Excerpt from After Confession

Introduction:
Containing Multitudes

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Identity, the having and being an "I," is what separates me
from all the others, and also what unites me with them...
Self is self-in-relation: no other kind exists.

-- Alicia Ostriker, "I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon Olds"


For good or ill, we live in the age of memoir. As autobiographies, memoirs, fictionalized biographies, and works of creative nonfiction fill bookstores with ever-growing frequency, discussion of the nature and boundaries of autobiographical writing has grown both common and heated.

Much of this debate, however, centers around works of prose. After Confession began with our wondering where poetry might fit into the grand scheme of things. More than forty years after the poets and poetry first tagged "confessional" ignited critical controversy, American poetry continues to display a notable confessional strain -- some would say exhaustively and exhaustedly so. As the intense interest that greeted Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters demonstrated anew, readers remain fascinated by these issues and both poets and critics divide profoundly on many key matters. After Confession addresses not only the legacy of confessional poetry but also the deeper concerns that have always underpinned such discussion. We asked ourselves: How do contemporary poets negotiate the often controversial historical, ethical, and critical considerations related to autobiographical poetry? What do today's poets have to say about the nature of truth-telling and authorial responsibility, and how do they reflect on their own places within the historical context of the lyric "I"?

It turns out that American poets have rather a lot to say on these topics. In essays personal and polemical, in autobiographical musings and critical arguments, in creative as well as analytical prose, in historical studies as well as reviews of new poetry, poets of every aesthetic stripe have weighed in on the nature of autobiographical poets. Yet these essays have for the most part remained scattered in a variety of books and journals; to our knowledge, this anthology is the first to collect such a range of statements on this particular theme. After Confession gathers important treatments of autobiographical poetry by some of our most powerful poets, and adds them to new essays written especially for this volume.

As our contributors demonstrate, autobiographical poetry is an especially contested topic these days -- for reasons ranging from ethics to politics. After Confession addresses the controversy in four interrelated and overlapping sections. Part I, Staying News, offers critical and historical perspectives. From William Matthews's pithy summary of the complexity of these issues to Billy Collins's skeptical gaze directed at a certain kind of contemporary lyric, this section introduces and argues many of the key terms of the larger discussion. It also presents in Joseph Bruchac's "The Self within the Circle," a strong reminder of how culturally embedded these issues are; essays later in the book by Kimberly Blaeser, Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, and Carol Muske-Dukes carry forward this theme in their distinct ways.

Part II, Our Better Halves, collects essays and musings of a more explicitly autobiographical cast, shedding light on the poetics and autobiographical context of poets as various as Yusef Komunyakaa, Annie Finch, Thylias Moss, Stanley Plumly, Claudia Rankine, and Colette Inez.

Part III, Degrees of Fidelity, the essays address the complex ethical and aesthetic concerns raised by autobiographical poetry -- particularly with respect to the implications of fictionalizing one's own experience in lyrics that are or appear to be autobiographical. In this section Ted Kooser, Carol Frost, and Andrew Hudgins conduct a mini-symposium on the subject of poetic "lying," while Stephen Dunn, Kimiko Hahn and Brendan Galvin bring their diverse perspectives and aesthetics to the discussion.

Finally, Part IV, Codes of Silence, gathers an array of essays by and about women. In reading for this anthology, we were struck by how frequently discussions of confessional and post-confessional poetry centered -- explicitly or not -- around issues of gender, sexuality and the explosive growth in recent decades of women's poetry. The essays here by Alicia Ostriker, Pamela Gemin, Marilyn Chin, Carol Muske-Dukes and other women poet-critics thus comprise a small anthology of critical views on a vitally important development within American poetics.


Rather than supporting any single perspective on autobiographical poetry, then, After Confession presents a range of views. Because we believe our theme requires such vigorous debate, our essayists frequently disagree with each other, sometimes quite directly. Just as Walt Whitman claimed for himself a shifting and expansive selfhood ("I am large, I contain multitudes"), current American poets of each distinct camp have seemed intent on proving Whitman right -- even when agreeing on no other matter. Surely the present era in our poetry is the most pluralistic -- or balkanized -- ever. No matter what poetic flag one pledges allegiance to, at the heart of such pluralism, we believe, lie the issues of self and other, private and communal identity, confession and reticence, sincerity and artifice with which this book concerns itself. This may not be an exclusively American debate, but the legacy of Whitman certainly points to its centrality within our tradition.

