Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Confessionalism is the movement by which contemporary culture has been marked in the past ten years, and its power shows no sign of dwindling. It has permeated everything from autobiography to women’s magazines, from talk shows to broadsheets, even forging whole new genres: docusoap and reality TV. The stars of today are not the most talented, but the most open to voyeurism. Those who will let the public eye penetrate furthest, and see the most bicod, sex and tears. From the hugely successful memoirs of Dave Peizer to the bitchiness of Big Brother, confessionalism is hot. It sells. The public want human nature at its most raw and vulnerable, and ‘art’ has been left trailing behind.

Except in poetry. Strangely, the art form that spawned the term, and gave us the most articulate and searingly honest human zoo of all - Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton - has turned its back on this contemporary cultural phenomenon. Poetry Review’s Spring 2001 review of the last seven years showcases writers who are clever, post-modern ‘shapeshifters’, from Duffy to Shapcott, Armitage to Lumsden. Poetry - with its appeal to lovers and frequent attraction to the more dramatic ‘I’ above ‘he / she’ - has always been linked to brutally honest expressions of self. These are also frequently the poems that touch the nerves most deeply, from John Donne’s agonised struggles with God in his Holy Sonnets to Hughes’ Birthday Letters. So why, now this impulse is so explicitly relevant, are poets shying away from direct emotional exposure? Why no ‘New Confessionalism’?

The cynical would cite as the main reason poetry’s refusal to interest itself in the transient phenomena of contemporary culture. There is certainly a sense in which poetry has always perceived itself as a superior art, and one dealing with universal truths rather than the temporary. However, whilst it is certainly disappointing how few poets wrestle with specifically modem issues, and also who allow cross-influence with film, popular music and contemporary prose, there are many ‘New Generation’ poets who could claim to do so.

Perhaps the snobbery - if that is the term about confessionalism is more to do with a fracture that has occurred within poetry itself. It is a commonplace that there are more writers than readers of poetry today, and if we look closely at the majority of work that these new poets are producing we will find it to be almost entirely confessional. Confessionalism is the mode of poetry in prisons, in survivors’ groups, in writers’ groups, in adolescent bedrooms. Writing courses increasingly encourage people to ‘write about what they know’ or ‘express themselves’. Poetry as therapy is now a concept so devalued by the sheer volume of people who feel that they have a ‘poem’ in them that it is hard to take seriously. And professional poets, wanting to distinguish themselves from this enormous mass of unpublished but heart-felt poetry, are perhaps doing this by ceasing to pour their own hearts out.

The recent professionalism of poetry - whereby many of the bigger names make their livings on a circuit of school workshops, readings, residencies and Arvon courses - may also make some writers squeamish about releasing highly personal work. On a very basic level, it is probably harder to control a class of fourteen years olds if they think you are an adulteress who has sexual dreams about your mother. If the definition of a confession is an admission of sins, faults and crimes, then in a cliquey world of networking and backslapping, careerist poets may find this loss of face damaging. Craig Raine’s recent confessional elegy A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is an obvious example, opening him up as it did to ridicule and disgust - it was felt by many critics that his honesty in lines such as “Your long glowing nipples shabby with hairs” went too far. On a more serious scale, Barry McSweeney, who wrote with agonising honesty about his personal demons and alcoholism, found it almost impossible to be published for many years. His unfashionably confrontational verse was easier to sweep under the poetry carpet.

The rejection of confessionalism by women is also often a careerist move, but for very different reasons. It has frequently been perceived as a particularly female mode of writing in its concern for the intimately emotional and physical; the domestic power play of lovers and families rather than the larger philosophical questions. It has also - via sectioned Anne and suicidal Sylvia - been attached to the image of woman as hysterical harpy: disturbed, hormonal, her own muse before she is an artist. In order for women poets to be taken seriously they have increasingly been trying to break away from the intimate, physical language of Sixties and Seventies feminism - with its links to Kristeva’s écriture feminine - and instead show that they can take on ‘male’ territory: wider political issues, social commentary, metatext, and irony.

To revert to a confessionalist mode now might be to reaffirm the cultural image of the ‘Mad Poetess’. After a period of great acclaim following her death, it was a notable fact that in Poetry Review’s 1994 ‘New Generation’ issue, none of the women poets cited Plath as an influence. Elizabeth Bishop, conversely, was repeatedly named, with Sean O’Brien in The Deregulated Muse arguing that this was “to suggest that the woman poet need not be a casualty or a victim, a lunatic or a suicide, and that her work should prepare itself for the long run”. It is clear that this attitude has worked for women, as innumerable respected female poets have emerged since the 19906, with lists from poetry houses such as Bloodaxe testifying that they have more than achieved equality. However, in winning this victory, female poetry is perhaps less ferocious, impassioned and visceral. I found it interesting that my first collection, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, whilst praised for these qualities, was mainly criticised with the adjective ‘Plathian’ used damningly.

