Seidel
Who said confessionalism was dead? Just about everyone. Read Frederick Seidel and learn the limits of one's awareness. Here is a poetry larger than most everything written these days that comes straight from the planet Lowell-Berryman-Plath. "Straight" may be the wrong word for so knotted a consciousness, one so cosmically and personally tormented. "He hid his life away in poetry," says the poem "Frederick Seidel." Boring? It's like being bored at a beheading, bored at the final judgement of what we have amounted to. If they find anything in the dust millennia from now (whoever or whatever "they" are), the only chance the best of us has to be is what we had the courage and perception to see and say about ourselves. The "confessors" wont be alone out there, but they'll up there at the front of the parade. As Seidel shows us in THE COSMOS TRILOGY, we're caught between a cosmos that can't see us or care for us and an ego we can't turn off except by self-laceration.
posted by roger mitchell @ 4:41 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Dear Roger,
I will join you in saying bah to the death of confessionalism. The whole idea that one can be “confessional” has the hidden assumption that the only way of gaining intimacy (and therefore authority) in a poem is to speak from the first person, and that the authority of the speaker comes from disclosing actual events or feelings that flow directly from same.
I would point to Brenda Shaughnessy’s "Interior with Sudden Joy," which, in my view, manages to obtain a great degree of intimacy through an epistolary form, sometimes addressing the beloved and sometimes addressing the speaker through a refracted form of the second person. Okay, so she doesn’t actually recount events (or even recognizable situations), but it seems to me that the attacks on confessionalism are actually attacks on personal material in a poem, and that the anger of these critics are directed against intimacy in narrative rather than the positioning of the narrator.
I have also read Seidel, and I have to say that I found him formally accomplished. Lots of sophisticated deployment of imagery and narrative strategies. However (and perhaps this is a content problem), I found this weird negotiation in his work between class and sex. (And not in the way that Lowell, for instance, goes out of his way in his poems to establish his erudition and make it clear that this social display is the only thing that gives him--and not you---the authority to critique his own class.) For me, Seidel seems jealously possessive of the way he toys with, makes fun of, and even enjoys the tacit privileges of class in his poems. One of these privileges (which Seidel seems to be saying is inherent, at least for him) is the privacy and amorality of the sexual experience. I’m not necessarily saying that sex doesn’t have anything to do with those qualities, just that the way he handles it is both vague and explicit, and in a manner that makes me very uncomfortable. Thus, his self-interrogation seems to become more display than agony, but perhaps this is merely the coolness of his delivery.
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