The Art of Confession

The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV

Christopher Grobe

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479839599
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The story of a new style of art—and a new way of life—in postwar America: confessionalism. What do midcentury “confessional” poets have in common with today’s reality TV stars? They share an inexplicable urge to make their lives an open book, and also a sense that this book can never be finished. Christopher Grobe argues that, in postwar America, artists like these forged a new way of being in the world. Identity became a kind of work—always ongoing, never complete—to be performed on the public stage. The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and ’60s, performance art in the ’70s, theater in the ’80s, television in the ’90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed—with, around, and against the text of their lives. A blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and performance theory, The Art of Confession explores iconic works of art and draws surprising connections among artists who may seem far apart, but who were influenced directly by one another. Studying extraordinary art alongside ordinary experiences of self-betrayal and -revelation, Christopher Grobe argues that a tradition of “confessional performance” unites poets with comedians, performance artists with social media users, reality TV stars with actors—and all of them with us. There is art, this book shows, in our most artless acts.

1

The Breath of a Poem

Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959

What did Robert Lowell smell like? Did Sylvia Plath wear perfume? And I know they say that vodka has no odor, but imagine you were sitting in the front row at an Anne Sexton reading: do you think you could smell the booze on her breath? Questions like these seem offensive to the literary sensibility. Poets aren’t supposed to have smells because, by and large, they aren’t supposed to have bodies. And, aside from the occasional frisson over the smell of old books or the feel of fine paper, neither are we readers supposed to have bodies—or make much use of them if we do. That strange ritual, the formal poetry reading, seems designed to enforce such prohibitions. Why else do our literary titans, asked to perform their authority, aspire instead to escape our notice—tucking their bodies behind podiums, dressing themselves like stagehands, and flattening their voices to a comforting drone? Why, for that matter, do they defer to the printed page, reading word by word poems that, in fact, they know by heart, by breath, and by gut? The poet, it seems, is just an onionskin overleaf—the mercifully thin barrier to a poem, not its conduit.

What happens, though, when the poet’s self is not just the conduit, but (suddenly) the content of the poem as well? This is precisely what happened in midcentury America, when confessional poetry emerged side by side with a craze for poetry readings. Together, these two forces—confessionalism and the reading—conspired to make public creatures of poets, yoking the old I of lyric more tightly than ever to its living, breathing referent. If this were a coincidence, it would be a cruel one—to write such poems is one thing; to perform them in public, quite another—but we can’t rightly say that the confessional poets were ambushed by their own publicity.1 On the contrary, 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.

Confessional poetry thus confounds any easy distinction between performance and the printed page. Poets who write under the pressure of the reading don’t just look for perfection on the page—nor do they settle for creating a winsome “performance piece.” Instead, they look to create rich interactions between page and performance. Peggy Phelan has recently asked that we attend more often and more closely to this space between literature and performance, what she calls (borrowing a term from Robert Frost) poetry’s “oversound”:

What we need is and: close readings of performances and poems, more muscular math for calculating oversound, the thing not in the words, not in the melody, not in the dance, not in the meter.… If we lose the intimacy of the connection between literature and performance, we diminish something vital in and between them.2

Plath, Sexton, and Lowell—indeed, all confessional poets—dwell in what Phelan calls the in and between. Their poems encode past performances, capturing the breath of a once-living voice, and their readings (live and recorded) channel this breath. They breathe their poems (and past selves) back from the page. According to Diane Middlebrook, the confessional poets are united by “content, not technique,” but these poets do share a technique: a way of putting their poems in motion, a strategy for playing in and between print and performance—in other words, an oversound.3

Any present-day reader—anyone shameless enough, that is, to risk being overheard—can begin to search for this oversound by simply reading a few of these poems aloud: testing their affordances, seeking their implied parameters, trying to discover “what it means for a life to say these words.”4 But if, like me, you want to approach this problem historically, you’ll need something more than a text and some gusto. You’ll need proof of what pushed these poems toward performance, evidence of their journey from the page to the podium, and a rich sense of how they were actually enacted: with what style, by what strategy, amid what norms of reception. In other words, you’ll need the kinds of evidence that performance scholars routinely amass.

Few poets have gotten this treatment. Two decades ago, Charles Bernstein announced his ambition “to integrate the modern history of poetry into a more general history of performance art.”5 A whole subfield of poetry studies, sound criticism, was born to answer Bernstein’s call, but it has tended to focus on a rather narrow canon. One contributor to each of this subfield’s leading books names the same “wide range” of relevant poets: “Charles Olson to Allen Ginsberg,” “Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley,” that is, the Beats to the Black Mountain poets.6 (Why not Anne Sexton to Amiri Baraka—or John Cage to Percy Dovetonsils?) Even by a more generous definition of the field—say, the poets featured on PennSound, a website Bernstein co-founded—sound criticism’s canon has been limited to the avant-garde mostly, joined by a smattering of general high-brow verse. Scholars like Lesley Wheeler, Derek Furr, Tyler Hoffman, and Raphael Allison have begun to expand the canon of poetry performance, covering a broader and less homogenous range of poets. In this chapter, I build on this work by taking the confessional poets—middlebrow literary celebrities, some would say—quite seriously as performers and subjects for sound criticism.

