speaker’s body. Even while she carries out the motions of living the American Dream and doing “as a wife should,” she remains unsuccessful. The speaker confides to her daughter that “All the superlatives / of tomorrow’s white tree and mistletoe / will not help you know the holidays you had to miss” (36). The poem gestures again toward perfection, signified by the noun “superlatives” and the symbolic purity of the white Christmas tree. However, like with the failure of the father in Lowell’s poems, the materialism of the

American Dream in Sexton’s work does not produce its happy nuclear family, or assuage the speaker’s sense of her failure as a mother.

In “The Double Image,” Sexton further disrupts the fantasy of the 1950s American

Dream by exhibiting the ennui of the women in this social class. The poem confesses to not only the speaker’s failure as a homemaker, but her disillusionment with this lifestyle. Over the course of the poem, she struggles to find happiness as a mother. In part 1, Sexton’s speaker reveals that shortly after the birth of her first daughter, she experiences a mental breakdown and attempts to commit suicide. In part 2, she struggles to fit in as a mother after her institutionalization, telling readers:

I lived like an angry guest like a partly mended thing, an outgrown child. I remember my mother did her best. She took me to Boston and had my hair restyled. Your smile is like your mother’s, the artist said. I didn’t seem to care. I had my portrait done instead. (37)

The act of having her portrait painted, repeated in several stanzas of the poem, speaks to the upper class status of the speaker’s family. Her wealth appears to allow her economic stability during her institutionalization and her recovery at her mother’s house. The portrait indicates her social class, yet also highlights her ennui. It shows her the idealized version of herself, with

styled hair and smiling face, she feels she should attain. However, this version is not real, and, in part 3, the speaker acknowledges the inauthenticity of her posed body, stating that “I had my portrait done, holding my smile in place, till it grew formal” (37). Instead of inhabiting her expected role as a mother and hostess, she lives as a child and guest. Her mother attempts to engage her, encouraging her to present a ladylike appearance, yet the speaker remains apathetic.

Sexton alternates between expressing her apathy and her guilt at her apathy.

After a second suicide and second hospitalization, the speaker explores the heart of her ennui, confessing in part 5: “And I had to learn / why I would rather / die than love” (40). These lines grapple with her mental illness, but also with her love—and identity—as a mother. In the homemaker paradigm of the 1950s American Dream, a mother’s love entails not only caring for her children, but maintaining her appearance, the household, social engagements, etc., whereas death offers freedom from all expectations and responsibilities. Indeed, the mother informs her daughter that “Death was simpler than I’d thought” (36). Beneath smiling portraits of mother and daughter, Sexton’s speaker explores the unhappy underbelly of upper middle class motherhood in “The Double Image.”

“The House” (1962) similarly reflects a tone of ennui as it parodies the 1950s American

Dream. In “The House,” Sexton takes readers on a tour of a seemingly picturesque suburban home, complete with “kelly-green lawn” (71) and “All that money!” (72). However, the poem’s narrator critiques the monotony of the Dream by referring to the scene as “the same bad dream,” and the family as “the same dreadful set,” representing their prosperity in tandem with their unhappiness. Stanza three casts the figure of the father/breadwinner in a negative light; Sexton writes: “Father, / an exact likeness, / his face bloated and pink / with black market scotch, / sits out his month bender / in his custom-made pajamas / and shouts, his tongue as quick as galloping

horses, / shouts into the long distance telephone call. / His mouth is as wide as his kiss” (72). The father’s custom-made pajamas and long-distance telephone call emphasize his wealth, in addition to the shape and bearing of his body. His shouting implies a role in command, while his wide mouth and bloated face suggest a life of comfort. This same imagery also emphasizes his anger and indicates his status as an alcoholic. While the father appears angry, the mother appears miserly. Stanza four informs readers: “Mother, / with just the right gesture, / kicks her shoes off,

/ but is made all wrong, / impossibly frumpy as she sits there / in her alabaster dressing room / sorting her diamonds like a bank teller / to see if they add up” (72-73). The mother, alone with her wealth, is depicted as selfish and materialistic. In fact, every member of the household is isolated, as indicated by the separate stanzas for each character.

The daughter, shown walking through the house and past each family member, exhibits the most ennui. She walks upstairs “to slam the door on all the years / she’ll have to live through…” (74) as she imagines the future in store for her:

At thirty-five she’ll dream she’s dead or else she’ll dream she’s back. All day long the house sits larger than Russia gleaming like a cured hide in the sun. All day long the machine waits: rooms, stairs, carpets, furniture, people — those people who stand at the open windows like objects waiting to topple. (74-75)

The repetition of the word “dream” in these lines emphasizes how this figure seeming to live the idyllic lifestyle of the American Dream instead dreams for something else. Indeed, the daughter of “The House” is disillusioned with this lifestyle; like the speaker in “The Double Image,” she struggles to find fulfillment and wishes for death. Perhaps the most pointed parody of the Dream in this poem lies in its transformation of the house into an object of horror. The simile likening it

to a cured hide associates it with a corpse, an association with death reinforced by the speaker’s assertion that the daughter will “dream she’s dead / or else she’ll dream she’s back.” The speaker’s hyperbole regarding the size of the house, a mark of the family’s upper class status, presents the lifestyle it symbolizes as inescapable for the daughter. To her, the house operates as part of a machine that dehumanizes individuals by confining them to specific social roles. “The

House” poem caricaturizes the generic nuclear family— “the same dreadful set”—at the heart of the American Dream, and critiques the monotony and materialism of its lifestyle.

In the suburban world of Sexton’s early poetry, mental illness is a common theme, as seen in such poems as “The Double Image” and “The House.” In “Cripples and Other Stories”

(1966), Sexton treats mental illness as an injury that cripples the speaker’s body and capacity to love during her upper middle class upbringing. The speaker addresses the poem to her therapist:

“God damn it, father-doctor. / I’m really thirty-six. / I see dead rats in the toilet. / I’m one of the lunatics” (160). Sexton writes in a strict abcb rhyme scheme and a sing-song rhythm reminiscent of a nursery rhyme, reflecting the speaker’s attempt to control her illness and how she feels nonetheless disempowered by the disorder. In the sixth quatrain, she tells her doctor: “you hold my hand / and teach me love too late. / And that’s the hand of the arm / they tried to amputate”

(161). The injured arm symbolizes her unhappiness, and shows how her mental illness isolates her from loving others. Indeed, she expresses a distant relationship with her parents, characterizing her mother as a critic (“Disgusted, mother put me / on the potty. She was good at this”) and her father as an alcoholic (“My father was fat on scotch. / It leaked from every orifice”

(161)). She traces her injury to her childhood, explaining: “Though I was almost seven / I was an awful brat. / I put it in the Easy Wringer. / It came out nice and flat. / I was an instant cripple / from my finger to my shoulder. / The laundress wept and swooned. / My mother had to hold her”

(161). The speaker’s misfortune illustrates her class privilege. Indeed, the cause of her injury, the

“Easy Wringer,” an appliance that popularly appeared in homes with money during this time, refers back to the comfortable lifestyle of the 1950s American Dream. The family’s laundress also establishes their upper middle class status. The poem reads confessionally, not only since it confesses to mental illness, but mental illness in middle class America. Sexton demonstrates how class privilege, although never the subject of her confessions, nonetheless structures the

Confessional poetry of the late 1950s to mid-1960s, underscoring its foundation in the economics of the American Dream. To the daughters, wives, and mothers in her poems, who seem to lead lives of luxury and comfort, the American Dream means a lifestyle that is materialistic, monotonous, confining, and ultimately unfulfilling.

The works of Lowell and Sexton illustrate how the politics of social class shape the genre of Confessional poetry. Indeed, the poems that established the Confessional Poetry Movement register as confessional in large part due to their disclosures of unhappiness within the picturesque life of the 1950s American Dream. Lowell’s upper class status underwrites the poems in his 1959 collection Life Studies as well as the confessional theme of the book. In her research on Confessional poetry and privacy in U.S. culture during the Cold War, Deborah

Nelson illustrates privacy as a hierarchical construct that applies predominantly to the upper class. She also notes that “Gentlemen, it would seem, observe the privacy of other gentlemen— not necessarily anyone else’s” (51). Her analysis refers to a specifically upper class masculinity, indicating that Lowell’s Confessionalism in Life Studies registers as particularly scandalous because it seems to violate the gentleman’s privacy accorded to him as a Lowell. Sexton’s poetry also unsettles the fantasy of the 1950s American Dream. Clare Pollard reads Sexton’s early works as “engaged in parodying and subverting the cultural expectations of her time, and

particularly those of advertising” (3). In To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty

Ones (1962), and Live or Die (1966), Sexton exhibits alcoholism, mental illness, and more from within the iconic home and nuclear family of upper middle class suburbia. The truth of the upper middle and upper class bodies portrayed in Lowell’s and Sexton’s Confessionalism during the

1950s and 1960s is that they do not fit into the image of contentment projected by the Dream, demonstrating how the politics of social class work to shape the Confessional body and reveal the truths of the body for a generation.

CHAPTER 2

INVISIBILITY AND MASCULINITY: TRUTH AND THE MALE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN SNODGRASS AND LOWELL

Confessional poetry is frequently subject to feminist analyses. Shortly after the death of

Anne Sexton, feminist poet Adrienne Rich wrote that “Her poetry is a guide to the ruins, from which we learn what women have lived and what we must refuse to live any longer” (On Lies,

Secrets, and Silence 123). Many scholars have followed Rich’s example by focusing on the representations of mothers, daughters, lovers, wives, and other women in the works of Sexton and other Confessionals. Brian Brodhead Glaser calls attention to this tendency, noting that “a number of critics have approached the genre of confessional writing more broadly as women’s writing, exploring how writing works with and works out issues of women’s experience and gender identity” (26). He also observes that men and masculinity have historically been left out of scholarly conversations about gender in Confessional poetry. Seeking to fill this gap, Glaser, as well as Christopher Pugh, approach masculinity through the trope of fatherhood in the works of Robert Lowell and/or W.D. Snodgrass. Ian Gregson’s The Male Image also performs a gendered analysis of Lowell’s writing, exploring how the trope of the mermaid in Lowell’s depictions of his ancestors, his parents, and himself expresses his “ambivalent attitude to male potency” (17) and ambiguous desire for “autonomous masculinity” (27). These few studies do not address masculinity as represented by the male Confessional body, however—a notable absence considering the wealth of research published on the female Confessional body, as well as the intimate relationship between masculinity and the male body.

Feminists have theorized the principle that the personal is political thoroughly with regard to women’s bodies, yet the personal is political in men’s bodies too. Erving Goffman’s renowned description of normative American masculinity illustrates the link between the cultural

construction of gender and the individual body. Goffman writes that “in an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports” (128). Each of the characteristics Goffman lists exhibits itself in one or more ways through either the appearance or behavior of the body. Even when a man wears a wedding ring on his finger, indicating his status as married, or avoids touching other men except in approved ways (handshake, clap on the back, etc.), indicating his status as heterosexual, his masculinity manifests through his body. When an individual’s body engages with cultural constructions of gender, it embodies the personal that feminism highlights as political. Therefore, feminist analyses of Confessional poetry should include representations of men in their scope, so as to apply feminist theory to the politics of mainstream masculinity.

Confessional poetry reveals the knowledge that is, and is not, considered a truth of the body in U.S. culture as well as how each generation considers the personal to be political. The works of the Confessional poets exhibit that a man’s body does not constitute the truth of his identity as much as a woman’s constitutes the truth of hers. The poetry of W.D. Snodgrass and

Robert Lowell during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s testifies to this phenomenon, since, in even their most forthcoming confessions, the imagery of men’s bodies is frequently either absent or deferred, such as through animal or nature symbolism. When men’s bodies do appear in their work, the truth of them is often that they are disempowered. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959) and Lowell’s collections Life Studies (1959), Notebook (1969), The Dolphin (1973), and Day by

Day (1977) reveal the invisibility and disempowerment of the hegemonic male body as embodied in Confessional poetry and U.S. culture during this time.

Scholars frequently study masculinity as either invisible or in crisis. Indeed, Glaser underscores fatherhood for Snodgrass and Lowell in terms of loneliness, and Gregson reveals

Lowell’s depictions of manhood (his father’s and his own) with regard to weakness and guilt.

Sally Robinson’s Marked Men sheds light on this trend regarding masculinity in Confessional poetry (and scholarship on masculinity in Confessional poetry) by noting how normative

American masculinity benefits from both invisibility and visibility. She points out that

“Invisibility is a privilege enjoyed by social groups who do not, thus, attract modes of surveillance and discipline; but it can also be felt as a burden in a culture that appears to organize itself around the visibility of differences and the symbolic currency of identity politics” (3).

Robinson goes on to note that “white men can most persuasively claim victimization by appealing to representations of bodily trauma” (6). She makes an astute point about how men’s visibility as men works for them when vulnerable. Her idea applies well to Confessional poetry in particular, since its poems famously expose the speaker as flawed and/or vulnerable.

The phenomenon of the disempowered male body in the imagery of Confessional poets relates to the understanding of truth at the heart of Confessional poetry, since Confessional truths tend to refer to culturally significant, often sensational, information. Masculinity studies, such as

Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America, have pointed out how over the course of American history, masculinity has largely been invisible as gendered.7 Not only are men frequently invisible as men, but their bodies are frequently invisible when conformed to hegemonic constructions of masculinity. Indeed, masculinity commonly connotes power, so when men are

7 Kimmel’s introduction relates his own realization about the invisibility of masculinity. He explains that during a 1970s seminar on feminism in which a white woman and a black woman debated the idea of universal sisterhood, the white student noted that she looks in the mirror and sees a woman, then the black student explained that she sees a black woman. Kimmel then recognized: “when I look in the mirror, I see a human being...As a middle-class white man, I have no class, no race, no gender” (4). He does not mention, although his statement implies, that he also has no body. Indeed, Kimmel’s body is not conventionally visible because it is not marked by any of the differences, such as those of gender, class, and race, that constitute the body in mainstream U.S. culture.

in power, specifically when men’s bodies are empowered, they are often invisible to themselves and others as bodies. Therefore, men’s masculinity largely functions as invisible when normative, and only becomes a confessional truth for them and others when it departs from cultural norms. The aspects of hegemonic American masculinity described by Goffman inform this standard, so for a man’s body to be, for example, young, strong, or healthy would not commonly comprise a truth of him, or function as a source of confession. Conversely, for a man’s body to be old, weak, or dying would very likely constitute a truth of him, as evidenced by these motifs in U.S. culture and Confessional poetry during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

W.D. Snodgrass

In 1959, W.D. Snodgrass published Heart’s Needle. The work, which begins with a collection of short poems and ends with an eponymous long poem, features formal verse such as

“Orpheus,” yet also includes personal references such as in “These Trees Stand…” where

“Snodgrass is walking through the universe” (36). Like Lowell’s Life Studies, which it narrowly beat out for the Pulitzer Prize, Heart’s Needle caused a sensation among readers because it challenged Modernism’s call for the impersonality of the poet with regard to topics, such as divorce, considered unspeakable during this time period. The title poem “Heart’s Needle” relates the reflections of a father who, like Snodgrass, divorced the mother of his first child and started a family with another woman. Many responses to this work identify the writing as especially authentic or honest. A 1959 review by Judson Jerome, for example, characterizes the poem as

“the sudden breaking of all posture into a heart-rending plaint for honesty” (430). He writes: “It is the only book I have read this year in which the hard ribs of sincerity show through. Snodgrass wants us to know what he has learned—with terrible earnestness—and he shapes his poems, almost confessions, with painful beauty” (429). Jerome’s review, describing Heart’s Needle in

terms like “sincere,” “earnest,” and “honest,” exemplifies the popular perspective among critics during this time that Confessional poems are autobiographically truthful. Heart’s Needle does not necessarily relate the autobiographical truth of Snodgrass’s personal life, but it does speak to the Confessional truths of 1950s U.S. culture.

Snodgrass does not include the male body among the confessions in Heart’s Needle, so his long poem “Heart’s Needle” does not present the father’s body as a truth of his identity. The poem reflects on a father-daughter relationship, and focuses on the daughter’s body much more frequently than her father’s. The daughter’s body appears first in poem “3” of the sequence, when the speaker discloses: “I tugged your hand, once, when I hated / Things less: a mere game dislocated / The radius of your wrist” (45). Snodgrass does not describe the daughter’s body here with much imagery; nonetheless it fulfills an important function for the emotional context of the poem. The girl’s dislocated wrist makes material her status as a victim and her father as the agent of her pain. Her injury serves as an outlet for the father’s guilt at leaving his daughter for his new family. The association of emotional with physical pain can be seen in the passage’s rhyme scheme, which pairs “hated” with “dislocated.” The injury further serves as an allegory for the speaker’s fear that he is forever estranged from his daughter, since his attempt to reach out to her, both literally and figuratively, is unsuccessful. The daughter’s character manifests in terms of her body, i.e. her hand and her wrist, while Snodgrass represents the father through an amorphous and immaterial “I,” demonstrating the invisibility of the male body in “Heart’s

Needle.”

The next body written into the narrative of “Heart’s Needle” is also the daughter’s and not the father’s. Two stanzas in poem “6” offer readers contrasting representations of her body in order to reflect her relationship with her father. The first of these stanzas reads:

While nine months filled your term, we knew how your lungs, immersed in the womb, miraculously grew their useless folds till the fierce, cold air rushed in to fill them out like bushes thick with leaves. You took your hour, caught breath, and cried with your full lung power. (49)

The passage highlights the daughter’s physical well-being, and tinges the speaker’s tone with nostalgia, reflecting his perception of his daughter in the time before she learned that he must leave her. This stanza depicts the daughter’s lungs, although initially frail with “useless folds,” as powerful, since they conquer the “fierce, cold air” and claim the hour with “full lung power.”

Snodgrass represents the power of her breath even in the extended line length of the last couplet.

The daughter’s body is powerful in the presence of her father before he tells her that he must leave, and she becomes estranged from him.

Later in poem “6” of “Heart’s Needle,” the motif of the daughter’s breath reappears in one of the section’s final stanzas. The passage reappropriates this motif to represent how the father’s guilt at leaving his daughter shapes his reflections about her body. The speaker confesses:

You raise into my head a Fall night that I came once more to sit on your bed; sweat beads stood out on your arms and forehead and you wheezed for breath, for help, like some child caught beneath its comfortable wooly blankets, drowning there. Your lungs caught and would not take the air. (51)

The daughter’s body here contrasts with its previous description: instead of lungs with full power, hers “caught and would not take the air.” The relatively constant line length of this stanza, particularly compared to poem “3,” embodies this stagnation. Furthermore, body imagery such as the sweat beads on her skin, the wheeze in her breath, and her frail form drowning

amongst the wooly blankets represent the girl as helpless. The vulnerability of her body underscores her father’s guilt: his helplessness at not being able to alleviate her pain, despite her need “for breath, / for help.” It also underscores his helplessness at not being able to function as a good father, since, as he admits to her in the section’s final stanza, “Child, I have another wife, / another child” (51). The stanza once again characterizes the daughter in terms of her body—i.e. her arms, forehead, lungs—and the father as an immaterial presence. The passage mentions the speaker’s head, but really refers to his mind (in a way that fits the forthcoming rhyme with

“bed”) rather than his body. Although the daughter’s body, represented in terms of her wrist, her lungs, etc., does not take shape as specifically feminine, her female body is visible throughout her father’s confessions, while his male body remains obscured.

Apart from the immateriality of the “I,” the male body is also invisible in “Heart’s

Needle” as deferred through animal symbolism. Snodgrass often uses symbolism in this sequence, through the people, places, and objects that form the backdrop of its narrative, to establish tone and theme. This symbolism also functions to invoke the male body while at the same time keeping it out of the text. In poem “9,” the speaker recalls an argument with his daughter, relating that “Here, last year, / you pulled my hands / and had your first, worst quarrel,

/ so toys were put up on your shelves” (57). Instead of describing the father’s and daughter’s bodies during this fight, Snodgrass turns to describing the different figurines perched on the child’s shelves. He reflects the tension of their quarrel by mentioning snarling bobcats and elks with locked horns, but also details the bodies of parent-child pairs, such as the lioness standing

“hard and tanned and envious” (57) over her cub, or the bison standing eye-to-eye with his calf:

The bison, here, immense, shoves at his calf, brow to brow, and looks it in the eye to see what it is thinking now.

I forced you to obedience; I don’t know why. (57)

This stanza describes not only an emotional, but a physical standoff between father and child.