Aesthetically speaking, personal poems can go wrong in many ways: they might indulge in the elevation of trivial or merely uninteresting domestic detail; they might simply whine, recounting, in Robert Frost's handy dichotomy, not "griefs" but "grievances"; they might ignore important aspects of the world beyond the poet's doorstep and thus remain cloistered in the prison of self; they might mistake the tawdry or sensational for the boldly honest; and, in fact, they might fall anywhere along the deadly spectrum that runs from cocktail-party bore to megalomaniac.

Attacks on current autobiographical lyrics that suffer from these problems are therefore to be expected. In an interview, contributor Marilyn Chin provides a particularly vigorous example:

Poetry has moved to the suburbs. Current literary journals contain a lot of poems about the mythology of the self. I suppose this was first inspired by the confessional poets. American poets have veered away from Whitman's idea of the democratic self as a representative or national self. Their poems are self-centered, short-sighted; they don't extend to larger concerns.

Such dismissals, interestingly, come from multiple aesthetic angles. We are no more surprised to hear Chin dismiss the backyard epiphanies of the average suburban lyricist than we are to hear a middle-aged male reviewer scorn the glut of poems that follow Sharon Olds's lead in exploring private experiences of sexuality, alcoholism, and abuse. Meanwhile, the Language poets wish a plague on both houses for their presumed shared sense of self-enclosure, their inability to see how fraught romantic individualism truly is. The Expansive poets, who otherwise share few attitudes with Language poets, agree. A critical opinion this widespread, we feel deserves a probing look, especially given the excellent personal poetry than many would argue has emerged in recent years. one virtue of the debate conducted in these pages is the way it highlights many fine autobiographical poems, by our contributors as well as other poets. And one recurring motif is the notion that first-person lyrics can embrace a larger social vision, achieving revelation over narcissism, universal resonance over self-referential anecdote.

But to what extent are these issues new, or particularly American; and to what extent are they ancient and universal? Consider this typical indictment of American poetic solipsism: "Each poet...usually spends his time considering the interests of a very insignificant person, namely himself.... There is a danger, that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart." Granted, we have tampered with the quotation, substituting "poet" for "citizen in democracy"; but otherwise, we did not need to alter the words Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840, long before Whitman announced "I celebrate myself." English critic Richard Gray, from whose American Poetry of the Twentieth Century we take the Tocqueville quotation, maintains that "every major American poem could be called 'song of myself.'" He further points out:

Solitude or isolation, self-reliance or egotism freedom or loneliness, self-sufficiency or pride: the terms may vary -- and, indeed, do so throughout American writing -- but they can all be traced back to the structure of feeling that Tocqueville perceived, a structure that has as its keystone the idea of the individual, the simple, separate self.

Clearly, when poets today react against personal poetry as narcissistic, cut off from greater social, political, moral engagements -- they join a long procession of such critics. The same is true regarding sensational or indecorous subject matter. For instance, when reviewers turned up their noses at Anne Sexton's poems about menstruation or her uterus, they may not have been aware of participating in a rather long tradition of complaint about poets who challenge the proprieties: the Romantics were familiar with such criticism. Even earlier, in the eighteenth century, according to critic Susan Rosenbaum, Charlotte Smith's proto-confessional poems were accused of "exploiting personal experience...." We suspect that Sappho may have faced similar charges.

In fact, lyric poets in many eras and many cultures have cultivated the illusion of a sincere voice revealing its intimate secrets although poets and cultures have varied in the degree to which they expected readers to believe this fiction. And just as scholars and lay people alike cannot prevent themselves from gossiping about Shakespeare's Dark Lady or the precise nature of Tennyson's friendship with Arthur Hallam, we are not likely to see the end to sensations like Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, whose critics trotted out all the well-worn arguments against autobiographical poetry, including the claim that it panders to low sensationalism. The truth is that, strictly speaking, both Hughes's and Plath's poetic versions of their marital problems are fictions. We really have no way of knowing, apart form always contestable biographical research, whether a given poem actually does confess personal intimacies, or simply wants to give that impression. Does it matter? Is Robert Frost's great poem "Home Burial" about the children he and Elinor Frost lost? What better answer will we ever have than yes and no?

Lyrics have always entangled artifice with confession. Our essayists recognize and reckon with the inevitable risks of narcissism, assuredly, but as a whole focus more on pondering the possibilities of this still-vital tradition. As Joan Aleshire writes in her essay "Staying News," included here, "...the poem of personal experience -- the true lyric poem -- can, through vision, craft, and objectivity toward the material, give a sense of commonality with unparalleled intimacy." The deepest value of autobiographical poetry as we have seen it develop in the past forty years, then, may be that it refocuses attention on these fundamental aesthetic problems, not that it solves them.

From the Introduction to After Confession, edited by Kate Sontag and David Graham. Copyright 2001 by Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.