Confessionals - The Lonely I in poetry

From the chapter "Formalists and Confessionals" (The American Century), in Richard Gray's History of American Literature. (Some paragraph divisions added).

"Be guilty of yourself in the full looking glass," a poet of slightly earlier generation, Delmore Schwartz, had said; and that injunction, to see and know the trught about oneself no matter how painful or embarrassing it might be, is clearly the enteprise, the heart of these poems.

This rediscovery of the personal in American poetry assumed many forms—as various, finally, as the poets involved. At one extreme are poets who attempted to blunge into the unconscious: in the work of Robert Bly (1926-) (whose best collection is The Light around the Body (1967)), Robert Kelly (1935-) (some of whose best work is in Finding the Measure (1968)), Galway Kinnell (1927-) (whose Selected Poems appeared in 1982), and James Wright (1927-1980) (Collected Poems (1971)), for example, the poet dives down beneath the level of rational discourse, using subliminal imagery and a logic of association to illuminate the darker areas of the self, the seabed of personal feeling, dream and intuition. 

In Robert Bly's case, exploration of the subrational has led him toward "tiny poems," in imitation of the Chinese, and prose poems that are, as he put it, "an exercise in moving against 'plural consciousness'." His aim is to uncover the "dense energy that pools in the abdomen," as he put it in a poem titled "When the Wheel Does Not Move"; the fierce, mystical forces that unite him, at the deepest level, with the looser, livelier froms of the natural world. 

Kelly and Kinnell dip perhaps even further down. "My wife is not my wife" Kelly insists in one of his poems called "Jeaousy," "/ wife is the name of a / process, an energy moving, / not an identity, / nothing in this world is / mine but my action." To articulate the process, the activity that constitutes identity, Kelly has devised a poetry that is a haunting mixture of dream, chant, and ritual: his poems are an attempt to translate the interpenetration of things into intelligible (although not necessarily paraphraseable) signs and sounds. "The organism / of the macrocosm," as he puts it in "prefix," "the organism of language / the organism of I combine in ceaseless natureing / to propagate a fourth, / the poem, / from their trinity." 

Kinnell began from a rather different base from Kelly, in that his earlier poems were informed by a traditional Christian sensibility. But, while retaining a sacramental dimension, his later work burrows ferociously into the self, away from the traditional sources of religious authority—and away too, from conventional notions of personality.. "If you could keep going deeper and deeper;" he wrote in 1978, "you'd finally not be a person ... you'd be an / animal; and if you kept going deeper and / deeper, you'd be ... / ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone / could read poetry would speak for it." 

The poems that issue from this conviction (as a collection like When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990)) illustrates) show Kinnell trying to strip away formal, verbal, and even surface emotional constructs, anything that might dissipate or impede the poet's continuing exploration of his deepest self and experience. "How many nights," he asks in "Another Night in the Ruins," "must it take / one such as me to learn / ... / that for a man / as he goes up in flames, his one work / is / to open himself, to be / the flames?" Short, chanting lines, a simple, declarative syntax, emphatic rhythms, bleak imagery and inssitent repetition: all turn the poet into a kind of shaman, who describes strange apocalyptic experiences in which he throws off the "sticky infusion" of speech and becomes one with the natural world ("The Bear") or participates in the primal experiences of birth ("Under the Maud Moon") and death ("How Many Nights"). 

The tone of James Wright's work is quieter, less prophetic than this, but he too attempts to unravel from his own unconscious the secret sources of despair and joy. Of another poet whom he admired, Georg Trakl, Wright said this: "In Trakl, a series of images makes a series of events.  Because these events appear out of their 'natural' order, without the connection we have learned to expect from reading the newspapers, doors silently open to unused parts of the brain." This describes the procedures of many of Wright's own poems, which evolve quietly through layers of images until they surface with the quick thrust of a striking final image or epiphany. For instance, in "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" Wright carefully annotates his surroundings. "Over my had," he begins, "I see the bronze butterfly / Asleep on the black trunk / Blowing like a leaf in green shadow." The vision of the butterfly suggests a being wholly at one with the world: entrusted, pliable, possessed of the stillness of a plant or even a mineral ("bronze"). This feeling persists into the following lines thorugh the subtle harmonizing of time and space ("The distances of afternoon") and the sense of cowbells, heard from far off, as the musical measure of both. It is growing late, however, and as "evening darkens" a succession of images toll the poet back to his sole self. The last two lines complete the series and confirm the discovery: "A chicken hawk floates over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life." The hawk, presumably, will find its home; it possesses the ease, the buoyancy and assurance, that characterize the other natural objects in this landscape. But the poet will not. He can see in the things of this world only a vivvid, subliminal reminder of ruin, his failure truly to live. Surprising though this last line may seem, it has ben carefully prepared for by the hidden agenda of the poem; the images that constitute the argument, strange and emotionally precise as they are, have opened the doors to the revelation. 

