Brian Glavey Reveals Parallels Between Confessional Poetry and Performance

At Los Angeles Review of Books, Brian Glavey reviews Christopher Grobe's new book, The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV. In The Art of Confession, Grobe "makes a powerful case that this connection between confession and performance is no coincidence," Glavey explains. "A confession is always a performance — a complex interplay of audience and artifice, media and meaning — a fact that artists and audiences have always recognized to some extent." From there: 

The inseparability of performance and confession is true in a rather literal way for the confessional poets in particular. Grobe explains that the rise of confessional poetry is shaped by the contemporary emergence of the business of poetry recording by record labels like Caedmon Records and, even more importantly, by a kind of craze for the poetry reading, which demanded of poets not only a relatively novel form of public performance but also a new relation to their work. Plath, Lowell, and Sexton came to write their poems under the pressure of an expectation that they would be performed, a pressure that helps explain why the kind of modernist impersonality, which insisted on the division between poet and the poem, came to feel stifling and inadequate. It is one thing to insist that a speaker’s words are not your own when they are closed off in the pages of a book and another when you are saying them in front of a crowd of eager listeners, to keep your distance when you find your own voice breaking with emotion as you read them out loud. In this light, the fame of confessional poets — and even the all-consuming mythologies that surround them — should not be considered an unfortunate and distracting accident of their reception. “On the contrary,” Grobe asserts, “confessional poetry was from the start a performance genre, infused at every stage of its creation with the breath of the poet — and with a promise to perform.”

This is a fascinating paradox that constitutes the heart of Grobe’s argument: poetry becomes personal precisely by becoming performative. The strength of Grobe’s compelling account stems from the complexity and flexibility of the concept of performance — “understood,” he explains, “as a hypermedial practice, as a way of playing with and between media.” Confessions are performative, in other words, not only in the theatrical sense but also in something like the deconstructionist sense as well, existing somewhere in the ambiguous space between marks on the page and the way those marks are animated by the act of being read. Confession puts words into motion, and attending to the performative dimension of this motion highlights the way that a poetic confession resists the strict finality of the written word even as it seems to succumb to it. When Lowell describes his work as making a breakthrough back into life, in other words, he is not merely describing the jettisoning of repressive literary traditions. This rupture is not simply a matter of content but also of form, a breakthrough of the written word into the lecture hall, for instance, an attempt that “spills across the borders that separate literature from performance.” The generational transformation he describes is not merely a matter of putting real life back into the poems; it is a matter of the way that poems circulate out in the life of the world. It is a recognition that poems exist as part of that world in the first place.

Read more at Los Angeles Review of Books.