This loss of confessionalism’s ferocity and passion - in both male and female work - with its sense of being deeply, excruciatingly felt, has also brought a loss in public interest. Whilst members of what Alvarez called the ‘Age of Anxiety’ were big stars, even today’s most powerful pulls lack glamour or appeal to those outside the ‘poetry scene’. The poetry world’s own agenda and power struggles seem to have very little to do with what the public actually enjoys. Vulgar though it may be deemed to be, the general reader picks Plath over Adcock, and Birthday Letters above Crow, because confessional art has a more instant and violent appeal. It engages the reader, grabs them, makes a human connection. There is little room here to prove this thesis, but as an example, we might look at these first lines of Sexton’s extended metaphor Self in 1958:

What is reality?
I am a plaster doll; I pose
With eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall.

Now compare them to the first lines of Jo Shapcott’s Goat, which also deals with a speaker who has become ‘other’:

Dusk, deserted road, and suddenly
I was a goat. To be truthful it took
Two minutes, though it seemed sudden.

Shapcott’s voice is wry and clever, using understatement for humour, but it is Sexton’s that is more gripping: it demands an answer, and its transformation is violent, frightening, and instantly painful. Confessionalism is more involving for the reader then, because it is intimate, emotive, immediate. William Oxley has commented that what many readers feel is lacking in contemporary poetry is content, and for the man on the street: “Modern poetry has become an esoteric language focused on trivial things”. Good confessionalism is appealing because it is the specific opposite of this. It explores our darkest emotional instincts: our deepest scars, secrets, griefs and desires. It is the mode in which poetry, so often deemed by people as dusty and irrelevant to their lives, can proclaim its relevancy. The Confessional movement’s doomed ‘characters’ were also, for all we may criticise such a conception of the poet, good press. People love a brooding Byron, hinting at his sexual exploits in verse; a frail Keats expressing his love for Fanny. Dylan Thomas’s angry, alcoholic persona does not necessarily diminish the power of his verse, but for many adds an urgency and poignancy to his apocalyptic visions. Okay, so everyone agrees that Murray Llachlan Young’s work did little for poetry’s public image, but the idea behind his persona was not so ridiculous. The faceless, private mass of contemporary poets are, again, not giving the public what they want: real blood, sex, and tears.

This is not to suggest that the public’s demand for this is an altogether positive thing. Some of TVs recent forays into voyeurism have bordered on the ugly and unethical, and the marketing of the writer over text is often both degrading and insulting. In a perfect world all writers would be allowed to produce work without any intrusion from the public eye. But it is truthful to state that, as much of literary history confirms, it is generally through exposure of a personality that poetry sells. Associated as it is with individual expression, people are more likely to purchase the slim volume of a charismatic or glamorous individual. It is part of the entertainment. And poetry’s recent low sales figures seem to be the result of integrity and peer opinion being valued above entertaining the people who are, after all, meant to be our audience.

To conclude then, a suggested compromise: between populist and highbrow, privacy and publicity. In the current media climate - where columnists discuss their cancer and marital break-ups, memoir-writers explain their incestuous relationships and Springer guests say “Surprise, honey, I’m a man!” - poetry must at least stop disowning the original confessional movement, and instead celebrate how it made emotional exposure matter, and confronted us with uncomfortable truths. The confessional movement needs to be revalued as an important progression in twentieth century poetry - one that was not just outpoured emotion, but emotion transformed into art by often ignored technical mastery.

There is no harm in a little cashing in, either, and it is high time a ‘Penguin Book of Confessional Poetry’ was issued - one that takes in more recent poets too, who have followed the line begun in the 19608, and might persuade a few teenagers that Plath is not the last word in emotionally engaging poetry. Finally, perhaps we need more poets to give the public what they want and, if not quite forge a ‘New Confessionalism’, then enter more extreme emotional territory. The popularity of the poem as a mode of intense personal self-expression, as testified to by the recent upsurge of writing groups, is something to be built on, rather than discarded. Contemporary society craves, and perhaps needs, a few more poetic postcards from the edge.