A few notes on Confessional Poetry

1. Over a three-day period in late April 1977 I wrote a long poem, “Divisions” (Divisions, Coach House Press, Toronto, 1983). I wrote about things that had deep emotional meaning in my life. I had married the previous summer, in August 1976, and the wedding was immediately followed by marital turmoil. Perhaps this was the catalyst for me to write a poem I had tried to write for many years. Writing “Divisions” was a catharsis, a purging of emotions; it is a poem of witness, of confession, of what I had seen and experienced. 

2. In the 1990s, I wrote “The Shadow Trilogy” (The Compass, 1993; The Yoni Rocks, 1995; The Mystic Beast, 1997; all published with Empyreal Press, Montreal), books that came from an awareness of the Shadow aspect of the human soul. The Shadow is an important archetype in Jungian psychology; it is made up of what we reject in ourselves and project onto other people. “Owning one’s Shadow” refers to being aware of one’s dark side and being responsible for one’s psychology instead of projecting it onto other people. Writing these three books was an important journey for me; it was a time when I tried to make sense of the first half of my life. 

3. There has always been a “confessional” aspect to my work. Confession is the Shadow’s autobiography. My work, before writing The Compass, was concerned with family, but with The Compass the work became even more intensely confessional, more directly revelatory. It was my Shadow, my darkness that I had to purge. 

4. In Frank Bidart’s essay on confessional poetry, found in Robert Lowell, Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), Bidart writes that “Lowell winced at the term” “confessional.” Bidart writes that the common perception of what confessional poetry is suggests “helpless outpouring, secrets whispered with artlessness that is their badge of authenticity, the uncontrolled admission of guilt that attempts to wash away guilt. Or worse: confession of others’ guilt; litanies of victimization.” No poet would want to be identified with this definition of “confessional poetry.” However, Bidart continues, “there is an honorific meaning to the word confession, at least as old as Augustine’s Confessions: the earnest, serious recital of the events of one’s life crucial in the making of the soul.” The important point here is that confessional poetry, today so discredited among poets and critics, is concerned with “the making of the soul.” This is the definition of confessional poetry to which I subscribe.