Snodgrass depicts the bison to be “immense,” evoking the stature of the father’s body compared to his young daughter’s as a means of establishing his authority. The stanza suggests this symbolism by rhyming “immense” with “obedience,” referencing the common cultural association of size with power. Instead of representing him standing rigidly, crossing his arms over his chest, or gesturing angrily with his hands, Snodgrass only invokes the material presence of the father through the figure of the bison, so the empowered masculinity that informs his stature renders it all but invisible.

The eclipse of the male body through nature symbolism occurs in the shorter pieces of

Heart’s Needle as well, such as in Snodgrass’s poem “Song.” The majority of the poem uses the landscape as a metaphor to characterize the speaker, as in the first stanza when he describes toadstools “Pale and proper and rootless” (21) to tell readers “I have been their sort” (21). The man continues to illustrate himself in the figurative language of the landscape, concluding in the final stanza: “Woman, we are the rich / soil, friable and humble, … / where our old deaths crumble / and fortify my reach / far from you, wide and free, / though I have set my root / in you and am your tree” (21). Although he likens himself and his mistress to the rich soil, he identifies himself alone with the tree, both suggesting and obscuring his own body. Indeed, the root of the tree functions as a double entendre, which signifies his penis while leaving his material body absent from the poem. The tree itself offers meanings on multiple levels too. The man’s identification as his mistress’s tree symbolizes his masculinity, which resonates with Deborah S.

David and Robert Brannon’s definition of manhood according to the four principles of “No Sissy

Stuff,” “The Big Wheel,” “The Sturdy Oak,” and “Give ‘Em Hell” (12). According to David and

Brannon, “The Sturdy Oak” signifies “A manly air of toughness, confidence, and self-reliance”

(12). As such, the figure of the tree, standing for strength, self-assurance, and independence, represents the qualities of hegemonic masculinity. Tall, hard, and stoic, it also reflects the features of the hegemonic male body, so that readers can interpret the metaphor to imagine the speaker as a tall, muscled man with an impassive face. The poem’s figurative language evokes the appearance and actions of the male body only indirectly, so that the form of this man as a man is ultimately absent from Snodgrass’s “Song.”

When the male body does appear directly in the poems of Heart’s Needle, Snodgrass often depicts it as weakened or damaged. In his 1959 poem “Papageno,” for example, Snodgrass takes on the persona of Papageno from The Magic Flute to tell readers: “My mouth was padlocked for a liar. / Losing what old hands never seek / To snare in their most cunning art, / I starved till my rib cage was wire / Under a towel. I could not speak / To hush this chattering, blue heart” (12). The first and last lines of this stanza engage his body only vaguely, but lines five and six offer a striking image of Papageno’s rib cage. The mention of his ribs as visible shows readers the starved and feeble state of his body, and the metaphor of his bones as wire further emphasizes his fragility. Readers see this motif repeated in “Heart’s Needle,” where, in poem “8,” the father confesses “We manage, though for days / I crave sweets when you leave and know / they rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet / foods leave us cavities” (55). This stanza marks one of the few times Snodgrass reflects the father’s relationship with his daughter on his own body, and it exhibits his teeth weakened by cavities. The father’s rotting teeth differ vastly from the starving form of Papageno, but both passages display the male figure as it departs from the strength and vigor that characterizes the hegemonic male body.

Heart’s Needle also features the male body as disempowered by aging, such as the professor’s body in the poem “April Inventory.” Its opening stanza contrasts the professor’s sentimental reflection on the changes wrought by the coming of spring and his sardonic inventory of all that has changed (or not changed) in his life since last April. The professor juxtaposes the youthfulness of spring with the aging state of his body, noting that “The blossoms snow down in my hair; / The trees and I will soon be bare” (37). The phrase “blossoms snow,” establishing a telling clash between spring and winter, offers readers the image of the professor’s hair as either white with flowers or white with old age. The speaker continues this characterization: “The girls have grown so young now / I have to nudge myself to stare. / This year they smile and mind me how / My teeth are falling with my hair” (37). Here, Snodgrass contrasts the aging male body not only with the landscape, but with the blooming young girls at the university. He likens their bodies, “Younger and pinker every year” (37), to flowers in spring, and his own, with falling teeth and hair, to a tree in winter. His self-deprecating tone becomes self-affirming toward the close of the poem, when the professor reflects:

While scholars speak authority And wear their ulcers on their sleeves, My eyes in spectacles shall see These trees procure and spend their leaves. There is a value underneath The gold and silver in my teeth. (39)

The tree motif appears again, although no longer in relation to the speaker’s body; instead, “these trees” refer to the bodies of the students, who begin to age like their professor. In contrast, the professor’s body now materializes in terms of metals, such as the shiny spectacles on his eyes or the gold and silver fillings in his teeth. Although these devices characterize his body as old, they deflect focus from the aging body itself: wrinkled skin, age spots, or, as aforementioned, falling

hair. The body fades from the poem as the professor finds value ultimately within, demonstrating that, as he achieves power in inner peace, his body no longer constitutes a truth to be confessed.

As well as weak, damaged, and aging, the male Confessional body materializes in

Heart’s Needle as naked, young, and feminized. This phenomenon can be seen in Snodgrass’s poem “The Operation” (1959), which contains one of the most direct and descriptive representations of the male body in the collection. The poem’s speaker describes his body during a hospital stay, detailing his experiences before, during, and after a medical procedure: “Gripped in the dead yellow glove, a bright straight razor / Inched on my stomach, down my groin, /

Paring the brown hair off. They left me / White as a child, not frightened. I was not / Ashamed”

(16). Snodgrass characterizes the speaker’s nude body, shaven smooth for the operation, as childlike, indicating the male body as worthy of mention only when it deviates from the expectations of hegemonic masculinity. His body compares to a child’s not only in terms of being hairless, but in terms of being powerless, since the poem positions the body so that it suffers a condition which warrants medical attention. The speaker continues to illustrate his body as it departs from normative masculinity, explaining: “They clothed me, then, / In the thin, loose, light, white garments, / The delicate sandals of poor Pierrot, / A schoolgirl first offering her sacrament” (16). The stanza feminizes his body, so that it not only evokes that of a child, but of a little girl specifically. This description recalls the visibility of the daughter’s and not the father’s body in “Heart’s Needle.” Along with “Heart’s Needle,” “Song,” “April Inventory,” and “The

Operation” establish the erasure of the hegemonic male body as a pattern in Snodgrass’s work.

Robert Lowell

Published the same year as Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle, Lowell’s Life Studies, which experiments with looser form and bolder content, such as the book’s motif of mental illness,

often strikes readers as poetry that challenges taboos to present the unfettered truth. Indeed, according to Miranda Sherwin, “Robert Lowell’s 1959 Life Studies marked the debut of a new and highly influential school of poetry and the emergence of a broader cultural moment, one in which nothing was too personal or too private to represent explicitly or to foreround self- consciously as a potential context of the author’s own life” (1). As with Snodgrass, Lowell’s poems do not reveal personal so much as generational truths. Moreover, many of the patterns found in Heart’s Needle persist in Lowell’s works. Lowell continued his Confessionalism over the course of several books, representing the male Confessional body in Life Studies (1959) as well as in Notebook (1969), The Dolphin (1973), and Day by Day (1977). The male body appears more regularly in Lowell’s poetry than in Snodgrass’s, yet remains largely invisible, deferred, or disempowered. Craig Svonkin, exploring the motif of otherness in the works of postwar U.S. male poets, notes: “Rather than struggle to prove that the artist could be manly and perform ‘the real business of life’ (Bell 35), male domestic poets such as Berryman, Bidart, Jarrell, and

Lowell…celebrated their marginality, hunting for new tropes to explore their feelings of alienation” (96). Many of these representations of marginality in Lowell’s work occur in the upper class of Boston society, since the characters in his poems (like Lowell himself) frequently hail from wealthy families. Lowell’s representation of how social class marks—or does not mark—the male body often reveals telling connections between gender, class, power, and truth in U.S. culture.

The male body does not function as a prominent focus of Lowell’s work, as the female body does for many female Confessionals, so he often defers appearances of it through figurative language. Like Snodgrass, Lowell depicts the male body through animal symbolism. His 1959 poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” which broaches such taboo topics as infidelity,

addiction, and domestic violence, remains strikingly silent about the husband’s body. Seen through the perspective of the wife, this poem paints a revealing portrait of an abusive spouse:

“My hopped up husband drops his home disputes, / and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes, / free-lancing out along the razor’s edge. / This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge”

(Life Studies 93). These lines read as brutally honest, given that they expose behaviors, such as abusing drugs or soliciting prostitutes, that many would try to hide. The wife characterizes her husband not only with drugs and prostitutes, but physical violence. Readers can identify her fear as she confesses: “What makes him tick? Each night now I tie / ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .” (Life Studies 93). She mentions her own body here, yet not his, a notable omission, considering the physical presence her spouse commands. The wife does signify her husband’s body, albeit through simile, in the final couplet of the poem: “Gored by the climacteric of his want, / he stalls above me like an elephant” (Life Studies 93). The elephant symbolizes the husband’s body by indicating his size as overwhelming. However, this figurative language remains fairly vague as a description of the husband. For example, the symbol does not illustrate if his body is crushing because it is muscular, obese, or simply unwanted. Furthermore, the phallic reference implied by the verb “gored,” similar to the “root” in Snodgrass’s poem “Song,” functions as a double entendre that evokes, but still defers portraying the husband’s penis. Given the many silences broken in Lowell’s “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” and the strength of the husband’s presence in the poem, the silence surrounding the male body here is notable.

Lowell demonstrates that within the privilege of hegemonic masculinity, men’s bodies are not subject to the same scrutiny as women’s, even in cases when these bodies perpetrate violence.

The 1973 poem “Redcliffe Square” from Lowell’s collection The Dolphin also witnesses marital problems between husband and wife in imagery that defers representation of the male

body. This poem, which alludes directly to Lowell’s third wife Caroline Blackwood and their home in Redcliffe Square, presents a poetic version of Lowell as the speaker. In poem “5” of the sequence, the speaker imagines his body as that of a serpent. The snake holds symbolic significance, since it alludes to the biblical serpent in the Garden of Eden, resonating with the fall from grace Lowell discusses in line six. The snake metaphor also gives the speaker a chance to indirectly describe his own body. Lowell writes:

In my dream, my belly was yellow, panels of mellowing ivory, splendid and still young, though slightly ragged from defending me. My tan and green backscales were cool to touch. For one who has always loved snakes, it is no loss to change nature. My fall was elsewhere— (The Dolphin 18)

This metaphor presents the reimagined male body as empowered. Firstly, the speaker recognizes his body as “still young.” Although his current body reflects its age, the imagery in this passage focuses instead on the form of the serpent, which possesses the youth and virility associated with hegemonic masculinity.8 Secondly, this body, although “slightly ragged” from defending itself, signifies strength, since its scrapes imply a quarrel from which the speaker has emerged victorious. Many of the symbols—serpent, elephant, tree, bison—used by Lowell and Snodgrass to deflect imagery of the male body represent power, either in terms of size, strength, toughness, or fearsomeness. This pattern highlights the invisibility of the male body as a (human) body amongst Confessionals when empowered.

Lowell’s Confessionalism does include some descriptive imagery of the male body, yet many of these poems feature this body in moments that it fails to live up to the expectations of

8 The aging body actually forms a common motif in Lowell’s writing throughout his ouevre, as will be discussed later. Poems that contain references to the aged male body include “Waking in the Blue,” “Home After Three Months Away,” “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” “Randall Jarrell: 1914-1965,” “October and November,” “April’s End,” “Leaving America for England,” “Suicide,” and “Shaving.”

mainstream masculinity, such as in “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” from Life Studies. Like

“Commander Lowell,” “My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow,” and “Waking in the

Blue,” “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms” marks the male body as upper class while representing it as disempowered. The poem, which alludes to Lowell’s own father Robert Traill Spence

Lowell III, focuses on the father’s struggle to pretend that he is fine while he is dying. The speaker introduces his father in a fair amount of detail, referring to him as “bronzed,” “breezy,”

“newly dieted,” and “vitally trim” (Life Studies 78). Since these are all markers of health, and since “He smiled his oval Lowell smile,” readers are led to believe that he is well, yet, beneath his expensive dinner-jacket and smiling façade, the speaker perceives that he is “a shade too ruddy” (Life Studies 78). More seriously, readers also learn that “Father had had two coronaries”

(Life Studies 78). Hegemonic masculinity values strength and disdains weakness, which often discourages men from admitting that they are in pain. Only the intense pain of his imminent death causes the speaker’s father to speak up. Lowell writes: “Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting. / His vision was still twenty-twenty. / After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling, / his last words to Mother were: / ‘I feel awful’” (Life Studies 79). The confession of the poem is not the fact of the father’s death, so much as his admission that he is suffering. Lowell’s earlier description of the father’s vitality only serves to emphasize his ultimate disempowerment.

A similar intersection of gender, class, and power emerges in Lowell’s representation of the male Confessional body in his 1969 poem “Caligula” from the sequence “April’s End.”

“Caligula” stands out from the majority of Lowell’s Confessional poetry in its detailed objectification of the male body. The poem portrays Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, a Roman emperor popularly known as Caligula, famous for his extravagance during his reign.

Lowell’s depiction of Caligula overlooks his authority and luxury, however, and instead depicts him as disempowered:

Item: your body hairy, badly made, head hairless, smoother than your marble head; Item: eyes hollow, hollow temples, red cheeks roughed with rouge, legs spindly, hands that leave a clammy snail’s trail on your wilting sleeve your hand no hand can hold…bald head, thin neck— (Notebook 104)

This passage, highlighted with alliteration and repetition, serves to illustrate Caligula’s body as

“badly made.” His gaunt neck and arms characterize him as weak, while his sunken face and clammy hands characterize him as unhealthy. Furthermore, Caligula’s body appears unadorned by the lavish clothing customary of a Roman emperor. Lowell mentions the marble bust of

Caligula, likely an idealized version of his body, yet departs from it and instead depicts a very flawed, very human form. Caligula was Lowell’s nickname, so the description projects a poetic version of his aging self. Lowell earned the nickname at boarding school due to his imperious and even bullying nature, yet Caligula is depicted here as an emperor out of power. This representation resonates with the imagery of aging men found in Lowell’s later work, and reinforces the motif of the disempowered patriarch as a truth to be confessed.

The aging male body forms a particularly prominent motif in Lowell’s Confessional poetry. His poem “Leaving America for England,” published in 1973, offers evidence of this pattern. Sequence six, titled “Facing Oneself,” confesses to readers: “After a day indoors I sometimes see / my face in the shaving mirror looks as old, / frail and distinguished as my photographs— / as established” (The Dolphin 68). Lowell portrays the speaker as wealthy, using the adjectives “distinguished” and “established” while depicting him as disempowered, using the adjectives “old” and “frail.” The sequence’s title, “Facing Oneself,” refers to the man’s literal position in front of the mirror, yet it also implies that his aging features are a truth to be faced.

This stanza contains very little imagery, as contrasted with the more detailed depiction of aging from Lowell’s poem “Suicide,” published a few years later in Day by Day. Frank Kearful, who analyzes the motif of hands in this collection, observes its theme of aging; he points out that

“The late poems in the third and final section of Day by Day often refer to hands in connection with aging and presentiments of dying” (60). However, the representation of the aging male body extends beyond the hands, as in “Suicide” when Lowell writes: “Sometimes in dreams / my hair came out in tufts / from my scalp, / I saw it lying there / loose on my pillow like flax. / Sometimes in dreams / my teeth got loose in my mouth...” (Day by Day 15). Lowell distances the male figure from readers somewhat by featuring it in a dream, but, distinct from “Redcliffe Square,” he renders the dreamed male body in human form and invests it with a fair amount of detail. The description of hair and tooth loss offers readers the image of the elderly male body, comparing to similar imagery in Snodgrass’s poems “April Inventory” and “Heart’s Needle.” Popular for both

Confessional poets, this pattern emphasizes how the minority status occasioned by old age overrides the invisibility granted by masculinity in U.S. culture with regard to the politics of the body.

The poems of Snodgrass and Lowell attest that for the first works of Confessional poetry, published in the late 1950s, the male body does not constitute a subject of confession. Indeed, although Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle explores the cultural constructions of manhood and fatherhood during divorce, illness, and other trials, it renders the male body irrelevant to those explorations. Lowell’s Confessionalism, which spans the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, reflects an evolving awareness of the male body as embodied. However, like Snodgrass, Lowell predominantly focuses on other themes, including family or marital problems, which are confessional to him. Although the male Confessional body materializes at times with regard to

these motifs, such as in allusions to Lowell’s family history or his divorce, it does not appear as a motif on its own. By and large, the male body does not appear in Confessional poetry during this time, demonstrating that it does not qualify as a truth to be confessed for men as the female body does for women. This invisibility coincides with its historical context, preceding the spate of gender and body politics brought to light during the second-wave feminist movement of the

1960s and 1970s that revealed women’s bodies to be disproportionately scrutinized, objectified, and problematized. Men’s bodies are largely invisible as confessional in U.S. culture because men themselves are in power, and, as a result, are less subject to regulation. In a patriarchal culture that privileges normative masculinity, men’s bodies have not been considered as shameful, so they have not been considered as secretive. When it does qualify as confessional, the truth of the male body is that it departs from hegemonic masculinity to appear weak, aging, dying, or otherwise disempowered. In U.S. culture, bodies in power are often invisible regarding the very mechanisms that empower them—like social class for the upper middle and upper class

Boston poets famous for their Confessional poetry, or gender for the male poets who inaugurated the Confessional Poetry Movement.

CHAPTER 3

UNDERWRITTEN BY WHITENESS: THE CANON AND THE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN LORDE AND RICH

Feminist scholarship on Confessional poetry often focuses on the female body. Scholars such as Emily Boshkoff-Johnson, Tanfer Emin Tunç, Deborah Nelson, and Kathleen Margaret

Lant discuss the representation of the female body in the works of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath,

Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, and others. These studies situate the female body in relation to various regimes of power, revealing the politics of Confessional poetry. This research indicates, as Miranda Sherwin suggests, “that confessional writing is not a private, apolitical art, but rather one that demonstrates a deep engagement with the politics of literary influence, of gender relations, of psychoanalysis, and of American culture more broadly” (16). Tellingly, Sherwin’s statement politicizes Confessionalism without mentioning race, an omission that is replicated in the studies of Boshkoff-Johnson, Tunç, Nelson, and Lant.9 Marsha Bryant does focus on race in the works of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes, noting that “In white confessional writing, the confessional other usually appears as Asian, African, Middle Easterner, or Native

American—although the figure does not always confine itself to a single racial or ethnic identity” (177). However, her research includes only white writers, broaching the questions: Do nonwhite authors not write Confessional poetry? Or is Confessional poetry, by definition, a white kind of writing? These questions call for a more thorough conversation about race in the genre.

9 Tunç, the only one of these scholars to include nonwhite poets in her discussion of Confessional poetry, explores the female body as a metaphor for reproduction. Her article “Rivers of the Body: Fluidity as a Reproductive Metaphor in American Feminist (Post)Confessional Ecopoetry” does analyze Gwendolyn Brooks, pointing out that Brooks wrote about abortion “long before many of her contemporaries” (129), and mentions Clifton briefly as well. However, Tunç’s inclusion of these poets proves an exception rather than a rule, as evidenced by her introduction of Brooks as a poet “who rose to prominence during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and is also known [emphasis mine] for her confessional writing” (129).

Not only does scholarship on Confessional poetry rarely refer to nonwhite poets, but scholarship on nonwhite poets rarely refers to Confessional poetry. Scholars often hesitate to include nonwhite writers in the canon of Confessional poets, even in cases when their poetry appears quite Confessional. Jane Hedley’s analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother,” a 1945 poem discussing abortion that features a mother’s confession to the children she never birthed, contends that “confessional readings underplay its ethical and political agenda” (107). In fact,

Hedley directly distances Brooks from the genre, stating that “What she was unwilling to do…was to write of her own experience in the confessional mode” (105). Hilary Holladay’s book Wild Blessings devotes a chapter to comparing and contrasting how Lucille Clifton and

Sylvia Plath write about menstruation without once describing Clifton’s work as Confessional.

Scarlett Cunningham, who even points out that “a Black Arts framework dominates the criticism on Clifton’s poetry” (30), follows suit by studying Clifton’s intimate and seemingly autobiographical representations of the female body without recognizing the prevalence of this theme in Confessional poetry. As established by Cunningham, a Black Arts Movement lens prevails in scholarship on Clifton that often precludes other views. The given association of black poets with the Black Arts Movement is problematic in some ways, since it erases differences amongst poets in terms of form and content by grouping them together only by virtue of their identity. This erasure reveals a great deal about the racial politics of poetry and

Confessionalism.

