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.

"Scribble down your nakedness." -- Allen Ginsberg

Article from 11 November 1967

Back in 1967, two years after I began writing poems, I read the following article in the Montreal Star (published on 11 November 1967). This was around the time when I first heard of Allen Ginsberg and the other poets and artists who are also mentioned in this article. It was Allen Ginsberg's advice that was enormously important to me: "Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting." It was terrific advice--and certainly epiphanal--it gave a direction for my writing that was probably already present but not consciously thought out. The article also directed my reading to a generation of writers and artists who were an intellectual and creative community for many of us at the time. They inspired many of us in our life-work. Here, then, is the complete text of that article:

Scribble Down your nakedness, said Ginsberg -- and he did

By Peggy Polk

New York

Conrad Rooks, the rich boy who went from beatnik to alcoholic to drug addict to moviemaker, is going even further soon -- to the Indian province of Dharmasala, home of the exiled Dalai Lama.

His first film "Chappaqua," winner of the Silver Lion at the 1966 Venice film festival, opened at a New york theatre Sunday and is scheduled to make the rounds of art movie houses throughout the country, but Rooks is preparing to retire to the study and filming of Tibetan metaphysics.

"Chappaqua" -- named for the Indian burial place -- is a full color, baroque nightmare based on the cure which its 32-year-old author -- director-producer-principal player took in Zurich six years ago to rid himself of his addictions.

The Kansas-born Rooks traces his taste for narcotics to a series of operations he underwent at the age of 9. He says he began drinking when at 13 he started to frequent bars on New York's West 52nd Street to listen to jazz and at 14 he was an alcoholic.

Expelled from four prep schools, given a medical discharge from the Marines and arrested at 21 on a marijuana charge, he tried to learn the craft of writing from his beatnik friends. But it was not until his father died in 1961 that Rooks decided to take the 30-day "sleep cure" he was to tranbscribe to the screen in a rich melange of sound, color and stunning technique.

To make the film, Rooks assembled the patron saints of the beat and hippie world -- poet Allen Ginsberg, writer William Burroughs of "Naked Lunch" fame, French actor Jean-Louis Barrault, Moondog and Swami Satchidananda. Ornette Coleman played the saxophone and Ravi Shakar the sitar. Robert Frank, the avant garde photographer, was camerman.

The movie, from its inception as a poem, took four years and $750,000 of Rook's Avon Cosmetics fortune to film. It was one of the few such personal ventures to emerge from the underground to commercial distribution.

Rooks, who sports a Buster Brown haircut and a didactic manner, says he is delighted with the venture but has no intention of joining the filmmmaking establishment.

Business, he says, is corrupting and "businessmen have pretty much managed to run commercial moviemaking into a baloney factory.

"Of course I want to reach mass media. But I want to change mass media."

Hoping to avoid the baloney business entirely and to continue the process of self-education he began in the 1950s at the "baby end of the beat generation," Rooks, who has been married and divorced, says he will leave for northern India before Christmas with his young son, his girl friend and his crew.

There, he says, he will experiment with "pure film" under the aegis of the Dalai Lama. "He's interested in me," the movie maker said. "I've already spent some time with him in India. My guru took me. He wants me to come back; he is interested in my ideas of film."

One of those ideas is that filming should proceed like writing. A writer may experiment by constructing a paragraph a dozen ways. A film maker should do the same, Rooks says, by taking a variety of shots and putting them together in a variety of ways.

"Film isn't expensive," he says. The most you can spend if you shoot all day is $100,000.

Rooks is also convinced that the movie maker has no business trying to reproduce a novel on film. He must originate his own material.

"Chappaqua," he says, is a result of advice Ginsberg once gave him:

"Scribble down your nakedness. Be prepared to stand naked because most often it is this nakedness of the soul that the reader finds most interesting."

"Chappaqua" is autobiographical in the same way that Burroughs' "Naked Lunch," Ginsberg's "Howl" and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" are autobiographical, Rooks says.

But in his next film, Rooks wants to go outside of himself and "through some sort of simplicity, reveal some of the teaching which Asia is about to let us learn.

"We are basically uncultured races that are now coming into contact with the vastly more subtle races of the east and their cutlural knowledge is beginning to conquer us," he says. "Look at the Beatles running after their guru. Look at Mia Farrow going to India for spiritual teaching.

Working with the Tibetan exiles also has its practical advantages.

"There are 90,000 refugees all willing to do this kind of labor," Rooks said. "There are 20,000 artists doing nothing but sitting in front of tents now waiting for the Indian government to feed them. We'll put them to work."