These poets should be essential to any story we tell about poetry’s midcentury turn to performance. Not only were their poems deeply shaped by (and aimed toward) performance; they also muddied the distinction between art and life, treating even the most page-bound poem as a worldly event—or, at least, as a trace of a life truly lived. Before they were through, poetry readings were presumed confessional—something “to be staged primarily as a theatrical performance of exposure,” in the words of Kamran Javadizadeh.7 Slipping from the page to performance and back—and leaving all sorts of traces in between—poetry went manifold, channeling newfangled powers and gaining all kinds of strange new dimensions.

The Dimensions of the Midcentury Poem

Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience we call consciousness.… Our [media] technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio.…

—Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy8

Marshall McLuhan surrendered these words to print in 1962, and at that moment few American art forms answered his call for “interplay” quite so well as poetry. Beginning in the 1950s, and with increasing fervor throughout the 1960s, poetry lived (with promiscuous simultaneity) in print, on vinyl, and in the heat of live performance. Caedmon Records, the first mass-market label devoted entirely to literature, was founded in 1952, and other labels soon followed, each one clamoring to capture the voices of every sort of poet. At the same time, the demand for live poetry readings exploded. Once the prerogative of few poets—exceptional performers or literary stars—readings were now expected of all poets, no matter their standing in the profession, no matter their skill (or special interest) in performance. For a short time, then, performance—captured on LPs and repeated at readings—rivaled print as poetry’s main mode of circulation.

This would quickly transform poetry criticism—well, at least the New York Times thought so in 1956:

One thing these Caedmon records are bound to do is to alter the course of future scholarship.… [C]ritics of the future (Freudian, New and semantic) will have a high time pondering slurred words, dropped lines and changed rhythms. And the House of Caedmon will rank with the Domesday Book … as prime source material for doctoral theses.9

The future is finally here: poetry scholars, Marit MacArthur chief among them, are now using linguistics software to parse poetry recordings en masse, and if “slurred words” aren’t yet on anyone’s docket, well, it’s only a matter of time—but this future came slowly and unevenly.10 Only in the past few decades have poetry scholars begun to show much interest in readings, live or recorded, which is odd when you think that so many live readings have happened on college campuses—and that recorded-lit LPs were marketed primarily for classroom use. Many scholars must have listened to poetry LPs, but few left any record of what they heard. They surely attended readings, too, but somehow without attending to them. Thin descriptions of live readings may crop up around the edges of midcentury memoir—the way any irrelevancy might—but thick descriptions are pretty thin on the ground.

Even when scholars did take an interest in readings, they tended to treat them as purely sonic events. Just look at the titles of most articles and books on the subject: to this day, most of them center around keywords like “sound,” “voice,” and (audio) “recordings.” Embodied performance was—and, with a few happy exceptions like Raphael Allison’s Bodies on the Line, still is—beyond the pale of poetry criticism.11 Charles Bernstein, for instance, urged scholars to focus on “aurality … the sounding of the writing,” and not on “orality with its emphasis on breath, voice, and speech.”12 And even when critics began to defy this rule and consider embodied performance, they often veered into dry dissection. Lesley Wheeler, for instance, announces her intention to treat poetic voice as “a bodily phenomenon,” but then quickly whips out her scalpel and saw: “In order to speak, an individual pushes air from her lungs through her vocal cords, which are muscular folds in the larynx,” etc. Then, “In a listener … complex mechanisms in the ear and brain translate these speech sounds into perception through neural signals.”13 In other words, poetry readings are where ear/brain combines go to absorb the compressed air of lung/larynx/tongue cooperatives—or, more to the point, where poets and their audiences admit to having bodies only when it will help them enjoy the “sounding of the writing.” Anatomical litanies like Wheeler’s are, in fact, common when sound critics wish to dispatch with the body quickly. See Bernstein: “Aurality is connected to the body—what the mouth and tongue and vocal chords [sic] enact—not the presence of the poet.”14 There’s more to a body, though, than its respiratory tract. Once we acknowledge this fact, can we believe anymore in the bright line Bernstein draws between bodies and “presence”? I would call this splitting hairs—if the scalp weren’t out of bounds.

But Charles Bernstein was hardly the first one to strip the writer’s voice of its body. His midcentury counterparts were doing the same thing. In The Program Era, Mark McGurl tells the story of the “Voice Projec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Interlude: The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Confessional
• 1. The Breath of a Poem
• Interlude: Feminist Confessions, 1959–1974
• 2. Self-Consciousness Raising
• Interlude: Queer Talk, 1979–2010
• 3. Just Talk
• Interlude: Broadcast Intimacy; or, Confession Goes on Tour
• 4. Broadcast Yourself
• Coda: Confession in the Age of Aggregation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author