The Confessional Poetry Movement illuminates the shifting definitions of “personal” versus “political” in mainstream U.S. culture. The inclusion and exclusion of poets from the canon of Confessional poetry reveals an unspoken whiteness underlying what U.S. culture considers Confessional by characterizing white confessions with a personal voice and black

confessions with an exclusively political voice. Indeed, when black women write confessionally about their bodies, they are often understood to be doing so politically and are overwhelmingly associated with the Black Arts Movement rather than the Confessional Poetry Movement, while white women who write confessionally about their bodies may engage political topics, such as feminism, from within the Confessional Poetry Movement. A comparative analysis of the

Confessional body in the 1970s poetry of black author Audre Lorde and white author Adrienne

Rich demonstrates the whiteness that underwrites Confessionalism. Lorde and Rich, both regarded as political poets, published works on comparable themes within a similar timeframe, yet only Rich is also considered a Confessional. In their imagery of lesbian sexuality in Lorde’s collections Coal (1976) and The Black Unicorn (1978), and Rich’s collection The Dream of a

Common Language (1978), featuring her Twenty-One Love Poems, Lorde frequently characterizes the female bodies in her poems as black, whereas Rich represents race more sparingly. An analysis of their 1970s poetry, as well as the scholarly discourse on their poetry, notes the critical reception of similar poems by different authors. Lorde demonstrates how the female Confessional body, when described as black, reads as political, and not Confessional, whereas Rich illustrates that whether or not she identifies the female Confessional body as white, critics still often receive her work as Confessional. Although Lorde’s poetry does fit into other genres, including the Black Arts Movement, like Rich’s, it is Confessional. These poets illustrate that race is not a Confessional truth during this time: the Confessional body is white, yet overwhelmingly invisible as raced. The false binary between black and Confessional writing indicates that black bodies are consistently politicized in U.S. culture, while white bodies often escape this lens.

The canon of Confessional poets exposes the genre as a white kind of writing. Renée

Curry, who recognizes race as a shaping factor in literature and stresses the significance of framing white writing in a racial context, coins the term “writing white” in her 2000 book White

Women Writing White. Curry defines writing white as “writing authored from an acknowledged or unacknowledged white perspective; writing that implies or explicitly delivers the concept of

‘whiteness’ to a text; writing that remains ‘ignorant’ regarding white racial politics internal to and external to the text; and/or writing that employs the word ‘white’ to maintain ideological systems of mastery and dichotomy in the text” (2). Her definition encompasses writing that expresses white lived experience, but also writing ignorant about its racial context, given that in

U.S. culture whiteness does not regularly signify as racial. Curry, who analyzes H.D., Elizabeth

Bishop, and Sylvia Plath, regards writing white as a widespread phenomenon throughout the canon of American poetry. Confessional poetry is especially underwritten by whiteness due to the expectations of the genre.

Confessional poetry primarily writes white due to its reputation as a particularly personal form of writing. Since whiteness is largely invisible as political, it readily assumes the personal

“I” of Confessional poetry, even when it engages other political topics, such as feminism.

Conversely, nonwhite literature is exclusively racialized and politicized, so that the black “I” rarely reads as Confessional. Deborah Nelson’s research on privacy in U.S. culture during the

Cold War, which encompassed the Confessional Poetry Movement, notes that “Certainly,

Confessional poetry was nearly exclusively a white, middle-class, and even predominantly heterosexual genre, perhaps because white middle class heterosexuals enjoyed the greatest expectation of privacy, and were therefore the most likely to experience its violation” (31). Even today, terms like “private” and “personal” remain infused with whiteness. Similarly, the term

“race” remains linked to minorities (indeed, “race” connotes “black” in some ways as “gender” connotes “women”), so that white poets who do discuss their whiteness do not necessarily qualify to readers as authors who write about race. An example of this discrepancy can be seen in the research of Paula M. Salvio, who examines the role of race in Sexton’s pedagogy during her time as a teacher at Wayland High School in the late 1960s. According to Salvio,

One of the justifications Sexton offered for excluding writing assignments that engaged students in a discussion of racial consciousness pivots on the pedagogical assumption that students write best and with more rhetorical authority if they write about what they know. In other words, Sexton believed that students must write about what is familiar to them rather than attending to that which we designate ‘not-part-of-self’—that which we cannot or refuse to see or what we are innocent of. (112)

As this passage illustrates, race does not function as something Sexton felt her predominantly white students at Wayland High School knew about or considered personal to themselves. She encouraged them to render their lived experiences as (white) writers without recognizing their racial context, regarding them as personal rather than political. This example from Sexton’s pedagogy applies to her own poetry as well as that of other canonized Confessionals like Lowell,

Snodgrass, and Plath—who, as they write personally, write white.

Confessional poetry also qualifies as a white kind of writing in its function as a platform for confessing cultural truths, since white perspectives, often understood as universal, commonly comprise the accepted truths of each generation. Little research has theorized the relationship between race and truth. Nonetheless, whiteness has had most access to truth in U.S. society, given that the content considered the truth is determined by the dominant culture of the time.

This relationship between race and truth underwrites the canon of Confessional poetry: the whiteness implicit in Confessional poems enables them to speak to the truths of their time in ways that nonwhite works could not. Although the white version of the truth operates as the most visible, it often operates invisibly as white. As such, Confessional poetry regularly confesses to

white truths while rarely confessing to whiteness. The works of Lorde and Rich, in addition to the scholarly reception of their works, demonstrate the racial politics of Confessional poetry.

Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich

Although they published in earlier years, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich achieved acclaim as poets during the 1970s, after the peak of the Confessional Poetry Movement in the previous decade. Both women made names for themselves as political poets who used their work to challenge sexism, racism, and heterosexism. Their commitments to multiple causes render

Rich and Lorde border figures in the literary canon who do not fit unequivocally into any one genre. However, only Rich is included by scholars in the Confessional Poetry Movement;

Lorde’s poetry has been associated with several different movements, but has rarely, if ever, been labeled Confessional. This discrepancy stands out, given the striking similarities between the two in terms of form and content. Both authors employ the bold imagery, first-person perspective, and seemingly autobiographical allusions characteristic of Confessionalism.

Furthermore, both write personally about the female body, such as in their intimate portrayals of lesbianism. Lorde’s and Rich’s poems about lesbian desire coincide with the taboo writing thematic in Confessional poetry, given that, during the 1970s, the LGBT movement garnered little mainstream support.10 For Lorde, the female Confessional body largely manifests as black; however, for Rich, who addresses race often in her prose, neither blackness nor whiteness appear regularly in her poetry. The invisibility of race in Rich’s poems functions as a product of whiteness, which underwrites her confessions by enabling them to seem personal and private regarding race.

10 In fact, the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1974.

Rich is first and foremost a feminist poet, well known by scholars for her poems that challenge patriarchy and call for gender equality, although many critics also identify her as a

Confessional poet. Indeed, Tunç’s analysis of, in her own words, “American feminist

(post)confessional ecopoetry” includes Rich and describes her as one of Sexton’s and Plath’s successors (127). Camelia Elias also compares Rich’s work with Sexton’s. She explores the link between shamanism and Confessional poetry in the poems of both authors, implicitly categorizing Rich as a Confessional poet in the process. Gale Swiontkowski does the same, concentrating her focus on Confessional poetry, and then including Rich in her scope without comment. She examines the motif of father-daughter incest in the publications of Sexton, Plath,

Rich, and Olds, noting how all of these authors incorporate this motif into their poetry whether or not they were abused as children. According to Swiontkowski, “one might say that the

Confessional poetry of modern American women virtually began with their reconsideration of the issue of incest” (26). Through her analysis of Rich’s poems on incest, Swiontkowski thus canonizes Rich as a Confessional. Each of these studies identifies Rich as Confessional based on content in her poetry thematic to the genre. Tunç and Swiontkowski regard Rich as Confessional due to the intimate nature of her subject matter, i.e. menstruation and incest; Elias does so by virtue of the catharsis evoked by Rich’s writing (which Elias establishes as the function of

Confessional poetry) as well as Rich’s use of symbolic imagery of the unconscious (which Elias traces as the cause of this catharsis). All three critics include Rich in the genre without hesitation, equivocation, or explanation. Therefore, although Rich functions as a border figure in the

Confessional Poetry Movement because of her standing as a feminist poet, for many scholars her feminism does not discount Rich from being canonized as a Confessional.

Unlike Rich, Lorde rarely, if ever, qualifies as a Confessional poet in critical appraisals of her work. Most contemporary criticism identifies Lorde as a political poet without associating her with any specific poetry movement, such as in Lori Walk’s “Audre Lorde’s Life Writing:

The Politics of Location” or Jennifer Michaels’ “The Impact of Audre Lorde’s Politics and

Poetics on Afro-German Women Writers.” Given the interdisciplinary nature of Lorde’s writing as a self-styled ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,’ as well as the multiplicity of literary movements her writing speaks to, it is striking that scholars have not performed a Confessional reading of her poetry. Critics most frequently identify Lorde with the Black Arts Movement and feminist poetry movement. According to Lisa Gail Collins, who examines the parallels between the two, “Only a vital handful of courageous visionaries such as Frances Beal, Toni Cade

Bambara, [and] Audre Lorde…claimed, drew from, and shaped both movements.” In “After

Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, Cheryl Clarke also analyzes the influences of Black Arts and feminism on Lorde’s writing, focusing on how this synthesis shapes her 1978 book The Black Unicorn. Lorde additionally receives scholarly attention as a feminist

Postcolonial author, such as in Anh Hua’s study of critical and creative writing on sensuality and spirituality as a source of healing for minority women. Yakini Kemp explores Lorde’s use of the exotic erotic in her poetry as she navigates the sexual politics of her Caribbean identity, while

Liz Millward discusses Lorde’s practice of lesbian origin mythmaking through the figure of the warrior poet. The range of this research illustrates the multi-faceted, and interconnected, content of Lorde’s oeuvre. As Margaret Kissam Morris points out, “In Lorde’s writing, the conjunction of body, political and spiritual convictions, and text brings interrelated topics to the foreground: race, gender, sexual identity, eroticism, and mortality” (168-169). Although many of these themes also appear in Confessional poetry, little, if any, scholarship on Lorde considers her

Confessionalism. Indeed, the critics above approach her work through a myriad of perspectives—all of them political, yet none of them Confessional.

Despite this disparity in scholarship on their work, both Rich and Lorde wrote

Confessional poetry as seen in their 1970s poems featuring lesbian desire. Indeed, during their careers, both Rich and Lorde established themselves as lesbian poets who wrote openly about their sexuality. Rich began publishing poetry before Lorde, yet Lorde published about the lesbian

Confessional body first in her 1976 collection Coal, as seen in its poem “On a Night of the Full

Moon.” This work employs a first-person perspective to describe the sexual desire of one woman for another, and to portray their sexual experiences. In the first stanza, Lorde writes: “The curve of your waiting body / fits my waiting hand / your breasts warm as sunlight / your lips quick as young birds / between your thighs the sweet / sharp taste of limes” (172). The repetition of

“waiting” in the first two lines of this passage reflects the speaker’s building desire. Lorde illustrates the sexuality in this scene by employing the striking imagery and figurative language common to Confessional poetry. Her writing incorporates these devices progressively throughout the stanza. The first simile “breasts warm as sunlight,” although bold, makes a logical comparison. However, Lorde takes creative leaps by comparing quick lips to young birds and, furthermore, vaginal fluid to the taste of limes. Although published in 1976, the representation of the lesbian body in this metaphor is still largely unspeakable in literature classrooms today.11

11 As Susan Steffel and Laura Renzi- Keener point out, “Few would argue that the majority of literature that students are exposed to is primarily canonical and heteronormative” (30). According to Kirsten Helmer, “Much of the literature on sexualities and gender diversity in [high school] classrooms represents general calls by scholars and educators for curriculum changes or offers strategies that seek to make classrooms more inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students and their concerns and needs (e.g. Blackburn and Buckley 2005; Killoran and Pendleton Jiménez 2007; Spurlin 2000)…however, it is often from a theoretical perspective and without providing clear examples of pedagogical practices from actual classrooms (e.g. Kumashiro 2002; Meiners and Quinn 2012; Pinar 1998; Rodriguez and Pinar 2007)” (36).

The depiction of lesbian sexuality in “On a Night of the Full Moon” continues to break cultural silences as characteristic of Confessional poetry by representing female orgasm.

Although the poem’s first stanza engages a fair amount of figurative language, the final lines of part I simply state: “Before the moon wanes again / we shall come together.” This declaration describes sex even more literally than erotic poetry from previous Confessionals—such as

Sexton, who often describes sex indirectly, using metaphors like “we harvested” (“Us” 203), or

“you knead me and I rise like bread” (“Song for a Lady” 205). Moreover, the stanza stands apart as it refers to not only sex, but female orgasm specifically. The poem’s speaker broaches this subject again in part II, relating: “my hands at your high tide / over and under inside you” (172).

Lorde’s form evokes the sensation of release associated with orgasm by omitting the expected commas between prepositions. She also characterizes the climax with the figurative language of

“high tide” as well as the literal language of hands “over and under inside.” As such, orgasm forms a significant part of the sexual experience in the poem, which represents female sexual pleasure more intimately than prior poems in the genre. Indeed, even Sexton’s “The Ballad of the

Lonely Masturbator,” revolutionary for its time, refers to orgasm vaguely in lines like “The end of the affair is always death” (198).

Lorde’s “On a Night of the Full Moon” further challenges convention as it sexualizes lesbian women of size. The theme of roundness recurs in the poem, as indicated in the title’s reference to the moon—a motif that appears several times. In the poem’s final lines, the speaker declares: “Darkly risen / the moon speaks / my eyes / judging your roundness / delightful” (172).

The line break after “the moon speaks” renders the phrase ambiguous, so that it could characterize the moon as a separate entity, or it could racialize the “darkly risen” figure of the speaker. Regardless, the speaker identifies—and celebrates—her beloved’s body by recognizing

her “roundness” and pronouncing it “delightful.” These lines depart from the larger narrative regarding women’s bodies in U.S. culture, which marginalizes women of size and views them as comical instead of sexual. Lorde’s own lived experience as a black, lesbian, woman of size underwrites this point of the poem. The body-positive tone of “On a Night of the Full Moon” resonates as feminist, and also as Confessional.

The year after Lorde published “On a Night of the Full Moon” in Coal, Rich’s poetry explored queer sexuality in her pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems,12 which centers on the dynamics of a lesbian relationship. She represents the lesbian Confessional body in several of the poems in this sequence, focusing on the sexuality of this body in her piece titled “(The Floating

Poem, Unnumbered).” Rich opens the poem on the lines: “Whatever happens with us, your body

/ will haunt mine—” (Dream of a Common Language 32). These lines commemorate the speaker’s beloved by placing her body at the center of attention. The speaker continues:

your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come— the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there— the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth— your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet wave—whatever happens, this is. (Dream of a Common Language 32)

The entire stanza of the short poem consists of one enjambed sentence, lending it the dynamic energy of a sexual experience. In this experience, the speaker both gives and receives sexual pleasure. Rich constructs a complex portrait of the lesbian body through the figure of the lover— described at once with “generous thighs, “slender fingers,” and a “strong tongue.” Similarly, she characterizes the place between the lover’s thighs as simultaneously innocent and wise. Although

12 Twenty-One Love Poems, originally published in 1977, appeared again in 1978 as part of Rich’s collection The Dream of a Common Language.

Rich invests this body with intimate detail, she does not refer (either directly or indirectly) to the race of either lover. Rich’s own lover during this time, Michelle Cliff, was a black woman, and

Rich was certainly aware of her own whiteness, yet her poem avoids representing race altogether, like most canonized Confessionalism. In white American culture, race was often considered an indelicate topic, and appeared to be particularly difficult to discuss in poetry.

Despite their different approaches to race, Rich’s 1977 “(The Floating Poem,

Unnumbered)” shares many similarities with Lorde’s 1976 “On a Night of the Full Moon.” In fact, several of their lines echo each other, such as Lorde’s “The curve of your waiting body / fits my waiting hand,” and Rich’s “I had been waiting years for you / in my rose-wet cave,” as well as Lorde’s “between your thighs the sweet / sharp taste of limes,” and Rich’s “Your traveled, generous thighs / between which my whole face has come and come—”. Rich’s poem also focuses on female orgasm, depicting it as a recurring event. The repetition of dashes in three successive lines of the stanza recalls the rhythmic contractions associated with orgasm.

Furthermore, the imagery of “traveled, generous thighs” affirms the body-positive attitude expressed by Lorde. Indeed, celebrating her body as strong rather than thin, the speaker describes her lover’s touch with such terms as “firm” and “protective.” Both poems call attention to the fleeting nature of their experiences. The title of “On a Night of the Full Moon” limits the setting to one evening, and the first lines of “(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)” disclaim: “Whatever happens with us, your body / will haunt mine.” Since these poems focus on the moment, they express uncertainty about the future, and, as such, speak to the unstable political and social position of lesbian relationships during the 1970s in the U.S.

In their Confessional poetry, Lorde and Rich represent lesbian bodies intimately as not only a site of sexuality, but a space of solace and security. Lorde’s poem “Woman,” published in

The Black Unicorn (1978), focuses on the sanctuary offered by the female body it portrays. The title, “Woman,” calls attention to the gender of the poem’s beloved, underscoring the work’s illustration of lesbian sensuality. In the text of this short poem, Lorde invests this sensuality with a tone of tranquility:

I dream of a place between your breasts to build my house like a haven where I plant crops in your body an endless harvest where the commonest rock is moonstone and ebony opal giving milk to all of my hungers and your night comes down upon me like a nurturing rain. (297)

This stanza stages a reimagining of the female body as a land of paradise. The metaphor links to the cultural trope of the woman’s body as a site of caring and cultivation, such as seen in the popular personification of earth or nature as a mother. The beloved’s body resonates with the trope of Mother Earth as imagined “giving milk” and providing “nurturing rain.” Lorde characterizes the landscape of the lesbian body as particularly nurturing, given that it proffers milk (and not food) to satisfy the speaker’s hunger. The poem also does so by situating the speaker’s sanctuary between her lover’s breasts. As in her earlier poem “On a Night of the Full

Moon,” Lorde’s imagery in “Woman” has racial implications as well. The speaker’s description of the beloved’s “night” coming down upon her suggests her blackness. However, the terrain that makes up the haven of the beloved’s body contains both moonstone and ebony opal, gemstones associated with white and black respectively, and that are also both known for their shimmering, multicolored hues.

The representation of lesbianism in Lorde’s poem “Woman” shares several characteristics of Confessional poetry. First of all, it appears to allude to Lorde’s own life as a

self-identified lesbian. The first-person “I,” the first word of the poem, anchors the work in a monologue that invites the reader into the speaker’s confidence. In the first line of the poem, the speaker also invites readers into the privacy of her lover’s body by discussing her breasts. This body, reimagined as a landscape, does not include as much detail in “Woman” as in “On a Night of the Full Moon,” yet Lorde nonetheless presents it intimately. Additionally, her writing features the visceral imagery characteristic of Confessional poets. In Sexton’s poem “Unknown

Girl in the Maternity Ward,” for example, the speaker depicts her infant daughter with figurative language such as “You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed” and “Your lips are animals; you are fed” (24). These images captivate readers with a freshness and rawness similarly found in

“Woman,” such as Lorde’s metaphors in the lines: “where I plant crops / in your body / an endless harvest.” This passage anchors the poem in the physicality of the lesbian body, signifying it as at once erotic and homey.

Poem “VI” of Rich’s sequence Twenty-One Love Poems (1977) similarly exhibits the lesbian Confessional body as a space of safety, focusing on the security embodied by the beloved’s hands. The speaker meditates: “Your small hands, precisely equal to my own— / only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands / I could trust the world, or in many hands like these”

(Dream of a Common Language 27-28). Like “Woman,” poem “VI” establishes its tone to be more intimate than erotic—an intimacy indicated by the speaker’s familiarity with her beloved’s hands as thoroughly as with her own. The speaker’s attention to the size of her lover’s hands at the beginning of the poem emphasizes its focus on a lesbian relationship (given that, in heterosexual relationships, men’s hands usually outsize women’s). The hands of the beloved, characterized as small, nonetheless present the lesbian body as a source of safety. Indeed, the speaker’s position “in these hands,” suggesting that she is being held, demonstrates their

protective value to her. The speaker goes on to list the different abilities of these hands, capable of “handling power-tools or steering-wheel / or touching a human face….Such hands could turn / the unborn child rightways in the birth canal / or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship / through icebergs, or piece together / the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup” (Dream of a

Common Language 28). This passage portrays the lover’s hands as diversely competent; they can perform maternal actions like saving an infant during childbirth, as well as paternal actions like piloting a rescue ship. The hands of the poem’s beloved transcend traditional gender roles in order to illustrate their value to the speaker as a haven of trust and comfort.