While writers such as Wright and Kinnell have tried to register the movements of the subconscious, others have dramatized the personal in more discursive, conscious forms. These include poets like Richard Hugo (1923-1982), Karl Shapiro, and Louis Simpson, who explore the self's discovery of the outer world and its reaction to it and, rather more significant, those like John Logan (1923-1987), Adrienne Rich (1929-), Anne Sexton (1923-1974), and W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009), who incorporate elements of their personal histories in their poems.

In the poetry of Richard Hugo, collected in 1984, the personal dimension is founded on the relationship between the private self of the poet and the bleak, lonesome world he describes. The setting he favours is the Far West: not the Far West of legend, however, but a far more inhospitable, emptier place. Looking at one decaying township in Montana, he asks himself, "Isn't this your life?"; and his own poetic voice, somber and laconic, seems to answer him in the affirmative. Yet he can also learn from his surroundings; their strength of spirit, "rage" and endurance, have stamped their mark on him. "To live good, keep your life and the scene," he concludes in "Montgomery Hollow" "/ Cow, brook, hay: these are the names of coins": the currency of the West has, in fact, saved him from moral bankruptcy, helped him pay his duess to himself and the world. Hugo's poetic stance has hardly shifted over the years. 

By contrast, Shapiro and Simpson began (as we have seen) as poets of public event, and only gradually changed their interests and allegiances. As the personal element in their poetry grew, so its shape and tone altered too. "Sabotage the stylistic approach," Shapiro commanded in "Lower the standard: that's my motto," "Get off the Culture Wagon. Learn how to walk the way you wan." Attacking "the un-American-activity of the sonnet," writing pieces with titles like "Anti-Poem," he adopted a long, flowing line somewhere between free verse and prose poetry. With this, he has explored himself and his surroundings (in volumes like Poems of a Jew (1958) with sometimes embarrassing frankness: "When I say the Hail Mary I get an erection," he admits in "Priests and Freudians will understand," adding wryly, "Doesn't that prove the existence of God?" 

The alteration in Simpson's work (as a collection like At the End of the Open Road: Poems (1963) indicates) has been less radical: his verse, while becoming freer, has retained an iambic base. But he, too wants to know what it is like to be him at this moment in history, "an Amrican nurse / installed amid the kitchen ware." Like Whitman, he is concerned wit hthe representative status of his self, his Americanness; unlike Whitman, his landscapes are often suburban. "Whare are you Walt?" Simpson asks in "Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain," observing sardonically, "/ The Open Road goes to the used-car lot": that observation measures the distance, as well and the kinship, between it author and the person addressed, the first, finest poet of national identity.

Of the four poets just mentioned who insert their own stories directly into their narratives, John Logan (whose several collections include The Bridge of Change: Poems 1974-9 (1980) is the most apparently casual. His poems seem simple, informal: "Three moves in six months," begins one, "and I remain the same." But, in fact, they are carefully organized to allow for a subtle orchestration of theme and tone. In the poem just quoted, for instance, "Three Moves," he graduates from startling colloquialism ("You're all fucked up") to moments of lyricism and grace: "These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt / and so all their multi-thousand-mile range / is too short for thee hope of change." And although, as these lines imply, Logan himself suffers from "a sense of guilt" from which the animal kingdom is blessedly free, he can occasionally participate in the vitality, the innocence of the natural world around him. "There is a freshness  / nothing can destroy in us—," he says in "Spring of the Thief"; "Perhaps that / Freshness is the changed name of God." 

