So What Is Post-Confessional Poetry?
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Well Post-Confessional isn't easy to explain, except that it's tonality and themes are after the Confessional.  Plath, Snodgrass, Lowell, Sexton, Berryman, Jarrell...

Is it safe to say it's autobiographical (always)?  "I", personal yet universal--I think that's the key: it's universal.  There needs to be risks taken ("willing to undermine the boundaries of self"), something is at risk emotionally.  I think the confessional poem/post-conf has to tell the story the poet cannot tell any other way.  Raw exposure, display.  These are poems of experience but also poems where something is happening on the artistic end as well (metaphor, syntactically, sonically...).  It's in danger of being therapuetic, narcissitic, whining, but when done right I think it's nowhere near those things, that they're actually poems of a strong self-awareness.  For me, when I write, I cut off the emotions I feel and look at them from a scientific angle--describing or displaying the emotion as if it were an entity and I was simply a host.  Make sense?

Emotional ambiguity makes for great confessional/post-confessional poetry--give no answers, allow the reader to float around in that space where conflicting emotions occur at the same time.  Questions are asked or displayed.  I guess post-confessional is simply elaborating or trying different, original angles and perspectivesfrom the confessional...which, I guess, still keeps it confessional.  I think post-confessional only means that it's poetry written after the 20th century in confessional style, is it not?  I mean, really?  The term seems to be disliked and avoided (Snodgrass detested it), but today so many poems are full of it to certain, different degrees.  I like what Michael Robbins says at The Poetry Foundation: "...can be dismissed as grandiose, self-pitying egoists...(but they're not) because if you read them with the care they deserve, you'll discover some of the most self-aware poetry of the 20th century...which usually ironizes, and subtly, its own worst tendencies..."

We are wanderers of the truth--truths we'll never know but merely grasp at without expecting an answer--we want the confusion broken down but never disspelled.  If we had answers, there'd be no point. 

I'm merely trying to describe the experience of confessional/post-confessional.  I think what it is is obvious, almost just a term for the new. 

 

What do you think is post-confessional?  Who are your favorites?  Do you know of any websites, blogs, books, or poets specific to post-confessional?  And is there a need for the term?

 

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