The portrayal of the lesbian body as a source of comfort appears again in poem “XIV” of

Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems. This work delineates and juxtaposes the bodies of lesbian and straight lovers suffering from motion sickness on a boat ride buffeted by waves. The speaker explains: “In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples / huddled in each other’s laps and arms / I put my hand on your thigh / to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine” (Dream of a Common Language 31-32). The phrase “honeymoon couples” highlights the straight lovers’ ability to marry, and contrasts the marginalized status of lesbian relationships in U.S. culture during the 1970s.13 The posture of these couples further reflects this difference: the straight lovers display their affection openly by gathering in each other’s laps and arms while the lesbian lovers comfort each other more discretely by holding hands. Despite this prudence, the speaker and her beloved do find solace in the intimacy of each other’s touch. Rich writes: “we stayed that way, suffering together / in our bodies, as if all suffering / were physical, we touched so in the presence / of strangers who knew nothing and cared less / vomiting their private pain” (Dream of a Common Language 32). The caesurae of the commas and interruptions in the line breaks

13 The legal right to marriage was not protected for all same-sex couples in the U.S. until the Supreme Court ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges in 2014.

mimic the jerky sensation of the rocking boat, underscoring how, amidst the chaos, the couple remains still. Their unmoving hands provide comfort as they anchor the lovers in a sense of stillness and solace. Like poem “VI,” poem “XIV” does not embody race. However, both works of Rich’s compare to Lorde’s “Woman” because they engage the confessional intimacy of the lesbian body as a space of refuge. The lovers’ fear of displaying their affection publicly in “XIV” highlights the representations of lesbianism in each of these poems as controversial. This portrayal of intimacy functions as culturally disruptive by challenging not only the marginalization, but the fetishism of lesbianism in U.S. culture—critiqued by Rich in her 1976-

1978 poem “The Images” when she asks “when did we choose / to become the masturbator’s fix” (A Wild Patience 3). Both Rich and Lorde break cultural silences in their work to exhibit the humanity of lesbian love. They differ from canonized Confessional poets, like Sexton and Plath, in that they represent lesbianism, yet Lorde and Rich demonstrate their Confessionalism as they challenge social conventions to write in a personal, seemingly autobiographical style about the female body.

Rich and Lorde stand apart from canonized Confessionals, however, in regard to their deep engagement with the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. Rich addresses racial inequality regularly in her prose, which she often uses to criticize racism within the feminist movement.14

However, her poetry discusses race more as an exception than as a rule. Even in poems that explore her ethnic identity and reference her Jewish heritage, Rich infrequently represents her whiteness. Rich’s 1981 poem “Frame” does focus on race, yet it does so in a way that distinctly

14 Essays that discuss race include “Teaching Language in Open Admissions” (1972), “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia” (1978), and “Disobedience and Women’s Studies” (1981). In fact, in “Disloyal to Civilization,” Rich coins the term “white solipsism” to confront white feminists who suffer from “a tunnel-vision that simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or significant” (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 306), and challenge them to take up the difficult work of crossing racial barriers.

distances the poet from the poem. Set in 1979 Boston, “Frame” narrates the story of a black female university student waiting outside for the bus on a cold, windy night. The poem relates her perspective as she enters a nearby building on campus to seek shelter from the cold while waiting. It goes on to describes her conflict with the building’s white security guard, and then the white policeman the security guard calls, a conflict that ends with the woman charged with assault and battery.15 In contrast to most Confessional poetry, the “I” is not the subject of this poem, but the observer; the first-person narrator tells the story removed from its events, repeating to readers in italics: “I am standing all this time / just beyond the frame” (A Wild Patience 46).

The narrator works to become an ally by inserting herself into the scene as a witness, declaring that “What I am telling you / is told by a white woman / who they will say / was never there. I say

I am there” (A Wild Patience 48). Given the work’s publication in 1981, before the emergence of whiteness studies in the 1990s, Rich’s racialization of the narrator’s white body is ahead of its time. However, despite the narrator’s efforts, she remains distanced from the scene, as evidenced by the italics that set her apart from the rest of the poem, and the motif of the poem’s title,

“Frame,” that isolates her from its events.

Indeed, the white narrator of “Frame” remains noticeably disembodied from the racial politics of the piece. While narrating the black woman’s story, she explains: “I see her drawing her small body up / against the implied charges. The man / goes away. Her body is different now. / It is holding together with more than a hint of fury / and more than a hint of fear. She is smaller, thinner / more fragile-looking than I am” (A Wild Patience 47). Readers learn that the white woman differs from the black woman by looking larger and less vulnerable, yet they learn

15 Rich’s narrative alludes to an actual event, publicized in a 1979 court case by a black female student of Boston University, who filed charges against a white male police offer after he aggressively arrested her for trespassing in a university building.

little else about the speaker’s body. Her immateriality stands out next to the black woman’s embodiment, which the passage characterizes both figuratively and literally. Although the narrator’s white body remains invisible, the poem depicts its subject’s black body throughout the narrative: the sleet melting in her hair as she waits for the bus; the handcuffs clamping her wrists, the knee striking her breast, and the fingers pinching her thigh as she faces assault from the policeman; as well as the teeth she sinks into the policeman’s hand as she retaliates, and in turn becomes charged with assault. In Rich’s poetry, as in “Frame,” white bodies are all but invisible as white.

Conversely, Lorde’s poetry characterizes the female Confessional body in context with her racial identity, such as in her 1986 poem “To a Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black

Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman.” In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker proclaims:

I was born in the gut of Blackness from between my mother’s particular thighs her waters broke upon the blue-flowered lineoleum and turned to slush in the Harlem cold 10 PM on a full moon’s night my head crested round as a clock “You were so dark,” my mother said “I thought you were a boy.” (359)

The first-person “I” is the subject of the poem, who affirms her racial identity in the first line of the first stanza by announcing her origins in “the gut of Blackness.” The speaker emphasizes her blackness here not only by capitalizing the noun, but featuring it as the only two-syllable term in a line of one-syllable words. Lorde’s reference to the “Harlem cold” later in the stanza functions as another racial marker, since Harlem is a historically black neighborhood in New York City— the site of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the birthplace of the Black Arts Movement. “To a

Poet” resonates as Confessional in the intimacy of the birth scene it portrays, as well as its seemingly autobiographical allusion to Lorde’s own birth in Harlem. Furthermore, the bold

imagery in lines such as “I was born in the gut of Blackness / from between my mother’s particular thighs” echoes earlier Confessional poetry, such as Sexton’s poem “These Times…” which confesses: “I did not know the woman I would be / nor that blood would bloom in me / each month like an exotic flower, / nor that children, two monuments, / would break from between my legs” (121). The mother’s words at the end of the stanza, which also resound with this candid tone, further lend intimacy to the poem. Its lyric style, visceral imagery, apparently autobiographical allusions, and intimate themes, such as sexuality and family drama, are all characteristic of Confessional poetry, an aesthetic Lorde uses to represent the female body throughout her oeuvre, including poems such as “Generation” (1968), “Making It” (1970),

“Black Mother Woman” (1973), “To The Girl Who Lives In A Tree” (1974), “Blackstudies”

(1974), “Dahomey” (1978), and “Inheritance—His” (1993).

The similarities and differences between Lorde’s and Rich’s poems reveal the racial politics that underwrite Confessional poetry. During the 1970s, both poets write Confessionally about lesbian love and desire. However, Rich’s poetry consistently approaches race less intimately than sexuality or gender. She racializes whiteness occasionally, such as in “Frame,” but embodies it even more rarely; moreover, her portrayal of female bodies in her work rarely represents any race. As such, Rich’s reputation as a political poet largely stems from her feminism, which does not invalidate her identification as a Confessional poet in the eyes of scholars, particularly since canonized Confessionals such as Sexton and Plath regularly broach issues of gender and/or sexuality in their work. In fact, many scholars have performed feminist readings of their poetry, including Tanfer Emin Tunç, Janet Badia, Francesca Haig, Clare

Pollard, and Sandra M. Gilbert. Unlike Rich, however, Lorde’s race plays a central role in her identity as a political poet. Her intimate depictions of black bodies appear to distance her in the

eyes of scholars from the genre of Confessional poetry, which overwhelmingly ignores discussions of race. Indeed, Sexton even confesses to avoiding the topic: in her 1966 poem

“Walking in Paris,” she writes: “I have deserted my husband and my children, / the Negro issue, the late news and the hot baths” (136). As a poetry of the “I,” Confessional poetry departs, according to critics, from the political perspective inherent to black lyric poetry, which transforms the black “I” to an inherent black “we.” Therefore, the politics of race that inform

Lorde’s poetry associate her with Black Arts or Postcolonialism at the expense of Confessional poetry.

Lorde and Rich reveal how the politics of race have shaped the canon of Confessional poetry, excluding poets of color like Lorde from the genre. In the 1970s, the Confessional body was underwritten by whiteness, yet race was not a subject of Confessionalism. Historically, race was not a topic for white Confessional poets to whom it was not a personal, or even conscious, aspect of self-identity, while, for black Confessional poets, personal confessions were automatically associated with more explicitly political genres. Although Lorde’s work can, and should, be read through other lenses, it is clearly Confessional. A black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, Lorde should not be confined to any single genre of literature, and her work can be seen simultaneously as Black Arts, Postcolonial, feminist, queer, and Confessional. As a Confessional poet, Lorde interacts with issues that are taboo, secretive, or intimate. Her inclusion in the genre enables readers to consider not only how matters considered personal are, in fact, political, but how matters considered political are personal too. The intimacy of Confessional poems is valuable as it humanizes different selves.

CHAPTER 4

BEYOND THE AMERICAN DREAM: THE SUFFERING OF OTHERS AND THE GLOBAL CONFESSIONAL BODY IN FORCHÉ AND OLDS

The works of Confessional poets reflect the truths of a given generation and how each considers the personal to be political. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, U.S. culture underwent significant changes that in turn wrought changes to Confessional poetry, and the bodies represented in the genre. In poems from the Confessional Poetry Movement, social class is not a direct subject of confession, despite its roots among the upper middle and upper class domestic lives of poets like Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell ostensibly living the 1950s American Dream.

In the yuppie culture of the 1980s, the American Dream became larger in scope and further from reach for most citizens. During this time, Confessional poems still do not discuss social class directly16; however, representations of social class in Confessional poetry do become more political during the 1980s as the American Dream becomes more exaggerated. Confessional works no longer focus so intently on the self, constituting the truth of the body in the suffering of others. Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us (1981) as well as Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living (1984) and The Gold Cell (1987) critique yuppie culture by contrasting those

16 Like earlier Confessional poets, contemporary Confessional Sharon Olds does not discuss class at all in many of her poems from The Dead and the Living: “Ideographs,” “Things That Are Worse Than Death,” “The Guild,” “The Eye,” “Birthday Poem for My Grandmother,” “The Winter After Your Death,” “Miscarriage,” “The End,” “Best Friends,” “Absent One,” “Possessed,” “The Forms,” “Fate,” “My Father Snoring,” “My Father’s Breasts,” “The Takers,” “The Pact,” “Late Speech with My Brother,” “The Elder Sister,” “The Connoisseuse of Slugs,” “Poem to My First Lover,” “New Mother,” “The Line,” “The Fear of Oneself,” “Poem to My Husband from My Father’s Daughter,” “Sex Without Love,” “Ecstasy,” “Eggs,” “For My Daughter,” “Relinquishment,” “Son,” “Pre- Adolescent in Spring,” “Blue Son,” “Pajamas,” “The Sign of Saturn,” “35/10,” “Bread,” and “Bestiary,” as well as from The Gold Cell: “In the Cell,” “The Twin,” “The Solution,” “When,” “Saturn,” “What if God,” “History: 13,” “The Meal,” “Alcatraz,” “Looking at My Father,” “Now I Lay Me,” “Late Poem to My Father,” “After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood,” “California Swimming Pool,” “First Sex,” “Still Life,” “Greed and Aggression,” “It,” “I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror,” “Love in Blood Time,” “This,” “The Moment the Two Worlds Meet,” “The Quest,” “Liddy’s Orange,” “When My Son Is Sick,” “The Green Shirt,” “Gerbil Funeral,” “Mouse Elegy,” “The Month of June: 13 1/2,” “Left with Sick Kids,” “That Moment,” and “Looking at Them Asleep.” Forché omits class as well from several of her poems in The Country Between Us: “On Returning to Detroit,” “Selective Service,” “For the Stranger,” “Reunion,” and “Poem for Maya.”

bodies living the Dream of luxury with those living—and dying—in poverty, starvation, and violence. In rejection of the self-indulgence of the 1980s American Dream, Forché and Olds advocate for a culture of equality and empathy.

The 1950s Dream of having a home and happy family becomes more exaggerated during the 1980s, as the goal becomes less economically attainable. The decade gave rise to yuppie culture, which remodeled the American Dream to making big money at a high-powered career while owning a condominium in the city and perhaps several cars. The term “yuppie,” an acronym for young urban professional and a converse to the “hippie” of the 1960s and 1970s, arose in the early 1980s to describe a group of individuals who live in the big city, work high- paying careers with long hours, and strive to lead lifestyles of sophistication and style. The term often refers negatively to people who are self-centered and overly concerned with their class status. This materialism can be seen manifested in the celebrity culture of the time, summarized by Madonna’s lyrics “we are living in a material world / and I am a material girl” from her 1984 song “Material Girl,” or the character Gordon Gekko’s iconic line “greed, for lack of a better word, is good” in the 1987 film Wall Street. The yuppies of the 1980s expanded the scale of the

Dream, while at the same time it became less and less attainable. William J. Palmer contends that

“Yuppies saw themselves as a uniformed cavalry circling the wagons around what was left of the

American dream, that dream’s material icons: the job with a chance for advancement, the house

(in its new condo form), the car, the status goods, perhaps even a controlled and economically justified family” (280).

As Lawrence R. Samuel points out, “While ‘the eighties’ are popularly remembered as a glorious decade of capitalism with Wall Street paper entrepreneurs praising the value of greed, the Dream remained out of the grasp for many if not most Americans” (135); he argues that

“[T]he American Dream became more privatized over the course of the decade, mirroring the concentration of wealth and increasing divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’” (135).

Between the 1950s and 1980s, the U.S. economy evolved from one based on factories and production to one based on information and services. Mortgage interest rates reached historic highs, and inflation resulted in reduced spending power. According to George Kozmetsky and

Piyu Yue, “Even though the nominal earning growth rate showed an upward trend for the time period of 1948-1981, the real earning growth rate was declining because the inflation rate was moving up rapidly and reached…12.7% in 1980” (215). The economy recovered from a recession during the mid-1980s, yet income inequality continued to rise. These economic conditions shaped the Confessional poetry of the time, underscoring the influence of social class on the genre.17

Early Confessional poetry was largely a solipsistic mode of writing in that it did not focus on others except in close relation to the speaker. Jo Gill observes that “It is apparent from any survey of the criticism of Confessional poetry that the mode is habitually and negatively associated with an authorial self-absorption verging on narcissism” (60). However, Confessional poetry published during the 1980s is distinctly more communal. Whereas earlier

Confessionalism was a specifically American style of poetry, much of it anchored in Boston and connected to the 1950s American Dream, Confessional poems published during the 1980s became more international in scope. Olds’s and Forché’s works during this time make allusions

17 Social class refers to the three-tiered model of, broadly defined, the upper class, which pertains to living in luxury, the middle class, which pertains to living comfortably, and the lower or working class, which pertains to living in poverty. Although social class is subject to nuance, tangible markers appear in Confessional poetry that signify class status to readers. For example, in the twentieth-century United States, allusions to wearing fur coats and drinking martinis indicate association with the upper class, while allusions to going to sleep hungry or having no shoes indicate association with the lower class. An individual’s social circle, marked, for instance, by references to living in a poor neighborhood or inheriting an illustrious family heritage, also proves telling, since social class is also related to one’s social network.

to private family members and friends as well as to political movements and world events. As a result, these poems show greater attention to social class. While still not the main focus of their confessions, social class is represented in poems that discuss topics such as war and racism. This shift in scope helps to redefine the genre of Confessional poetry.

Carolyn Forché

Unlike Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, whose bodily confessions often emerge from within the lifestyle of the American Dream, Carolyn Forché frequently represents bodies subject to extreme poverty or violence in her poems. The influence of Forché’s working class, immigrant upbringing can be seen in her writing, in lines such as “I have the fatty eyelids / of a Slavic factory girl, / the pale hair of mixed blood” (“The Island” 10). The majority of Forché’s poetry reflects her work as a journalist and a human rights advocate. She considers herself a Poet of

Witness, as defined in her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of

Witness, yet her early works resonate as Confessional; indeed, poems published by Forché during the late 1970s and early 1980s often employ raw imagery and autobiographical allusions to delve into psychological or sexual experiences. Her 1981 book The Country Between Us draws on personal experiences from her human rights work in El Salvador, and her return to U.S. culture. In an interview with Chard deNiord, Forché states:

I have lived in countries under oppressive regimes, with governments supported by the US. We have not often been the good guys. Most people in the US paid no attention to this. They lived their lives. While all this was going on, while the wars were going on, they had fun, studied, worked, had kids, took the boat out on weekends. But in those countries, people suffered greatly, disappeared by the tens of thousands, were tortured and mutilated, and still people fought back…. I knew some of them. They saw the world clearly. They found a peace within themselves. (18-19)

Forché reinforces the relationship between social class and Confessional poetry by providing a discourse with which to subvert the 1980s Dream and its yuppie materialism. Forché’s poetry

examines social class conditions both within and outside of the U.S., often considering the

American Dream from an international perspective. In The Country Between Us, she critiques the 1980s Dream as an empty fantasy that blinds Americans to the bodily suffering happening beyond their borders, advocating instead for broader political awareness and deeper empathy among U.S. citizens.

Forché carries out this critique in her poem “Return” (1981), written after her human rights work in El Salvador just before the Salvadoran Civil War. In the poem, which is dedicated to Forché’s friend Josephine Crum, the speaker confides to her friend Josephine about the frustration she feels upon returning to the U.S. among the “iced drinks and paper umbrellas, clean / toilets and Los Angeles palm trees moving” (17). After witnessing the horrors of the war, which subjected people to starvation, torture, and murder, she finds the amenities of her lifestyle in Los Angeles horrifying. The speaker confesses:

Josephine, I tell you I have not rested, not since I drove those streets with a gun in my lap, …I go mad, for example, in the Safeway, at the many heads of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples and coffee, especially the coffee. And when I speak with American men, there is some absence of recognition: their constant Scotch and fine white hands, many hours of business, penises hardened by motor inns and a faint resemblance to their wives. (19)

The abundance of fruit at the supermarket suggests a lifestyle of luxury in the U.S., yet also suggests the economies of its origins in Central and South America. As one of the country’s major exports, coffee in particular alludes to El Salvador, where in 1981 a civil war was raging, and Salvadoran citizens were suffering. The Americans around Forché’s speaker are ignorant of

this connection and do not even appreciate the abundance available to them. Rather, Forché represents these individuals as being preoccupied in their pursuit of the American Dream to

“make large amounts of money quickly…to acquire the most expensive material goods, to spend rather than save, to party extremely hard as a reward for working extremely hard” (Palmer 280), whose bodies reflect this yuppie lifestyle. Indeed, their “many hours of business” indicate their ambition for career success while their “fine / white hands” represent their white collar work, reinforcing their remoteness from the unnamed workers who pick the fruit in their supermarkets.

Moreover, the Scotch the men drink shows their preference for expensive material goods. Apart from their white hands, the yuppies only appear in the poem in terms of their penises, which, aroused by “a faint / resemblance to their wives” (19), signify their desire for more of what they already have.

These yuppie bodies provide a stark contrast to the bodies of the war victims in “Return,” which Forché uses to condemn U.S. citizens as self-centered. The poem alludes to South

American revolutionaries, including Camilo Torres and Victor Jara, and reports their deaths.18

Forché goes on to discuss the rape, torture, and confinement of El Salvador’s Lil Milagro

Ramírez, “how she walked / with help and was forced to shit in public” (18).19 Contrary to a yuppie life of consumption, these political activists risked their comfort, safety, and ultimately their lives for the welfare of their country. While it represents yuppie bodies only vaguely,

18 Camilo Torres was a Catholic priest who joined the National Liberation Army in Colombia and became a guerilla fighter. Torres died in 1966 during an ambush on soldiers of the Colombian army, although his body was never recovered. Victor Jara was a folk musician whose songs influenced the rise of the leftist Popular Unity party in Chile. After the Chilean coup d’état of the Popular Unity government in 1973, he was arrested, tortured, and murdered. 19 Lil Milagro Ramírez was a poet and revolutionary who helped to lead one of the founding guerilla groups, which would go on to become the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), of the civil war in El Salvador. However, in 1976 she was captured by members of the National Guard and killed three years later in one of their prisons.