The voice of W. D. Snodgrass, and his stance toward nature, is at once more controlled and intense. His finest work is "Heart's Needle" (1959), a series of poems which have as their subject his daughter and his loss of her through marital breakdown. "Child of my winter," begins the first poem: "born / When the new fallen soldiers froze / In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows . . . " Cynthia, the poet's child, was born during the Korean War and she is, he gently suggests, the fruit of his own cold war: the static, frozen winter campaign that is getting nowhere is also Snodgrass's marriage. The allusions to the war, and descriptions of the season, are there, not because of any intrinsic interest they may possess, historical, geographical, or whatever, but because they image the poet's inner world, his personal feelings. "We need the landscape to repeat us," Snodgrass observes later. The measured, musical quality of his verse, and his frequent attention to objects and narrative, disguise an obsessive inwardness, a ferocious preoccupation with the subjective.

"My poems ... keep right on singing thee same old song": the words could belong to Snodgrass, but in fract they were spoken by Ann Sexton, whose first two collections, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), established both her reputation and her intensely personal stance. Even those pieces by Sexton that appear not to be concerned with herself usually turn out to be subjeective, to have to do with her predicament as a woman. "The Farmer's Wife", for instance, begins as a description of someone in rural Illinois, caught up in "that old pantomime of love," and then concludes with lines that suddenly switch the focus from farmer and wife to the poet and her lover.  Elsewhere, when the narrative mask is dropped, the tone can be painfully raw and open, and given a further edge by elaborate rhyme-schemes or tight stanzaic forms. "All My Pretty Ones" is a good illustration of this. Addressed to the poet's father, the contrast between the passion and intimacy of the address and the strictness of the given measure only intensifies the feeling of the poem. It is as if the disciplines of the poetic form, which Sexton confronts in a half-yielding, half-rebellious fashion, were part of the paternal inheritance, something else that the father she both loves and hates has left her to deal with. However, she was not only concerned with the pain of being daughter, wife, mother, lover. She also sang, as she put it, "in celebration of the woman I am." Long before it was fashionable to do so, she wrote in praise of her distinctive identity, not just as an American poet, but as an American female poet. "As the African says:" she declares in "Rowing," "This is my tale which I have told"; and for her this tale was, finally, a source of pride.

A similar pride in the condition of being a woman characterizes the poetry of Adrienne Rich. Rich's early work in A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955) is decorous, formal, restrained. But even in here there is a sense of the subversive impulses that lie just below the smooth surfaces of life. In "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers", for example, the character who gives the poem its title sems to be crushed beneath patriarchal authority: "The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band / sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand." However, the tigers she has embroidered "across a screen" suggest her indomitable spirit. Even after her death, "The tigers in the panel that she made / Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid." "Sleek chivalric" and poised as they are, these animals nevertheless emblematize certain rebellious energies, turbulent emotions that will not be contained polite on the surface, passionate beneath, Aunt Jennifer's art is, at this stage, Adrienne Rich's art. Gradually, though Rich came to feel that she could "no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express these materials according to a prior plan." "Instead of poems about experience," she argued, "I am getting poems that are experiences." A work like "Diving into the Wreck," the title poem in her 1973 collection, measures the change. In it, the poet tells of a journey under the sea, during which she has to discard all the conventional supports, the crutches on which she has leaned in the upper world. "I came to xplore the wreck," she says: "The words are purposes. / The words are maps ...." And she describes shat she calls "the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth." Diving deep into the deepest recesses of her being, exploring the "wreck" of her own life, Rich feels compelled to jettison inherited techniques and fictions. A more open, vulnerable, and tentative art is required, she feels, in order to map the geography of her self: a feling that is signaled in this poem, not only by its argument, but by its directness of speech, its stark imagery and idiomatic rhythms, above all by the urgency of its tone. The map, as it happens, is not just for her own use. "We are all confronted," Rich has declared in the preface to On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Poems 1966-1978 (1979), "with ... the failure of patriarchal politics." "To be a woman at this time," she goes on, "is to know extraordinary froms of anger, joy and impatience, love and hope."  "Poetry, words on paper, are necessary but not enough," she insists, "we need to touch the living who share ... our determination that the sexual myths underlying the human condition can and shall be ... changed." In Rich's later work, as in fact a volume like Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001) illustrates, the confrontation with hrself is insparable from her broader, feminist purposes; her work has become intimate, confessional, but it is an intimacy harnessed to the service of the community, the invention of a new social order.