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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

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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 FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE PERSONAL, THE POLITICAL, AND THE CONFESSIONAL:

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

By

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.

ii
 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

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 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.

v
 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

1
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

2
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

3
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

4
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).

5
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

6
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.

7
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

8
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.

9
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.

10
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

11
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

12
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.

13
 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

14
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.

15
 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.

16
 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.

17
 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

18
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.

19
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

20
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.”

21
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

22
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,

23
 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

24
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

25
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.

26
 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

27
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

28
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

29
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

30
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

31
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

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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

33
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

34
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”

35
(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

36
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.

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 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

38
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.

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 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.

40
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

41
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:

42
 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 fore-
head 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

43
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.

44
 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

45
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.

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 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

47
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,

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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,

49
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

50
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.”

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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.

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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.

53
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

54
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.

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 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).

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 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

57
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.

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 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

59
“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

60
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.

61
 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.

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 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

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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).

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 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

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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

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

Dream of a Common Language.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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 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.”

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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

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“[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.

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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

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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

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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.

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“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

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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.

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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

84
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

85
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

86
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)

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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

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 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

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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

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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

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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.

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 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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

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“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

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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

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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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