“Return” includes haunting imagery of the bodily suffering of war victims, mentioning “reports of mice introduced into women, of men / whose testicles are crushed like eggs” (20), or a “child like a supper scrap / filling with worms” (20). In contrast to the scene at the Safeway, which features items of food as a sign of luxury, these lines portray human bodies as food items consumed by the violence of war. Their sexual organs provide another point of contrast, represented in terms of pain rather than pleasure. Although these contrasts in themselves constitute a critique of American materialism, the speaker does so explicitly as well. She states:

“Your problem is not your life as it is / in America, not that your hands, as you / tell me are tied to do something. / It is that you were born to an island of greed / and grace where you have this sense / of yourself as apart from others” (20). Forché’s speaker points out that, in spite of their ability, American hands are not moved to help. She links the atrocities suffered by Salvadoran citizens to the ignorance of American citizens, whose government supported the Salvadoran government while it carried out thousands of human rights violations during the civil war. These lines also link to the image of the 1980s American Dream. Advocating a stance in opposition of

Gekko’s famous motto that “greed is good” in Wall Street, the speaker criticizes the Dream’s foundation in materialism, and the confinement of the citizens’ hopes and goals to their own country. “Return” advocates for a more international perspective among citizens, and, not only empathy for others, but a recognition of their mutual connection.

“Photograph of My Room” (1981) witnesses the economic and political oppression of others with bodily imagery that resonates with the empathetic, international perspective advocated in “Return.” Forché’s “Photograph of My Room” parallels Sexton’s poem “The

House,” since it takes readers on a tour by introducing them to the individuals and objects that establish a home. However, the poems diverge a great deal. Rather than the trappings of a

suburban dream house or swanky city condominium, the belongings in “Photograph of My

Room” each tell a person’s story and empathize with their economic struggles: the china cups of a Serbian poet who was arrested for his time as a partisan, or the handmade quilt that alludes to

Forché’s own grandmother Anna after her immigration from Czechoslovakia (now the Czech

Republic).20 Instead of the generic cast of characters in Sexton’s “The House,” those in

“Photograph of My Room” appear personal and meaningful to the speaker. In stanza six, she describes an object that recalls the dying body of a friend:

Wrapped in a tissue you will find a bullet, as if from the rifle on the wall, spooned from the flesh of a friend who must have thought it was worth something. Latched to its shell, a lattice of muscle. One regime is like another said the face of a doctor who slid the bullet from the flat of his blade to my hands saying this one won’t live to the morning. (35-36)

The term “lattice,” often used to describe a home, functions in these lines to mark the objectification of the friend’s body by violence. Unlike her representation of the china cups or the handmade quilt, Forché does not connect the bullet, or the violence it symbolizes, with a specific country or conflict. The expression on the doctor’s face tells the speaker “One regime / is like another,” condemning political oppression across borders by universalizing the suffering it causes. The tone of the passage is mournful, given the loss of a friend’s life, and the

20 For immigrants to the U.S., the American Dream was not associated with the white picket fence, or high-rise condo, so much as the melting pot. Encapsulated by the lines of Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your / poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe / free” (202), the Dream stood for freedom from persecution in a land of equal opportunity. Forché’s poems similarly advocate for equality and freedom from oppression, although they do so from a more global perspective.

worthlessness of the bullet that remains in place of their body. The worthlessness of the bullet to the speaker affirms the value of humanism over materialism in the poem.

Indeed, in another stanza, the speaker describes: “Under the bed, a pouch of money: / pesetas, dinar, francs, the coins / of no value in any other place” (35). In contrast to the yuppie pursuit of wealth illustrated in “Return,” “Photograph of My Room” highlights the limited value of money. In so doing, Forché dismisses the glorification of material wealth underlying the

American Dream. Forché alludes to the Dream by dedicating the poem to Walker Evans, a photographer famous for the images he captured of people in poverty during the Great

Depression. Evans’s arguably most famous photograph, his portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of a cotton sharecropper during the Great Depression, shows a young woman’s face aged and weathered by hardship and exhaustion. Evans’s photographs feature many Depression-era bodies humbled by poverty, some barefoot and some toothless, many with unsmiling faces that have the same weary expression as Allie Mae Burroughs. Forché dedicates her tour of the room in the poem to Evans, suggesting that, like his photographs, the room can serve as a testament to the suffering of those bodies left out of the fantasy of the American Dream.

Forché ends The Country Between Us by exhibiting an alternative to yuppie culture with her poem “Ourselves or Nothing” (1981), which features a middle class American citizen engaged in the work of commemorating those who lived and died under the political oppression of the Holocaust. Forché dedicates the poem to her friend Terrence Des Pres, a U.S. author and

Holocaust scholar, and records his struggle to write what would become his book The Survivor:

An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. Her depiction of Des Pres shares some similarities with the bodies of the yuppie American businessmen portrayed earlier in “Return.” Indeed, the first image of him in the poem shows him drinking Scotch, yet for Des Pres the Scotch functions not

as a marker of consumption, but a method of coping with his research. Forché writes: “I watched you pouring three / then four fingers of Scotch over ice, / the chill in your throat like a small / blue bone, those years of your work on the Holocaust. / You had to walk off the darkness” (55).

Unlike the businessmen with their white hands, Des Pres’s body is marked by his compassion.

His sadness manifests as a chill in his throat that Forché characterizes with a small bone, an image that resonates with the remains of the Holocaust victims.

“Ourselves or Nothing” acknowledges the profound human suffering Des Pres encountered in the course of his research. For example, Forché describes: “In the mass graves, a woman’s hand / caged in the ribs of her child” (58-59). Like the dead friend in “Photograph of

My Room,” the mother and child only appear in the pieces of their bodies that remain. This imagery illustrates the tragedy of a parent’s worst nightmare: not being able to protect their offspring from harm. The mother’s outstretched hand shows both her desire and inability to protect her child. The incredible poverty and loss of the people Des Pres studies diverges from his own economic comfort to show the good that can be done from within positions of privilege.

Forché notes that he took “suppers of whole / white hens and pans of broth” (55), whereas, in

Prague, “Anna told me, there was bread, / stubborn potatoes and fish, … / eggs perhaps but never

/ meat, never meat but the dead” (56), and, in Theresienstadt, “there was only the dying” (56).

Des Pres’s comfortable dinners differ vastly from the concentration camp conditions, where there was little to eat and human bodies were objectified, so that they became meat and nothing more, yet Forché portrays Des Pres dedicating the economic comfort of his lifestyle toward a purpose: preserving the memory of the men and women whose lives were indelibly impoverished during the Holocaust. She ends the poem by advocating a new dream for

Americans: “There is a cyclone fence between / ourselves and the slaughter and behind it / we

hover in a calm protected world like / netted fish, exactly like netted fish. / It is either the beginning or the end / of the world, and the choice is ourselves / or nothing” (59). The fence, a remaking of the white picket fence that accompanies the American Dream, appears to protect

U.S. citizens from experiencing the violence that befalls nations such as 1940s Germany or

1980s El Salvador, but this idea of protection is awry. The simile of the citizens as netted fish reveals that they are actually trapped by the Dream. Forché dismisses the Dream by focusing instead on the fate of the world. Her speaker argues that those who live in luxury as well as those who face poverty and political oppression should not compete for bodily comfort in an economy of inequality, but must work together to achieve humanity for all.

Sharon Olds

One of the foremost contemporary poets writing in the Confessional mode, Sharon Olds contributes to the intersection between Confessional poetry and social class during the 1980s.

Her work, primarily known for its intimate and reverent representations of the body, does not typically focus on class. Rather, Olds returns to themes of sex, love, loss, death, and forgiveness with regard to such experiences as a painful childhood, a difficult relationship with parents, and loving relationships with husband and children. In fact, Olds’s work recalls Sexton’s, since it portrays an unhappy nuclear family against a backdrop of middle and upper class comfort. Olds is also similar to Forché in that her poems, particularly those published in The Dead and the

Living (1984) and The Gold Cell (1987), present bodies in poverty that reflect the increasing economic inequality of the 1980s. Indeed, the beginning of the decade witnessed a recession, and, while the economy had recovered by 1984, income inequality continued to rise (Kozmetsky and Yue 219). Within the yuppie culture of the 1980s, winning the “rat race” became the top priority for the upper class. Palmer remarks that “Most often, the workplace became the yuppie

battlefield. Their jobs took precedence over all other areas of their lives: self, relationships, family, morality. The competition for success, power status, money, in the workplace and in society became an unhealthy obsession” (285). Olds’s poems counter this materialism by paying homage to the sanctity of human life. According to Peter Scheponik, “Underlying all of Sharon

Olds’s poetry is a sense of the profound sacredness of the physical world in its infinite capacity for life and transformation” (52). In The Dead and the Living (1984) and The Gold Cell (1987),

Olds humanizes those enduring economic and political oppression who are invisible in yuppie culture by honoring bodies threatened by hunger and poverty in a decade reputed for materialism and greed.

Olds’s Confessionalism, like Forché’s, considers those left out of the American Dream, as seen in her examination of class, race, and power in “On the Subway” (1987). This poem follows the thoughts of the speaker, an upper class white woman, who sits in a subway car opposite a working class black man. She observes the inequality that separates them:

…He is wearing red, like the inside of the body exposed. I am wearing dark fur, the whole skin of an animal taken and used. I look at his raw face, he looks at my fur coat, and I don’t know if I am in his power— he could take my coat so easily, my briefcase, my life— or if he is in my power, the way I am living off his life, eating the steak he does not eat, as if I am taking the food from his mouth. And he is black and I am white, and without meaning or trying to I must profit from his darkness, the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the nation’s heart, as black cotton absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. (5)

The speaker’s fur coat, briefcase, and steak dinners signify her upper class status. She also links her social class to her race by using the term “profit” to highlight the economic privilege of white people in a racist culture. In contrast, the toll of the black man’s economic disadvantage appears on his “raw face” and in the red of his clothing, “like the inside of body / exposed,” which— despite the white speaker’s fear of him—emphasizes his vulnerability. This passage criticizes the racism and materialism of American culture (“the murderous beams of the nation’s heart”), and belies the fantasy that the American Dream is a meritocracy where citizens can achieve success as long as they work hard. The simile of the black cotton recalls the period of U.S. slavery when working hard certainly did not earn black individuals economic success.

“On the Subway” calls attention to the persistence of racism in the 1980s, and how it contributes to the income inequality of this time. As Kozmetsky and Yue observe, during the latter half of the twentieth century, “The percentages of poor families in the Black and Hispanic racial groups were twice or three times of the average level for all racial groups” (224). Yuppie culture, epitomized by the image of a busy Wall Street executive in an expensive suit, was largely underwritten by whiteness. According to Monica McDermott, “the 1980s and early 1990s were largely a period of stagnation for the Black community. Affirmative action programs were under strong attack through 1994, and the various economic recessions hit the black community especially hard. Early professional gains for the post-Civil Rights generation did not translate into expanding wealth and assets for the black middle class” (5). The setting of the poem on a subway car resonates with the city life of the 1980s American Dream, but Olds demonstrates how the city and its wealth are not accessible to all. She ends the poem with the speaker’s meditation that

There is no way to know how easy this

white skin makes my life, this life he could take so easily and break across his knee like a stick the way his own back is being broken, the rod of his soul that at birth was dark and fluid and rich as the heart of a seedling ready to thrust up into any available light. (The Gold Cell 5-6)

Olds depicts the black man’s body as an instrument of violence (the white speaker makes it clear to readers that she fears him) that mimics the violence done to him by society. Over the course of her reflection, the speaker adds depth to her imagery of the stereotypically violent black man with the imagery of the man’s soul as a helpless seedling. The poet does the same with the connotations of darkness, usually a literary device symbolizing evil or fear of the unknown that expresses the instinctual human fear of the dark. She instead associates darkness/blackness with the vulnerability of a small seed or the softness of cotton. “On the Subway” traces the white speaker’s fear of her fellow passenger to her knowledge of the violence done to people of color by white Americans and her complicity within a culture of injustice. In so doing, the poem reaches past barriers of class and race, as advocated by Forché in “Ourselves or Nothing,” to humanize his character.

Olds’s work also resembles Forché’s in her focus on economic oppression outside the

United States. From her collection The Dead and the Living, “Photograph of the Girl” (1984) is set in Russia and “Portrait of a Child” is set in Armenia. Olds divides The Dead and the Living into two sections: “Part One: Poems for the Dead” and “Part Two: Poems for the Living.”

“Poems for the Living” suggests an upper class lifestyle, through references to such features as the maid’s day off or the grandfather clock in “The Moment” (1984), while “Poems for the

Dead” confronts situations of starvation and poverty, such as famine in “Photograph of the Girl”

(1984) and genocide in “Portrait of a Child” (1984). In “Photograph of the Girl,” Olds features

the budding sexual maturity of a young girl combined with the bodily suffering she experiences because she is starving:

The girl sits on the hard ground, the dry pan of Russia, in the drought of 1921, stunned, eyes closed, mouth open, raw hot wind blowing sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are taking her together. She leans on a sack, layers of clothes fluttering in the heat, the new radius of her arm curved. She cannot be not beautiful, but she is starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones grow longer, porous. The caption says she is going to starve to death that winter with millions of others. Deep in her body the ovaries let out her first eggs, golden as drops of grain. (6)

The photograph reflects the desperation of the Povolzhye Famine, which, catalyzed by drought and civil war, affected Russia from 1921 to 1922. Intensified by the government’s refusal to ask for foreign aid and initial denial of international relief, the famine led to the deaths of an estimated five million people. The poem approaches this immense tragedy through the image of one girl, and conveys her starvation in a Confessional style. Indeed, Olds describes the girl with eyes closed (symbolizing her hunger without hope), mouth open (symbolizing her need nonetheless), and thinning body, yet also discusses her ovaries, and imagines her eggs as fragments of grain. The simile of her eggs as grain is especially poignant given the beginnings of the Povolzhye Famine in the failure of the grain crop. The characterization of the eggs as golden contrasts with the girl’s extreme poverty, so that Olds represents her body as a combination of physical poverty and plenty. Although she is shown as a famine victim, she is not a one- dimensional figure; Olds simultaneously fashions the poem as the girl’s coming-of-age story and her eulogy. Olds’s sexualization of a young girl, and, moreover, a dying famine victim confronts

conventionally unspeakable topics as characteristic of Confessional poetry, and in “Photograph of the Girl,” Olds uses her Confessionalism to humanize the girl and cultivate empathy for her plight.

The Dead and the Living also engages international politics in “Portrait of a Child”

(1984). The poem’s caption sets the poem in “(Yerevan, capital of a republic set up by those

Armenians who had not been massacred by the Turks” and tells readers “In 1921, Turkey and

Russia divided the republic between them.)” Olds refers to the Armenian Genocide, carried out by the Young Turk government on the minority Christian population of Armenians living in the predominantly Muslim Ottoman Empire, now Turkey. During the massacre, the government executed Armenian men and deported Armenian women and children, who were forced to leave their homes and belongings to embark on death marches through the desert without food or water. Olds focuses on the starvation death of an Armenian child in the aftermath of the genocide, writing that “Besides the shirt he wears nothing. His abdomen is / swollen as the belly of a pregnant woman / and sags to one side. His hip-joint bulges, / a bruise. His thigh is big around as a / newborn’s arm, and from hip-bone to knee / the tendon runs sharp as a crease in cloth” (8). The speaker compares the boy’s body to a pregnant woman and a newborn baby, poignantly invoking images of life in her description of death. As in “Photograph of the Girl,”

Olds juxtaposes tragedy with sexuality, observing that “His knees are enormous, / his feet peaceful as in deep sleep, / and across one leg delicately rests / his penis. Pale and lovely there / at the center of the picture, it lies, the source / of the children he would have had, this child / dead of hunger / in Yerevan” (8). The child’s penis, a typically unspeakable topic in U.S. culture, renders an intimate portrait of him, and emphasizes the tragedy of his death. Indeed, in contrast to the penis’s association with desire, pleasure, and propagating life, the lines that follow

depicting the child’s death make his loss all the more poignant, similar to the unrealized potential of the young girl’s eggs in “Photograph of the Girl.” Unlike the famine in “Photograph of the

Girl,” caused in part by drought, the starvation in “Portrait of a Child” was caused by the politics of the Armenian Genocide, which killed an estimated one and a half million Armenians. To date, the United States does not formally recognize the murders as genocide because of its political ties with Turkey, yet Olds bears witness to its reality by offering a sympathetic portrait in her

Confessional poetry of the suffering caused by the massacre.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, the U.S. economy and the American Dream underwent important changes. Confessional poetry changed accordingly; some Confessional poets took on new topics and explored psychological and/or sexual experiences in relation to political oppression, representing the truth of the body in the suffering of others. Forché and Olds, for example, speak about civil wars in El Salvador in the 1980s or Russia in the 1910s, and they represent the human rights violations in Germany in the 1940s during the Holocaust or in the

Ottoman Empire in the 1910s during the Armenian Genocide. Through the lens of her experiences in El Salvador, Forché critiques the excesses of the 1980s American Dream in The

Country Between Us (1981). While Olds does not write about political experiences as often as

Forché, she, too, serves as a witness to oppression in such works as The Dead and the Living

(1984) and The Gold Cell (1987). These collections counter yuppie materialism with the humanism underlying her Confessional poetry. Both poets feature familiar Confessional themes, such as miscarriage or sexual infidelity, yet, during this decade, Forché and Olds open their poetry to more explicitly politicized bodies. Although scholarship on Confessional poetry commonly overlooks social class, the politics of class works to shape the Confessional body, and the truths of the body for a generation.

CHAPTER 5

(STILL) UNDERWRITTEN BY WHITENESS: THE RACIAL POLITICS OF THE CONFESSIONAL BODY AND CONFESSIONAL POETRY OF COLOR IN CLIFTON AND OLDS

Confessional poetry reveals the changing understandings of “personal” versus “political” in U.S. culture, yet it also reflects those that remain over time. During the 1970s, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich wrote similar Confessional poems, yet scholarship on these poets identifies only Rich’s work as Confessional. Their example demonstrates that white women who write intimately about their bodies may engage political topics from within the Confessional Poetry

Movement, but when black women write intimately about their bodies, their work is considered exclusively political, and it is overwhelmingly associated with the Black Arts Movement, and not the Confessional Poetry Movement. Despite the progress of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1970s, Confessional poetry that continues into the 1980s and 1990s shows how these racial politics continue to exclude poets of color from the canon, since black bodies are consistently politicized in U.S. culture, while white bodies are less often recognized as racial.

In poems from Lucille Clifton’s good news about the earth (1972), two-headed woman

(1980), and quilting (1991), and Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell

(1987), and Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), Clifton and Olds represent the female Confessional body in their imagery of the reproductive female figure. Although both write Confessional poetry, only Olds is identified as a Confessional poet by critics. In fact, when Clifton’s poetry does draw scholars to compare her work to Confessionalism, they invariably qualify these statements in ways that do not apply to Olds’s oeuvre. This discrepancy demonstrates how black confessional voices are considered political in a way that dissociates them from Confessionalism, while white confessional voices, even if they address political themes, may still be considered personal, and

hence Confessional. Confessional poetry continues to be considered a white kind of writing, a genre that, in the words of Renée Curry, “constitutes writing authored from an acknowledged or unacknowledged white perspective; writing that implies or explicitly delivers the concept of

‘whiteness’ to a text; [or] writing that remains ‘ignorant’ regarding white racial politics internal to and external to the text” (2). However, Olds illustrates that white Confessionalism becomes more self-aware as white during this time. In conjunction with the rise of whiteness studies, her work begins to make whiteness more visible by representing it on the Confessional body.

Lucille Clifton and Sharon Olds

Lucille Clifton is a poet known for her minimalism. Her works are often composed of short poems that contain brief lines and omit capitalization. They frequently center on family life or black womanhood, and draw from her own personal experience. For example, Clifton was born with an extra finger on each hand, which were both amputated at birth, an experience she refers to in several of her poems, including “[i was born with twelve fingers],” “speaking of loss,” and “it was a dream.” Sharon Olds also writes poems that feature family life, such as the birth of a child, the death of a parent, or divorce from a spouse. Olds tends to write in a narrative fashion, and is especially known for her intense imagery. Clifton and Olds primarily published their works after the Confessional Poetry Movement proper had ended. Indeed, Clifton’s first book good times emerged in 1969 in the midst of the movement’s decline, and Olds’s first collection Satan Says appeared in 1980, years after its end. Nevertheless, poems from these authors are Confessional in their content and form alike. Both Clifton and Olds write intimately about the female body, exploring the female reproductive figure in terms of menstruation, miscarriage, and the womb. Both also construct their poems in the first-person with the autobiographical allusions and striking imagery associated with the genre. Although Clifton and

Olds both write in the tradition of the Confessional Poetry Movement, critics only classify Olds as Confessional (or Postconfessional). As with Rich and Lorde earlier, this disparity between

Clifton and Olds is based on the representation of race in their writing. Clifton writes confessionally about the black female body, so critics often disqualify her work as Confessional.

Olds represents whiteness more often than Rich, perhaps as a result of the influence of whiteness studies, yet she does not reference race as regularly as Clifton, and her racial imagery does not often register as political. Olds does write poems with explicitly political themes, such as

“Portrait of a Child,” yet, in the eyes of critics, these do not appear to invalidate her

Confessionalism. Many of the similarities and differences between Clifton and Olds resemble those of Rich and Lorde, establishing the racial politics underlying the genre of Confessional poetry across generations.

Much of the scholarship on Clifton does not identify her work with any school of poetry.

Scholars who do, most often consider her in context with the Black Arts Movement, and very rarely classify her as a Confessional poet, since, in U. S. culture, black bodies are constantly politicized, transforming the black poetic “I” to an inherent black poetic “we.” Researchers who take this approach include Ajuan Maria Mance, Hilary Holladay, and Bonnie Raub—the latter arguing that Clifton’s poetry needs to be framed by an understanding of her African American literary predecessors. Scarlet Cunningham points out the prominence of the Black Arts

Movement lens in criticism on Clifton. Interestingly, several scholars analyze how Clifton represents the body without ever referring to her Confessional style: Cunningham explores the aging body, Tanfer Emin Tunç the national body, and Tiffany Eberle Kriner the eschatological body. Cherise Pollard even focuses on how Clifton’s portrayals of the body speak to “womanly truths.” According to Pollard, “Clifton’s most powerful work is that which speaks the body’s

truths. These often take the form of poems about mothering, sexuality, defeating disease or surviving abuse” (20). Despite the strong links between truth, the body, and Confessional poetry,

Pollard’s research does not connect these links.

Furthermore, scholarship that does mention Clifton in context with Confessional poetry still distances her from the genre. For example, in Wild Blessings, the first book-length study of

Clifton’s poetry, Holladay writes that “Her mastery of lyric recalls the stylistic pleasures of imagism and the visceral emotion of Confessional poetry” (63). Holladay notes that Clifton’s work “recalls” Confessional poetry without ever directly characterizing it as Confessional. Tunç functions similarly; her article “The Poetics of Self-Writing: Women and the National Body in the Works of Lucille Clifton” refers to Clifton’s “very personal—almost confessional—works”

(189) and states that “she is probably best known for her frequently-anthologized ‘confessional’ gynocentric body poems” (196). Tunç’s use of “almost” in the first excerpt and quotation marks around the term “confessional” in the second excerpt demonstrate her reluctance to identify

Clifton as a Confessional poet, a view reflected by many scholars.

Although chronologically Olds is further removed than Clifton from the Confessional

Poetry Movement, she remains more closely associated with it. The intensity of her imagery, and the focus of her narrative poems in concrete experiences sometimes associates Olds with Deep

Image poetry, but the forbidden subjects of her works, and the seemingly autobiographical style of her writing identifies her more consistently with Confessional poetry. Some researchers cautiously label her Confessional, as Tunç does with Clifton. For example, Celia Carlson’s study of sensuous knowledge in lyric poetry studies the works of Gary Snyder and Sharon Olds, noting that “The poems of these two poets seem ‘confessional,’ aiming for a transparency, even a literal rendering of personal experience” (174). Others, however, classify her more directly. Brian

Reed’s article “Confessional poetry: Staging the Self,” which contrasts Olds’s craft with Sylvia

Plath’s, refers to her work as an example of contemporary Confessionalism. Gale Swiontkowski anchors her study of incest in Confessional poetry and automatically includes Olds in her discussion, with the likes of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich. Olds encounters this association in interviews as well, when interviewers—from Laurel Blossom in 1993 to Helen

Farish in 2008—ask her if she considers herself a Confessional poet. Olds replies: “the phrase I use isn’t ‘confessional poetry’ but ‘apparently personal poetry.’ When the term confessional is used, I think what people mean is apparently personal poetry” (qtd. in Farish 61). Preferring the phrase “apparently personal,” Olds distances herself from the label “Confessional,” as many canonized Confessionals themselves did, yet her sustained focus on the poetic self and bold exploration of personal, often secretive, experiences in her work often align her with the genre.

Throughout their careers, both Clifton and Olds explore topics associated with the reproductive female body, such as Clifton’s 1972 work “the lost baby poem.” This poem, addressed to an infant lost during pregnancy, refers to a miscarriage or abortion experienced by the speaker. Published prior to the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision to legalize abortion, “the lost baby poem” challenges social stigmas surrounding abortion and miscarriage by speaking from the perspective of a woman who has undergone the experience.21 The speaker remembers: “the time i dropped your almost body down / down to meet the waters under the city / and run one with the sewage to the sea” (80). She opens the poem with the shocking image of the infant’s corpse, whose “almost” body is not fully separate from her own. Readers learn that this discarded body, emphasized alliteratively with the “d” sounds in “dropped,” “down,” and again

21 The subject of abortion remains controversial today, as evidenced by the ongoing debates regarding abortion access in state legislatures across the country. Miscarriage, while less stigmatized, is still largely unspeakable for women who have undergone the experience. Indeed, in 2010, Alisa Volkman and Rufus Griscom gave a Ted Talk about four common parenting taboos; their presentation noted: “taboo #3: you can’t talk about your miscarriage.”

“down,” becomes part of the sewage disposed of at sea. This piece fits into a tradition of

Confessional poems on fetal mortality, such as Sylvia Plath’s “Stillborn” (1960) and Anne

Sexton’s “The Abortion” (1962). Notably, Clifton’s is the only poem of these to mention race.

The final stanza of “the lost baby poem” ends: “if i am ever less than a mountain / for your definite brothers and sisters / …let black men call me stranger / always for your never named sake” (80). Positioning blackness as a familiar and necessary aspect of the speaker’s identity politics, Clifton inscribes race on the female Confessional body.

The reproductive female body also appears in Olds’s oeuvre, which features a confession to the loss of an unborn baby in her 1984 poem “Miscarriage.” This poem continues the tradition of poems about fetal mortality in Confessional poetry, similar to Clifton’s “the lost baby poem.”

Like Clifton’s, Olds’s speaker narrates the piece from the perspective of a mother who is remembering and reflecting on the fetal tissue expelled from her uterus. Perhaps because of the tradition of Confessional poetry preceding her, Olds represents this experience more graphically than Clifton as well as Sexton and Plath, writing that: “When I was a month pregnant, the great / clots of blood appeared in the pale / green swaying water of the toilet. / Dark red like black in the salty / translucent brine, like forms of life / appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut / shapes of fungi” (The Dead and the Living 25). “Miscarriage” challenges taboos in part due to the unprecedented level of detail it ascribes to the body of the miscarried baby and associated waste.

The poem describes the shape the fetus takes in the toilet; indeed, the speaker uses references to clots, jellyfish, and fungi, to characterize its undeveloped body. This depiction shows the fetal tissue as not entirely an independent body, but part of the mother’s. The imagery here also involves a vivid use of colors: Olds contrasts the pale green of the porcelain toilet with the “dark red like black” of the fetus’s dissolving body. Despite all the color imagery, Olds does not

mention race at all. For her, it is irrelevant. However, like “the lost baby poem,” “Miscarriage” does explore the reproductive female body intimately, confessing to its moments of mess, grief, and loss.

Clifton and Olds write openly about menstruation as well, and, in so doing, write in the legacy of the Confessional Poetry Movement. Clifton follows in the footsteps of Sexton, who breaks silence on the topic in her 1966 poem “Menstruation at Forty,” although Sexton does so in a distinctly negative tone. In 1991, Clifton published “poem in praise of menstruation” writing:

if there is a river more beautiful than this bright as the blood red edge of the moon if

there is a river more faithful than this returning each month to the same delta if there

is a river braver than this coming and coming in a surge of passion, of pain if there is… (357)

In the poem, blood is glorious rather than gory. Clifton accomplishes this characterization by using metaphor to reimagine menstrual blood as a flowing river and then using this comparison to imbue menstruation with positive attributes, such as beauty, faithfulness, and bravery. The third stanza even assuages the pain of menstruation by romanticizing it with the “passion” of a coursing river. As characteristic of a Confessional poet, Clifton pays close attention to craft, so the form of the poem contributes to this effect as well: the building rhythm in the phrase “coming and coming in a surge” establishes an exhilarated tone. In addition, the form of the poem’s stanzas celebrates the ebb and flow of blood from the reproductive female body by repeating the

phrase “if there is a river,” so that the length of the final word(s) of each stanza waxes and then wanes in a cyclical fashion.

“poem in praise of menstruation” challenges social convention firstly by discussing menstrual blood, which still today is not considered a public topic of conversation, and secondly by glorifying it. While the cultural narratives surrounding menstruation are often negative, the confession of Clifton’s speaker is that she finds beauty in her bleeding. Confessional poems are well known for discussing secretive topics, and not as well known for expressing shame.

Sherwin observes that “despite the fact that many confessional poems are indeed based on real and traumatic experiences, the poets did not write to absolve themselves of guilt; only infrequently do they concern themselves with the topic of guilt at all” (25). Confessional poems that feature the female body often do so with pride, such as Sexton’s “Woman with Girdle” and

“Mr. Mine,” or confidence, such as Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” so the notable lack of shame that characterizes the poem’s discussion of a secretive topic aligns it with the aesthetics of female

Confessionalism, and confirms the political nature of the genre.

Less than a decade after Clifton published “poem in praise of menstruation” in quilting,

Olds published “When It Comes” in her 1999 collection Blood, Tin, Straw. This poem similarly celebrates menstruation, doing so in Olds’s trademark style, using her free-verse form and vivid imagery to explore controversial subject matter. In “When It Comes,” the speaker admits:

it’s lovely when it comes, and it’s a sexual loveliness, right along that radiant throat and lips, the first hem of it, and at times, the last steps across the bathroom, you make a dazzling trail, the petals the flower-girl scatters under the feet of the bride. And then the colors of it, sometimes an almost golden red, or a black vermillion (Blood, Tin, Straw 14)

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The poem represents the act of menstruating positively, and, furthermore, sexually. Olds employs gorgeous imagery, including the vivid colors similarly used in her poem “Miscarriage.”

Also characteristic of Olds, these lines portray the speaker’s body intimately. Although they focus primarily on her menstrual blood, they do not fail to observe the blood dripping “right along that radiant throat / and lips” (14). While Olds certainly brings her own style to this poem, it reads, in many ways, like a response to Clifton’s “poem in praise of menstruation.” Like

Clifton, Olds uses figurative language to romanticize menstrual blood and compare it with objects of beauty, such as the flower petals at a wedding. Later in the poem, for example, the speaker describes the dripping blood as “the delicate show; / like watching snow, or falling stars”

(Blood, Tin, Straw 14). In addition to her use of figurative language, Olds reflects Clifton in her use of various line lengths to mimic the ebb and flow of the menses.

Clifton and Olds also write Confessionally about the female reproductive body in poems that represent the womb. Indeed, Clifton’s 1991 work “poem to my uterus” resonates with

Sexton’s 1969 poem “In Celebration of My Uterus.” These works, published when Sexton was

41 and Clifton was 55, take on the perspective of an older woman who has been advised to undergo a hysterectomy. Clifton writes: “you uterus / you have been patient / as a sock / while i have slippered into you / my dead and living children / now / they want to cut you out / stocking i will not need / where i am going / where am i going” (380). Like Sexton, Clifton addresses the uterus directly, and asserts its value beyond its reproductive function. Her speaker confesses:

“old girl / without you / uterus / my bloody print / my estrogen kitchen / my black bag of desire / where can i go / barefoot / without you / where can you go / without me” (380). These lines establish the womb as an important, even beloved, part of the speaker’s identity, and, furthermore, invest it with complexity. The uterus does not function as a visible part of the

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female body, yet Clifton nonetheless depicts it with dimensionality. Many of her metaphors, e.g. sock, stocking, and kitchen, signify the womb as a cozy space. Clifton also portrays it as sexual

(a “black bag of desire”) as well as gory (a “bloody print”). The womb is usually a place of birth and beginnings, yet the speaker does not hesitate to portray it as a place of death too by remembering both the dead and the living children it held. Clifton not only pays tribute to the uterus, but examines it in relation to the Confessional themes of death and sex. “poem to my uterus” serves as another example of Confessionalism in Clifton’s work.

Olds’s poem “You Kindly,” published in 1999, expands on Clifton’s depiction of the womb as a “black bag of desire.” Although titled “You Kindly,” the poem concentrates on the body of the “I”: portraying the speaker in a loving sex scene that allows her to overcome past emotional abuse. Unlike in “poem to my uterus,” the uterus is not the main focus of this work, which also discusses the speaker’s vulva and breasts, yet Olds does include it as an important part of the sex act. The poem begins: “Because I felt too weak to move / you kindly moved for me, kneeling / and turning, until you could take my breast-tip in the / socket of your lips; and my womb went down / on itself, drew sharply over and over / to its tightest shape, the way, when newborns / nurse, the fist of the uterus / with each, milk, tug, powerfully / shuts” (Blood, Tin,

Straw 97). This passage, unusual for Olds in its lack of imagery, describes the womb for readers in terms of its actions. The speaker characterizes her womb as active as well as strong, using diction like “the fist of the uterus” and “powerfully shuts” (97). Olds details the contractions of the uterus in order to signify sexual climax. She appropriates these contractions, most commonly associated with the pains of childbirth, to sexualize the womb with the pleasure of orgasm and affirm its value outside of reproduction.

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The poem not only sexualizes the uterus, but locates the uterus at the center of sexual desire. Later in the stanza, the speaker remembers: “to see your / hand its ordinary self, when your mouth at my / breast was drawing sweet gashes of come / up from my womb made black fork-flashes of a / celibate’s lust shoot through me” (Blood, Tin, Straw 97). Again, Olds overlaps maternal with sexual imagery by correlating the act of nursing with sexual pleasure. This strategy challenges sexual taboos in the same way as Confessional poems. “You Kindly” draws upon the joy felt for the womb expressed in Clifton’s “poem for my uterus” and Sexton’s “In

Celebration of My Uterus,” intimately representing the reproductive female body. Olds and

Clifton represent the female body in moments of triumph and loss alike, breaking silences about this body and revealing its complexity. The similarities between these poems demonstrate the

Confessionalism used by both poets.

Despite the similarities in their Confessionalism, only Clifton identifies the female

Confessional body as black. Pride in this body constitutes a theme in her “homage” poems.

Clifton’s 1980 “homage to my hair” reclaims the beauty of nappy hair, often denigrated according to white standards of beauty. The short poem reads: “when i feel her jump up and dance / i hear the music! my God / i’m talking about my nappy hair! / she is a challenge to your hand / black man, / she is as tasty on your tongue as good greens / black man, / she can touch your mind / with her electric fingers and / the grayer she do get, good God, / the blacker she do be!” (197). The speaker takes pride in the beauty of her nappy hair with a tone of exhilaration, highlighted by the exclamation points at the beginning and end of the stanza. She displays a self- confidence similar to the speaker in Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” when she tell readers: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” (17). Describing the taste of her hair,

Clifton’s speaker employs the visceral imagery associated with Confessional poetry. This work

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also channels Confessionalism because it challenges social conventions by not only declaring nappy hair attractive, but affirming the sexuality of the aging female body.

The racial identity of the speaker is central to “homage to my hair.” Scarlet Cunningham notes that “the speaker and her partner jump, dance, and celebrate her body because of her blackness” (32), and remarks that “Her race contributes to her beauty and sexual desirability in this poem” (32). Clifton also references race by addressing the poem directly to black men. Her poem “homage to my hips” (1980) similarly values blackness by challenging white standards of beauty, confessing “these hips are big hips” and then celebrating “these hips are mighty hips. / these hips are magic hips” (198). Clifton uses a Confessional style to represent the black body in other works as well, including “lane is the pretty one” (1969), “the way it was” (1972), “[the bodies broken on]” (1972), “[the thirty eighth year]” (1974), and “my dream about being white”

(1987), which demonstrate the prevalence of racial identity as a theme in her poetry.

While Olds does not write about race as regularly as Clifton, her Confessional poems written in the 1980s indicate the budding visibility of whiteness as racial in U.S. culture and literature.22 Olds embodies whiteness and blackness in her 1987 poem “On the Subway.” This work stands out in her poetry because it is a direct meditation on race, and the confession of the speaker is her white guilt. The upper class white speaker, who sits opposite a black man on a subway car, observes the racial tension they both feel as she eyes the man’s shoes, “black sneakers / laced with white in a complex pattern like a / set of intentional scars,” and he in turn examines her dark fur coat, “the whole skin of an animal / taken and used” (The Gold Cell 5).

22 Olds actually ascribes whiteness most often to the male Confessional body, particularly the figure of the young son. Her poem “The Mother” depicts the son “white as a buoy” (Satan Says 57), and “Blue Son” describes to readers “His white skin, / so fine it has no grain, goes blue-” (The Sign of Saturn 43). In “Six-Year-Old Boy,” Olds portrays the son peeing in the countryside, and observes: “he shakes himself dry, penis tossing like a / horse’s white neck” (The Sign of Saturn 39). Interestingly, these representations often associate whiteness with weakness.

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She tells readers “he is black / and I am white” (5), and reflects on how their racialized bodies affect their lived realities: “There is / no way to know how easy this / white skin makes my life, this / life he could take so easily and / break across his knee like a stick the way his / own back is being broken, the / rod of his soul that at birth was dark and / fluid and rich as the heart of a seedling” (The Gold Cell 5-6). This excerpt uses imagery to characterize the man’s soul with tenderness, and his body with violence. However, Olds does not portray his body with the precise imagery characteristic of her style. Apart from referring to her white skin, the speaker does not detail her own body either, and spends more time in the poem focusing on their clothing. In comparison with the color imagery in “Miscarriage” or “When It Comes,” the lack of imagery in “On the Subway” is striking, demonstrating that the racialized body is not a presence in Olds’s work.

Although Olds does not approach race as thoroughly as she treats other topics, she does invest the female body with a more detailed description of whiteness than is offered, for example, in Rich’s poetry the decade before. Other glimpses of race in Olds’s oeuvre include

“Still Life” (1987) and “This” (1987). The speaker of her poem “Still Life” ascribes whiteness to the Confessional body, albeit briefly, telling readers: “I lie on my back after making love, / breasts white in shallow curves like the lids of soup dishes, / nipples shiny as berries, speckled and immutable. / My legs lie down there somewhere in the bed like those / great silver fish dropping over the edge of the table” (The Gold Cell 55). The white of her breasts and silver of her legs signifies the speaker’s race. This representation of whiteness does not focus on racism, and does not feature white bodies in contrast with black bodies. The poem presents whiteness individually, even confessionally, since, as Michel Foucault observes, “sex was a privileged theme of confession” (61), and “Still Life” racializes the speaker’s body post coitus.

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Olds’s poem “This” (1987) behaves similarly. The speaker defines her identity through her sexual body, telling readers “don’t ask me about my country or who my / father was or even what I do, if you / want to know who I am, I am this, this” (63). Given the primacy of the body for Olds, the poem is typical of her work, yet it stands out as it racializes the white body. The speaker claims: “I have this, / so this is who I am, this body / white as yellowish dough brushed with dry flour / pressed to his body. I am these breasts that / crush against him like collapsible silver / travel cups that telescope into themselves” (63). The flour-covered dough and the silver travel cups not only represent the speaker’s body as white, but—rare among white Confessional poets—invest her whiteness with imagery.

“This,” “Still Life,” and “On the Subway” show the emerging cultural consciousness of whiteness as racial, although whiteness still largely remains invisible in U.S. culture during this time. According to Toni Morrison, “in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse…It is further complicated by the fact that the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture” (9-10). Amongst collections such as

Satan Says (1980), The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell (1987), The Sign of Saturn

(1991), and Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), few of Olds’s poems represent race on the body and fewer still do so confessionally. Nonetheless, the beginnings of change are evident in Old’s work, and they help to re-shape the racial politics that underlie the genre of Confessional poetry.

While Olds and Clifton differ as poets in many instances, such as Clifton’s trademark experimentation with capitalization and Olds’s narrative style, both explore previously unspeakable topics, like abortion, miscarriage, menstruation, and the womb, in the tradition of the Confessional Poetry Movement. The female Confessional body forms an important theme in the works of both writers, although Clifton’s frequent representation of this figure as black

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politicizes her poetry in a way that does not apply to the bodily representations of whiteness by

Olds. In fact, Old’s portrayals of whiteness tend to be read only as imagery, whereas Clifton’s portrayals of blackness also resonate with political ideology. Even when Olds’s work is explicitly political, as in “Portrait of a Child” or “On the Subway,” it does not undermine her reputation as a Confessional or “apparently personal” poet. The racial politics of Confessional poetry, which conceive of whiteness as personal and blackness as only political, associate Olds much more closely with the genre, despite Clifton having published similar poems in an earlier timeframe. The similarities and differences between Clifton and Olds echo those of Rich and

Lorde in the 1970s, suggesting that across generations the canon of Confessional poetry remains defined by whiteness.

The inclusion and exclusion of poets from the canon of Confessional poetry demonstrates the changing and unchanging conceptions of the “personal” versus the “political” in mainstream

U.S. culture. The increasing representation and embodiment of whiteness by Olds, as well as

Rich, during the 1980s demonstrates the emerging politicization of whiteness during the late

1980s and 1990s. Curry’s book White Women Writing White, among other studies of whiteness in literature, indicates that it is becoming less and less possible for authors to write white without recognizing (or being recognized for) their racial context. Whiteness still monopolizes what registers as personal in Confessional poetry and as universal in U.S. literature. A race analysis of the Confessional Poetry Movement reveals that the canonical Confessional body is white, while largely invisible as such. Blackness, however, consistently registers as political, as seen in the peak of the Confessional Poetry Movement from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, when white

Confessionals such as Sexton avoided discussions of race as irrelevant to their personal lives, as well as afterward, from the late 1970s to the 1990s, in the works of black poets like Lorde and

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Clifton associated with the politics of the Black Arts Movement. Many nonblack writers of color also participate in the legacy of the Confessional Poetry Movement, such as Marilyn Chin or

Denice Frohman, who write intimate, seemingly autobiographical poetry that employs striking imagery and broaches forbidden social topics. These poets underscore the need for more research on the dynamics of Confessional poetry and race in order to explore the content considered confessional among and between different facets of U.S. culture, and to examine the influence of race on the construction of truth. By revealing what a culture considers confessional, or truthful,

Confessional poems can illustrate divisive social issues and systemic problems. Scholarship on

Confessional poetry has long established the genre’s engagement with the politics of gender, and needs to explore its engagement with the politics of race, so as to confront the false binary between racial and Confessional writing, and recognize the contributions of nonwhite

Confessional poetry.

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CHAPTER 6

SUFFERING, SEXUALITY, AND MASCULINITY: TRUTH AND THE MALE CONFESSIONAL BODY IN OLDS AND MOSES

Confessional poetry continues to illustrate the truths of the body for U.S. culture into the twenty-first century. Throughout the Confessional Poetry Movement, men’s bodies were rarely considered truths to be confessed, although women’s were often featured prominently. In the

1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the male body is largely absent, and hence irrelevant, within the confessions of W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Earlier female Confessionals, including

Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich, infrequently focus on the male body as well. During the 1960s and 1970s, Sexton features the female body in groundbreaking ways, such as in relation to aging in “Woman with Girdle,” puberty in “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman,” mental illness in “Cripples and Other Stories,” and infidelity in “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife.”

During the 1970s, Rich’s depictions of lesbian sexuality, such as in her Twenty-One Love Poems, also represent the female body in a momentous and meaningful fashion. Both poets portray the male body more frequently than Snodgrass or Lowell, but notably less often than the female figure, for which their poetry is known. By and large, the male body is not a subject of

Confessional poetry during this time, demonstrating that it does not qualify as a truth to be confessed for men as it does for women. Since men’s bodies have historically occupied positions of power, they have not been considered as shameful, so they have not been considered as secretive.

A shift in this trend occurs in the 1980s and continues into the present, in which men’s bodies emerge, more regularly and more revealingly, to be a truth of them, as exhibited by

Sharon Olds in her collections Satan Says (1980), The Gold Cell (1987), The Sign of Saturn

(1991), The Father (1992), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), and Stag’s Leap (2012), as well as Gabe

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Moses in his Spoken Word poems “Teeth” (2011), “How to Make Love to a Trans Person”

(2013), “Stimming” (2013) and “The Other Side of the Knife” (2014). Olds and Moses continue the trend established by Lowell and Snodgrass that when men’s bodies do appear in Confessional poetry, the truth of them is often that they are disempowered. The increased visibility of the male body in Olds and Moses additionally reveals its increased sexualization during this time. Indeed, imagery of men weakened, suffering, or dying, as well as naked or eroticized forms a motif throughout their works.

Masculinity studies of Confessional poetry tend to focus on masculinity as represented exclusively in and by cisgender men, primarily concentrating on Lowell or Snodgrass. For example, Brian Brodhead Glaser and Christopher Pugh approach masculinity through the trope of fatherhood in the works of Lowell and/or Snodgrass, while Ian Gregson examines how the trope of the mermaid in Lowell’s work reflects his “ambivalent attitude to male potency” (17) and ambiguous desire for “autonomous masculinity” (27). However, this focus overlooks representations of masculinity from other perspectives, such as by cisgender women and transgender writers, and, as a result, fails to form a more comprehensive understanding of the male body in U.S. culture. The male body becomes more visible in later Confessional poems, as influenced by both the time period and gender identity of the poets, including Olds’s position as a daughter or lover, and Moses’s position as a transgender man.

Like Snodgrass and Lowell, Olds and Moses show that a man’s body constitutes a truth of him largely when it differs from the hegemonic construction of masculinity. Indeed, the empowered male body rarely materializes as a Confessional truth, since, as a societal standard, it does not qualify as secretive. Between the 1980s and 2010s, the sexualized male body also emerges as truth to be confessed. Foucault recognizes that “From the Christian penance to the

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present day, sex was a privileged theme of confession” (61), situating the genre of confession in the history of the church confessional, where sins of lust, such as masturbation, premarital sex, and adultery, were commonly disclosed as truths. Furthermore, sex comes to signify truth because it entails how people’s bodies identify and interact with themselves; each other; and a complex web of ideas associated with parenthood, marriage, purity, love, lust, pleasure, and disease. (Related to sex, nudity is often a cultural symbol for truth, underlying the common expression “the naked truth.”) Sex functions as a central truth of the body for men and women alike. However, the sexualization of men’s bodies is especially confessional given that many cultures, the U.S. included, focus on women’s bodies as sites of sexual objectification. Michael

Kimmel, for example, notes that although “pornography is, at its heart, about men…most pornographic images are of women” (67). Therefore, eroticizing men’s bodies feminizes them in a way, since it positions them as sites of sexual objectification—a status, as aforementioned, usually reserved for women. Like disempowerment, sexualization forms a truth of the male

Confessional body because it challenges hegemonic American masculinity by sweeping aside the cloak of invisibility that typically prevents scrutiny of men’s bodies as bodies.

Sharon Olds

Whereas the Confessionalism of Snodgrass and Lowell focuses on other themes, including divorce and mental illness, the Confessional body commands the center of attention in

Olds’s poetry. Her work builds on the Confessional poets who precede her, as well as the erotic poetry pioneered by Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. Indeed, Whitman’s intimate focus on the male body in “Song of Myself” or “I Sing the Body Electric,” and Ginsberg’s bold depictions of male homosexuality in “Howl” resonate with Olds’s poems like “The Pope’s Penis” or “My

Father’s Breasts.” She has become known for the primacy and intimacy of the body in her

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poetry, and, like most Confessional poets, has received mixed reactions from critics. Some, such as Peter Scheponik, laud how “Olds embraces the corporeal, elevating the material world, at times, to the point of deification” (52). Others, like Anis Shivani, ask “Can she really be saying this? Where is her shame?” (211). The representation of the Confessional body in Olds’s poetry marks an important shift in American cultural attitudes about gender, truth, and the politics of body. Her oeuvre evidences an emerging consciousness of men’s bodies as truths of their identities, since male and female bodies appear regularly in her writing, such as seen from the perspective of a daughter, lover, ex-wife, or woman more generally, in Satan Says (1980), The

Gold Cell (1987), The Sign of Saturn (1991), The Father (1992), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), and

Stag’s Leap (2012). In these collections, Olds explores new stylizations of the male body, although preceding patterns emerge in her work as well. From the 1980s to the 2010s, Olds’s poetry not only illustrates the increased visibility of the male body during this time, but establishes what it becomes visible as in U.S. culture during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Olds’s writing not only renders the male body visible, but often features it as the subject of her poems. The female gaze at the male form informs a great deal of her poetry; in fact, Olds acknowledges the prevalence of this gaze in her 1991 poem “Looking at My Father,” which confesses to readers: “I could look at my father all day / and not get enough” (The Sign of Saturn

64). For the speaker, the desire to look becomes a compulsion: “my body / knows it knows, it likes to / slip the leash of my mind and go and / look at him, like an animal / looking at water, then going to it and / drinking until it has had its fill and can / lie down and sleep” (The Sign of

Saturn 65). The male body is neither invisible nor irrelevant here. Rather, the poem acknowledges the materiality of the male body and illustrates its importance as an object of the

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gaze. The interest in the male Confessional body established in “Looking at My Father” results in imagery that describes it closely and abundantly throughout Olds’s work. At times, her imagery takes shape in the form of a list that follows the speaker’s eye while it scans the male body from head to toe. Olds’s 1999 poem “Once” uses this technique to narrate the scene of a daughter walking in on her father in the bathroom. Although she sees her father briefly before she closes the door and leaves, the speaker notes: “my eye had driven / up the hairpin mountain road of the / naked male” (Blood, Tin, Straw 21). She observes him closely, telling readers:

and there, surrounded by the glistening turquoise tile, sitting on the toilet, was my father, all of him, and all of him was skin. In an instant my gaze ran in a single, swerving, unimpeded swoop, up: toe, ankle, knee, hip, rib, nape, shoulder, elbow, wrist, knuckle, my father. He looked so unprotected, so seamless, and shy, like a girl on a toilet (Blood, Tin, Straw 21)

Olds’s imagery underscores the physicality of the father in contrast with the bathroom tile, since against the turquoise “all of him / was skin.” She describes the father in clinical detail, listing the different body parts encompassed by the daughter’s gaze, before interpreting his body as like a small girl’s. This comparison of the father to a girl recognizes the male body, especially the body of the patriarch, as an unlikely source of objectification, since women’s bodies have more commonly been objectified in U.S. culture. Therefore, “Once” flips the cultural script by positioning the father’s body to be on display to the daughter’s gaze.

The poetic gaze concentrates on the male form, placing it at the center of the poem, again in “Not Going to Him” (2012). This poem focuses on the figure of the ex-husband. Published in

Stag’s Leap, a collection that narrates the story of a divorce, the poem witnesses a wife’s grief at the loss of her long-time spouse. The speaker expresses this grief as physically felt, writing that

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“My body may never learn / not to yearn for that one” (25). Her nostalgia focuses her attention on her ex-husband’s body. Beginning at his feet, “those time-worn / heels, those elegant flat feet”

(Stag’s Leap 25), she pictures his figure from bottom to top:

…in a sweep, calf shin knee thigh pelvis waist, and I run my irises over his feathered chest, and there, on his neck, the scar, doll-saucer of tarnish set in time’s throat, and up to the nape and then dive again, as the swallows fly at speed—cliff and barn and bank and tree—at twilight (Stag’s Leap 25)

The passing of time, or, more specifically, the passing of time as it marks the body, forms an important theme in this passage. This theme emphasizes the ex-husband’s body as a man’s body, illustrated in the description of his “time-worn heels,” his “feathered chest,” and the scar at his throat. In “Not Going to Him,” the hegemonic male body finally materializes. Olds represents the ex-husband with a combination of literal and figurative language. The passage begins clinically, with a list that names body parts similar to the imagery in “Once,” then progressively becomes more figurative until transforming into the striking image of the swallows at twilight.

The swallows’ dive suggests the speaker’s quickly averted gaze, which prevents her from continuing up her ex-husband’s body to imagine his face. The absence of the ex-husband’s face here is particularly significant given that Olds’s poems tend to concentrate on looking rather than looking away. This absence differs from the invisible or deferred male body in earlier

Confessionalism: whereas for Snodgrass and Lowell the male body remains largely irrelevant, for Olds in “Not Going to Him” the male face is too relevant to the ex-wife’s sense of loss to be depicted. She cannot bring herself to look at his face, so she concentrates on his body, rendering it visible to readers in representation of his memory and her grief.

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Olds indicates a cultural shift regarding the increased visibility of the male Confessional body, yet her poetry carries on the truths of earlier Confessionalism: when men materialize in her work, she frequently depicts them as disempowered, as in her poem “The Lifting” from her 1992 collection The Father. The Father closely chronicles a daughter’s experiences before, during, and after her father’s death, intimately charting the transformations his body undergoes at each stage. In “The Lifting,” which alludes autobiographically to Olds,23 the father calls to his daughter to witness the weight he has lost during his sickness. The daughter reports: “I looked / where his solid ruddy stomach had been / and I saw the skin fallen into loose / soft hairy rippled folds / lying in a pool of folds/ down at the base of his abdomen, / the gaunt torso of a big man / who will die soon” (The Father 15). The father’s skin shows his recent fall from power: from a strong, healthy man with a “solid ruddy stomach” to a weakened invalid with loose skin and a

“gaunt torso.” The rhythm of the last two lines, which pairs the spondaic phrases “big man” and

“die soon,” emphasizes the dichotomy of the father’s previous strength with the reality of the mortal illness that has weakened him.

“The Exact Moment of His Death,” also published in The Father, extends this motif by describing the scene of the father’s death through the daughter’s close observation of his body.

Indeed, Olds relates this moment not as a spiritual or emotional experience, but as a distinctly physical event. After he takes his last breath, Olds notes: “for a moment it was fully / he, my father, dead but completely / himself, a man with an open mouth and / black spots on his arms”

(The Father 35). She goes on to describe his transformation from a dead parent into a cadaver:

He seemed to be holding still, then the skin tightened slightly around his whole body as if the purely physical were claiming him,

23 The opening lines of the poem allude to Olds by name: “Suddenly my father lifted up his nightie, I / turned my head away but he cried out / Shar!, my nickname, so I turned and looked” (The Father 15). Here, Olds presents a poetic version of herself to readers.

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and then it was not my father, it was not a man, it was not an animal, I ran my hand slowly through the hair, lifted my fingers up through the grey waves of it, the unloving glistening matter of this world (The Father 36)

This scene features the father’s body in the moment of its ultimate disempowerment. Olds links death, power, and the body here by associating the imagery of the father’s tightening skin with an anaphora of his lost identities: or, more specifically, the lost power of his identities as father, man, and sentient being. The father’s body changes from the source of his masculinity and humanity to a mass of beautiful, yet inert matter. It is significant that poems like “The Lifting” and “The Exact Moment of His Death” feature the father instead of the mother, since death—as a loss of power—is more confessional for men. Anna Woodford, examining how The Father challenges the tradition of the filial elegy, notes the prevalence of the male corpse in women’s poetry, observing that “If male poets have used the female body for their own ends, then female poets, notably American poets, may be said to have used the male corpse” (2). Along with other scholars, Woodford focuses on how the father’s dying/dead body reflects on the changing identity of the speaker, yet overlooks how it reflects the evolving body politics of U.S. culture.

Olds’s poetry exhibits how the hegemonic male body has become more visible as a body, and how the male figure functions more as a truth of his character when disempowered.

In addition to the disempowered male figure, the sexualized male figure emerges as a truth of the male body in Olds’s Confessionalism, including her 1987 poem “First Sex.”

Olds stands apart from earlier Confessional poets with regard to the detail she invests in the sexualized male body. Snodgrass and Lowell acknowledge sex infrequently in their work, while

Sexton, known for challenging cultural silences to write about masturbation, menstruation, and the like, rarely sexualizes the male form. Olds instead builds upon the erotic poetry of Whitman

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and Ginsberg, exploring the male body with a singular breadth and depth in order to exhibit it as a human body. “First Sex” narrates a woman’s first sexual experience, and the poem stands out not only because it focuses on the male body, but because it positions him as the passive recipient of sexual pleasure. The speaker notes:

the tiny hairs curling on his legs like fine, gold shells, his sex harder and harder under my palm and yet not hard as a rock his face cocked back as if in terror, the sweat jumping out of his pores like sudden trails from the tiny snails when his knees locked with little clicks and under my hand he gathered and shook and the actual flood like milk came out of his body (The Gold Cell 50)

The imagery in this passage eroticizes the man’s body in a way that emphasizes his humanity.

Although some of its similes (e.g. gold shells, tiny snails) shift away from the body, they refer to specific anatomy (e.g. tiny hairs, sweating pores) instead of alluding to the body more vaguely, as in earlier Confessional poetry. This stanza sexualizes the whole body: it refers to the man’s penis, but also his face, his knees, his hair, and his sweat. Olds humanizes him further by rejecting clichéd sexual expressions (i.e. “not hard as a rock”) in favor of more realistic narration. The intimate subject matter of the poem presents it to readers as a discourse of truth, implying the man’s sexualized body as a truth of his character. Olds’s work extends the genre of

Confessional poetry by applying the Confessional theme of sex, along with the Confessional style of first-person narration and bold imagery, to a relatively new subject: the male form.

Olds’s poetry eroticizes the bodies of not only sexual partners, but father figures. In so doing, she recovers the father’s body from two forms of cultural erasure: the politics of masculinity that render the hegemonic male body invisible, and the incest taboo that renders the father’s body largely inaccessible to his daughter. Olds features the father’s sexualized body with

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regard to the mother, such as in “Night Terrors” (1980), and also with regard to the daughter. In

“Reading You” (1980), for example, the daughter refers to her father: “Man, male, his cock that I have loved / beyond the others, beyond goodness, so far beyond / pleasure I have loved his hatred, coldness, / indifference, solid blackness” (Satan Says 70). The father’s penis serves as the focal point of the daughter’s unattainable desire for him. Olds’s reference to the father’s penis, particularly forbidden to his daughter, heightens the sense of his inaccessibility, yet nonetheless anchors his character (otherwise characterized intangibly with “coldness,” “blackness,” and the like) in a material body. The next stanza also represents the father’s unavailability in terms of his body: “The head turned away / The eyes turned away / The chest, breasts, bathing suit—half / me, half mine!” (Satan Says 70). In this passage, Olds merges the father’s body with his daughter’s: the averted head and eyes suggest the remoteness of the father’s figure, while the breasts suggest the femininity of the daughter’s body, and the speaker’s exclamation “half / me, half mine!” intermixes their anatomies. Here, Olds challenges the distance between father’s and daughter’s bodies as dictated by the body politics of American culture. Indeed, her attribution of feminine characteristics to the father’s body renders it relatable, and thus accessible, to the daughter. The speaker’s focus on the father’s penis and breasts in “Reading You” does not necessarily position him as an object of sexual desire; rather, for her, his sexual body is inseparable from his identity as a father.

Olds further defies cultural taboos to sexualize one of the least visible male bodies ever in

“The Pope’s Penis” (1987). The poem reads: “It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate / clapper at the center of a bell. / It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a / halo of silver seaweed, the hair / swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night, / while his eyes sleep, it stands up / in praise of God” (The Gold Cell 19). Although its title is explicit, “The Pope’s Penis” describes the

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male Confessional body through more figurative than literal imagery. Olds uses distinctly religious symbolism in her characterization of the pope’s penis as a bell clapper or a ghostly fish, and his pubic hair as a “halo” of seaweed. Although this imagery does not represent the male body as precisely as Olds does in “First Sex,” “The Lifting,” or “Not Going to Him,” it reads explicitly because the body she describes belongs to the pope. The pope’s age, gender, and office in the Catholic Church as the voice of God combine to render his body not only invisible, but unthinkable to most. Olds, however, challenges readers to consider the bodily existence of the pope, and explores the physical experience of holding the holy office he does by locating his penis within his papal regalia and considering the warmth of wearing these clothes on his skin.

As in “Reading You,” Olds sexualizes the pope’s body without necessarily making it the object of the speaker’s sexual desire. She portrays sexualized bodies as universally human, positioning them as a truth for men like they are for women.

Gabe Moses

Gabe Moses speaks to the changing truths of the male body in the Confessionalism of his contemporary Spoken Word poetry. The genres of Spoken Word and Slam, which have gained prominence in U.S. culture during the twenty-first century, continue the work of the

Confessional Poetry Movement to a great extent. As Susan B.A. Somers-Willett observes, Slam poems “engage a first-person, narrative mode which encourages a live audience to perceive the performance as a confessional moment” (52). Furthermore, these works use first-person narration to broach intimate or forbidden topics, many of which engage the body. The representation of the body in Spoken Word poetry is particularly significant, given that these works, performed by the poet instead of published on the page, are literally embodied. Therefore, the poet’s postures, gestures, facial expressions, and tones of voice form part of the text of the

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poem. Moses’s poems, primarily performed between 2011 and 2014, represent the male

Confessional body informed by his own embodiment as a transgender, autistic, working-class individual. Moses frequently positions the male form as both the medium and subject of his works, extending the visibility of the male body found in Olds. Like Olds, Moses often exhibits the male body as either disempowered or sexualized. However, his perspective as a transgender man offers a window into the evolving truths of the male body inspired by the rise of the LGBT movement, and opens up discourses often invisible in the works of cisgender Confessionals.

Moses’s lived experience as a transgender man renders the hegemonic male body visible in his work. His poem “The Other Side of the Knife,” performed at the 2014 Capturing Fire

Queer Spoken Word Summit & Slam, reflects on the power of this body and the invisibility of its power in cultural conversations concerning manhood. Moses opens the piece from the perspective of a transman who is reflecting on the vulnerability of his prior lived experience as a female walking down the street. He recounts behaviors such as quickening his steps to avoid potential danger, and reaching into his pockets to close his fingers around the reassurance of a pocketknife. Moses explains a different set of anxieties after transition, telling listeners: “I spent a lifetime practicing not to look like prey. I’m still learning how not to look like a predator. This is the part they don’t tell you about.”24 These lines acknowledge the silence about the other side of this issue: the threatening presence of the man seen walking down the street. Illustrating the lived experience on this “side of the knife,” Moses says:

When I transitioned from female to male, no one ever told me finally having a body I felt comfortable in would cause others so much…discomfort. They braced me for the lengthening of my vocal cords and the corded muscles that would twine themselves around my stringy arms, for my skin to thicken, toughen like a hard patch of soil, so new hairs would push through it coarse, and tangled. They told me what transition looks like, feels like, but not what it walks like. Testosterone treatment has Frankensteined me into something you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley.

24 Moses performs live, so the punctuation of his Spoken Word poems is approximate based on my transcription.

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This passage portrays the hegemonic male body with vivid imagery, and Moses’s performance provides further representation, including gestures such as splaying his fingers upward to mimic sprouting body hair. His poem characterizes the male form figuratively as well as literally, using the neologism “Frankensteined” to connote the new threat posed by the body after transition from female to male. Compared to the imposing image of Frankenstein’s (male) monster,

Moses’s body can be seen as fairly short and slight, emphasizing how the exaggerated danger of his body in this line is related to his gender identity more so than his actual strength or physique.

“The Other Side of the Knife” reiterates the silence surrounding this issue in the lines: “They told me what transition looks like, feels like, but not what it walks like.” Indeed, the representation of the empowered male body, and the danger signified by it, is largely invisible in earlier

Confessionalism. Moses highlights how this body is perceived to be threatening, underscoring the link between hegemonic masculinity and violence.

Moses’s work represents the male body as empowered, yet, in the pattern of previous

Confessionals, also positions it as disempowered. His performance of the poem “How to Make

Love to a Trans Person” at the 2013 Leaf Poetry Slam portrays the trans Confessional body in the context of sexual pleasure, but also shows the female-to-male body when in pain. Moses structures the poem as a “how to” guide, organized by an anaphora of “do” and “do not” advice.

Superimposing the act of removing someone’s clothes for sex with the act of removing their bandages for treatment, he instructs listeners not to express pity: “When you peel layers of clothing from his skin, do not act as though you are changing dressings on a trauma patient, even though it’s highly likely that you are.” These lines highlight the emotional pain transgender men can feel during sex caused by shame and anxiety about their bodies, as well as the physical pain endured by these bodies, which have been wounded in the process of transition. Moses calls

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attention to this suffering, stating, “Do not tell him that the needlepoint bruises on his thighs look like they hurt.” His physical presence during these lines underscores this point, since he clenches his eyes shut as if in pain. Moses continues to characterize the trans male body via emotional and physical pain; he explains that “If you are being offered a body that has already been laid upon an altar of surgical steel, a sacrifice to whatever gods govern bodies that come with some assembly required, whatever you do, do not say that the carefully sculpted landscape bordered by rocky ridges of scar tissue looks almost natural.” This advice emphasizes the body’s vulnerability and fragility. Positioned on an altar and traversed with scar tissue, the FTM figure appears without any of the power ascribed to the strong male body in “The Other Side of the

Knife.” Moses’s attention to the scars marks the body as disempowered not only by registering its suffering, but also by distinguishing it from the hegemonic (i.e. cisgendered) male form.

Moses represents the male Confessional body disempowered by pain again in his 2013 poem “Stimming” about Asperger’s syndrome. Performed at the 2013 Capturing Fire Queer

Spoken Word Summit & Slam, where Moses was named champion, “Stimming” discusses the self-stimulating behavior common to individuals with autism. Moses begins the poem by listing examples of these behaviors, such as repetitively dragging a shoe along the floor, rubbing a hand across one’s hair, or flipping a light switch off and on. Throughout this segment, Moses matches his body to his words by mimicking these behaviors before the audience, gradually increasing his cadence and tone. He gestures more and more frantically before stopping altogether and stating that “Somewhere between then and now…I got better at hiding it, taught my body to shimmy through trap doors I could fit in my pockets when this world was too much.” These lines focus on Asperger’s syndrome as a specifically bodily issue, one that requires constant body

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monitoring, and that causes constant physical discomfort. Moses goes on to describe this suffering:

I have swarms of fire ants just under my skin. They are never not moving. I am never not aware of them. Most of the time it’s just something I’ve gotten used to until something touches me the wrong way and makes all of them bite. My skin burns, spreading out in ripples from the epicenter of me: all of my cells are screaming, and the only way to quiet them is to flap, rock, twist, spin, drag shoe along floor, rub hand across hair. Notice the release of it. Do it again.

This passage uses the metaphor of fire ants to manifest the invisible physical pain that causes many individuals with Asperger’s to engage in the visible behavior of stimming. Moses’s poetry often describes the body with figurative language, which contrasts the precision of Olds’s imagery, to help communicate to audiences the painful experiences of nontraditional bodies. The subjects of his works, such as in “Stimming,” often include minority bodies that have been marginalized by the norms of mainstream body politics.

The Confessionalism of Moses’s Spoken Word also features the male body disempowered by social class. His 2011 poem “Teeth” describes the pain of an aching tooth to reflect on the physical effects of being poor and the resulting body image issues. The extended focus on teeth in the poem contrasts with the falling and rotting teeth mentioned only briefly in

Snodgrass’s “April Inventory” and “Heart’s Needle” half a century earlier, a disparity that demonstrates the progressing visibility of the male body in Confessional poetry. Moses’s persona describes his teeth using a myriad of figurative language. For example, he describes his mouth as a closed fist and his teeth as tombstones, then memorials. Furthermore, he confesses: “No one in my family has all their teeth—and the ones we have, ain’t always pretty. We have mouthfuls of workhorses, coal shovels, 83 Buicks with busted grills. Things not built for show, but to keep working as long as they can.” These lines depict the teeth with the imagery of blue-collar masculinity. However, Moses also portrays the teeth more vulnerably, identifying the aching

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half-tooth at the back as a crescent moon, or a house hanging onto an eroding cliff. These varied stylizations represent the teeth with complexity. Toward the end of Moses’s performance, the poem shifts again, as Moses’s persona decides to appreciate his dental imperfections, and even invites them: “Let every girl I’ve ever kissed leave her marks in enamel soft enough to wear scratches where our teeth collide.” Although he starts the poem by lamenting his tooth pain, he ends it by affirming the damaged state of his teeth. He declares: “When they find my bones, my mouth will not be a blank canvas. In every imperfection, my teeth will tell the story that they belonged to someone who was handed a life as often bitter as sweet, as often tough as tender, but still chewed and swallowed every messy bite.” This affirmation is significant, given its context in the male body. Poems that revise mainstream standards of beauty popularly occur with regard to the bodies of women or people of color, which more commonly have been scrutinized (and stigmatized), and appear less often with regard to white, male bodies, which more commonly have not. Therefore, the revised standards of beauty offered in “Teeth” indicates the emerging cultural consciousness of men’s bodies as bodies.

Moses’s poetry contributes to both the increased abundance and scope of men’s embodiment through his sexualization of the FTM body in his most popular poem “How to

Make Love to a Trans Person.” This poem depicts the trans Confessional body in pain, yet also characterizes it as erotic. As does Olds, Moses confronts cultural silences to eroticize bodies that are often invisible as sexual in U.S. culture.25 He features the FTM body intimately, telling his listeners: “Get rid of the old words altogether. Call it a click or a ditto. Call it the sound he makes

25 Although many media representations of trans individuals focus all too often on their genitals, such as the preoccupation with surgery and transition noted by Laverne Cox in her 2014 interview with Katie Couric, they fail to explore the lived sexual experiences of trans people. The silence surrounding this topic is particularly evident given that Moses writes his poem about trans sexuality as a “how to” guide.

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when you brush your hand against it through his jeans, when you can hear his heart knocking on the back of his teeth, and every cell in his body is breathing.” This passage focuses on the male’s genitals, although it describes them using the imagery of other body parts. Moses’s erotic poetry engages the sexuality of the whole body, similar to Olds, and works to redefine the limits of the sexualized male form. His poem continues to pioneer new possibilities, instructing his audience:

If he offers you a thumb-sized sprout of muscle, reaching toward you when you kiss him like it wants to go deep enough inside you to scratch his name on the bottom of your heart, hold it as if it can—in your hand, in your mouth, inside the nest of your pelvic bones. Though his skin may hardly do more than brush yours, you will feel him deeper than you think.

The striking imagery in these lines includes a mix of literal and figurative language reminiscent of Olds’s diction in “The Pope’s Penis.” Moses’s description of the “thumb-sized sprout of muscle” reveals the most literal representation of the penis studied so far, which he then eroticizes figuratively in its desire to “scratch his name on the bottom of your heart.” This characterization of the penis redefines the hegemonic male body by empowering the phallus based on pleasure instead of length. “How to Make Love to a Trans Person” represents the male figure giving and receiving sexual pleasure, portraying the male Confessional body intimately and revising the scope of its embodiment.

The representation of the male Confessional body by Olds and Moses between the 1980s and 2010s helps show the shifting understanding of the “personal” that comprises the “political” in the gender politics of American culture. The 1980s and 1990s mark a discernable shift in the body politics of Confessional poetry. For Olds, the personal is physical: her poetry frequently and intimately features the bodies of men and women alike, situating the male figure as a central fixture of her Confessionalism. Her writing reflects not only the effect of the second-wave feminist movement, but also the influence of the growing field of masculinity studies

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popularized during the 1990s. This decade also saw an interest in corporeal feminism and body theory that corresponds with Olds’s work. In the 2010s, Moses’s Confessionalism portrays the male body in a myriad of new forms. Firstly, he features the trans male body, both in the content of his poems and in the embodiment of his performances. Spoken Word works like “How to

Make Love to a Trans Person” and “The Other Side of the Knife” reflect the rise of LGBT visibility, which began in earlier generations, but has garnered national attention in the last decade. Additionally, Moses’s work approaches the Confessional body through the experiences of various other minorities, discussing social class in “Teeth,” (dis)ability in “Stimming,” and religion in “Laces.” For him, the personal is political in many ways. Therefore, Moses’s poems also speak to the intersectionality of the third-wave feminism at work today. Olds and Moses illustrate how Confessional poems testify to the truths of the body in U.S. culture, and the evolution of these truths, which, over generations, allow for the inclusion of new types of bodies.

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CONCLUSION

While coining the term “confessional poetry” in his 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s Life

Studies, M.L. Rosenthal characterized Lowell’s poetry with “the energy of his uncompromising honesty” (154). Indeed, early criticism of Confessional poetry, shocked by its seemingly personal subject matter, and its departure from the impersonality of the poet encouraged in

Modernist poetry, often identifies the Confessional poem as a kind of diary writing and equates it with autobiographical truth. Since Confessional poems were thought to speak the plain truth,

Confessional poets were assumed to be simply recording the events of their lives, rather than using craft to create art. Many of the poets considered Confessional took pains to distance their work from the autobiographical lens associated with Confessionalism.26 In fact, throughout the course of my research, I could not find a single Confessional poet who agreed to the label. Later scholarship, from the 2000s and 2010s, takes issue with the label “Confessional” as well by rejecting the idea that Confessional poetry is authentic, revealing the complexity of its craft, and problematizing its assumed claim to truth. Seeking to establish the value of Confessional poetry outside of Confessionalism, this collection of research forges a distinction between the persona in the poem and the person who wrote it.

My research has asked not why Confessional poetry is not confessional, but why it was considered confessional in the first place, and what this understanding of the genre may offer us.

From the scholars to the poets themselves, many of those associated with Confessional poetry have taken issue with its title, yet the term “Confessional” does not create this misconception so

26 When asked in interview if she considers herself a Confessional poet, Sharon Olds disassociates herself from the term by answering: “the phrase I use isn’t ‘confessional poetry’ but ‘apparently personal poetry’” (qtd. in Farish 61). In an interview almost forty year earlier, Anne Sexton makes a similar distinction between her art and her life; she explains that “I’ve heard psychiatrists say, ‘See, you’ve forgiven your father. There it is in your poem.’ But I haven’t forgiven my father. I just wrote that I did” (qtd. in Packard 46). John Berryman goes so far as to make a statement in the 1968 preface to his second book of The Dream Songs, clarifying that the book “is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me).”

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much as our (mis)understanding of its relationship to truth. Miranda Sherwin contends that

“since the Confessional poets made no such claims to autobiographical truth-telling—rather, these claims were imposed upon them—the confessional label must be explored not as a product of the authors’ desire to be read autobiographically, but of the readers’ desire to attribute truth claims to their poetry” (9). Indeed, Confessional works remain as constructed and stylized as poems of any genre, and rather than disassociate Confessionalism from truth altogether, I have redefined the relationship. Many perceive a confessional truth to be the expression of a sin, crime, or otherwise secretive fact of a person’s life, considering the confession a testimony of what happened. Truth has several definitions, and the truth of Confessional poetry does not entail the unreserved expression of the authors’ guilt or the autobiographical facts of their lives as commonly assumed. The truth at the heart of Confessional poetry lies in its revelation of culturally significant information: the sites of our deepest emotions, the topics we vehemently disagree on, the places we feel most vulnerable, and the matters we really care about. The

Confessional poem produces truth by sharing the kind of content associated with it: information, which appears to intimately reveal the lived experience of the author, that is largely considered controversial or unspeakable in mainstream culture.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the truth of the upper middle and upper class bodies represented by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton is that they do not fit into the image of contentment projected by the 1950s American Dream. The confessions of Lowell and Sexton exhibit the unhappiness felt by these individuals while otherwise living the lifestyle of the Dream, and their revelations resonate as significant because they expose the problems, failures, and shortcomings of those who appear to “have it all.” Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass demonstrate that during the 1950s,

1960s, and 1970s, men’s bodies are not a truth of their characters as much as women’s are a truth

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for theirs, although men’s bodies become more visible as bodies over this time. When male bodies do appear in Confessional poems, the truth of them is that they are disempowered, since it deviates from their usual position of privilege within the politics of hegemonic masculinity. In the 1970s, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich exemplify that representations of white bodies may be read as individual, even as they engage political topics, whereas representations of black bodies are exclusively read as representational. Whiteness is considered personal, while blackness is considered political, since the racial majority is invisible as raced, and the canon of

Confessional poetry is underwritten by whiteness.

During the 1980s, Carolyn Forché and Sharon Olds show that the truth of the body is the suffering of others; in rejection of the self-indulgence of the 1980s American Dream,

Confessional poems become international in scope and advocate for a culture of equality and empathy. While Forché and Olds illustrate how Confessional poetry has expanded over generations, Lucille Clifton and Olds demonstrate how in some ways it has not changed. In the

1980s and 1990s, blackness is still excluded from the idea of the personal that underlies the canon of Confessionalism. During this time, whiteness is beginning to be recognized as racial, yet a false binary still exists between black and Confessional writing. From the 1980s to the

2010s, Olds and Gabe Moses reveal that the male body becomes more and more visible as confessional. The truth of the male body shows it to be disempowered, as in earlier generations, in addition to sexualized, reflecting the increased sexual objectification of their bodies, as men increasingly become recognized as gendered.

My argument has sought to expand the understanding of Confessional poetry, and what the genre can do. Although it is a poetry of the self, Confessional poetry often problematizes oppression, and even advocates for social justice. The genre has been shown to engage with

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second- and third-wave feminism, the economics of privilege and poverty, masculinity studies, whiteness studies, the LGBT movement, and more. By revealing what U.S. culture considers confessional and what it does not, Confessional poems tap into divisive social issues and reflect systemic problems. They have, for example, exhibited the unhappiness underlying the materialism of the American Dream, the double standard excluding poets of color from

Confessionalism, and the blind spot obscuring male bodies from scrutiny through the privilege of hegemonic masculinity.

My research has argued that we need to carry out feminist analyses of Confessional poetry that include representations of men in their scope, so as to apply feminist theory to the politics of mainstream masculinity. Feminism is, and should be, grounded in women’s interests, since historically they have been the marginalized gender. Men have not been marginalized the same way, but men’s issues have largely been ignored as gendered, so it is critical to approach them in this light. Many of the personal issues men face connect to a larger politics of gender, so for them, too, the personal is political. My research has also argued that we need to spend more time reading, identifying, and analyzing the Confessional poetry of authors of color. In this genre and others, writers of color have possessed less access to truth, since white narratives most often prevail in U.S. culture to establish the state of affairs as we understand it. I have studied the works of Clifton and Lorde, yet we also need to consider many other poets—such as June

Jordan, Marilyn Nelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Chin, and Li-Young Lee—in order to engage their work in light of truth. It is also important to concentrate on the Confessional works of Spoken Word poets, such as Denice Frohman, Zora Howard, and T Miller. Spoken Word poems simultaneously focus on personal identity while speaking truth to power, so they will continue to make a meaningful contribution to the role of poetry in discussions of selfhood,

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culture, power, and truth. These works carry forward Confessionalism by representing the

Confessional body in new and exciting ways, and by more explicitly illustrating oppression.

Many of the poems that represent the Confessional body specifically show the suffering of it. Judith Harris writes:

Works of the confessional mode, or the ‘personal,’ offpsprings of introspection and dissidence, often provoke the question among readers: Why should we care? Why should we care about the private suffering of others? To that position I would respond with: Why should we not? We read them not because they are brave, or scandalous, or masochistically enthralling. We read them not because we are, or they are, voyeurs or missionaries. We read them because they impart truth about cruelty, about the need to unify aspects of the self, and because they show the inscriptions of collective pain as a language that can be uttered, received, and transcended. We read them because they plummet through the surface, break the code of silence, and yield wisdom. These poets touch irresistible pain, pain that unites us or tears us apart. (267)

Indeed, Confessional poems exhibit private as well as collective pain, physical as well as mental suffering, and in so doing give voice to a range of important issues. From Snodgrass’s publication of Heart’s Needle in 1959 to Moses’s performance of “The Other Side of the Knife” in 2014, Confessional poets convey the pain of mental illness, sickness, and aging; of heartbreak, divorce, and death of a loved one; of transition, menstruation, and abortion; of discrimination, rape, and police brutality; and of famine, genocide, and war. Confessional poetry functions as a map of pain as well as a resource for better understanding each other’s bodies and our own, so that as a culture we may live well.

Instead of regarding Confessional poetry as a collection of individual confessions, we should understand the genre more broadly in terms of what U.S. culture considers to be confessional. I have examined Confessional poems from the beginning of the Confessional

Poetry Movement to the present in order to explore what we consider worth confessing, what we do not, and how the content of our confessions evolves or remains over time. While writing confessions about domestic violence, depression, or miscarriage, secret lovers, naked fathers, or

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estranged children, the Confessional poets engage with the regimes of power that influence identity and culture. What we refer to as truth reveals what we consider culturally significant, underscoring the need to pay attention to how truth is deployed and whose lives its reality privileges or oppresses. We need to ask keep asking ourselves: who gets to speak the truth, who gets to define it, and why?

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Natalie Perfetti-Oates is a PhD candidate specializing in 20th-century American Literature with a concentration in Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation analyzes how

Confessional poetry, understood as a poetry of the self, nonetheless offers a window into the relationships among truth, power, and the politics of the body in United States culture over generations. Natalie has published her work in Gender Forum and presented it at such conferences as the Midwest Modern Language Association, the South Central Modern Language

Association, the Midwest Popular Culture Association / Midwest American Culture Association, and the Southern Humanities Council.

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