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The Pitfalls of Personal Poetry


by RJ McCaffery

few years back I was writing about Anne Sexton, who along with W.D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and (sometimes) Thedore Roethke, formed the backbone of the American Confessional Movement.

In many ways, Confessionalism was overdue- through their controversial first-person poems, the confessionals opened up subject areas previously considered taboo by the poetry circle. Abortion, divorce, madness, menstruation- these were topics not discussed in "polite" society of the 1950s and 60s, and certainly, not topics a poem would address with candor. The confessional movement opened new possibilities for poetry, but it came with a price. Five of the above six poets killed themselves.

Confessionalism was, and is, a complex phenomenon. It spoke to suppressed concerns, and in so doing revitalized poetry and drew large crowds of readers. However, the poetry also titillated the audience and the critics, some of whom began discussing the poems with gross assumptions as to the "objective" truth of the events in the poems. The poems became less perceived as poetry, and more perceived as auto-biography done in verse.

For example, Anne Sextons first book was titled "To Bedlam and Partway Back", and was immediately seen as poetry about the POETS madness, as opposed to poems about madness. The poems were critically discussed as "unmediated autobiography"- i.e. truthful statements about "real life" that were not distorted by any artistic, poetic, or aesthetic considerations. Now the reasons that readers and critics assumed the poems were about Anne Sexton (the historical person) were many;

Anne wrote in the first person, (the "I" voice). She used diction that was appropriate for an educated woman living in Boston circa 1960. She used names of specific persons and places that she (Anne) had known and seen. She openly stated that she had begun writing poetry as a psychologically therapeutic activity. And, she told interviewers (and later, certainly did little to disabuse them of the notion) that the poems were about things that Actually Happened to her.

And sometimes that was true. However, in other cases, say in the poem "The Abortion", we know (beyond doubt) that Anne Sexton did not actually have an abortion. Now its not Annes fault that critics and readers immediately assumed that Anne had an abortion and then decided to write a poem about her experience. This goes to what I written elsewhere about "establishing trust with a reader". By this point in her career, Anne had the trust of the readers, so they read this poem like they had the others.

Actually, this phenomenon was confined, by and large, to her first person poems. Anne also wrote poems that were obviously in the voice of another person (say a girl being buried alive in Arabia), but these poems were not seen as being the same "type" of poem (unmediated autobiography) as her first person work.

The point in mentioning all this to you is for us to begin to consider what I call "personal poetry". By this, I mean any poem, so written, that it may be read as something that happened to the POET. This would exclude poems where the narrative voice (i.e. the voice speaking IN the poem) is not compatible with the Poet. For example, were I to write a poem about a girl being buried alive in Arabia, readers could safely assume that the narrative voice is not that of RJ McCaffery. On the other hand, were I to write a poem in which the speaker somehow identified himself as a male poet living in Athens, GA in the year 2000, working a series of odd jobs and generally fooling about on the web, the reader might be more willing to connect the speaker of the poem with me. Since we buy the readers trust with concrete physical details, the more concrete physical details that match up with the poet, the more likely the reader will be to attribute the narrative voice to the poet.

We could make a quick list:

How to make the reader think the Narrative Voice in a poem is YOU (actual poet)

Speaker and Poet

Conversely, to make a reader think the poem is not written by you,

Speaker and poet

Does this matter to my writing?, you may ask.

Well, it does matter a great deal, but how it matters depends on the reader. Most readers will be titillated by taboo stuff they feel may have happened to another person- thus, if the poem is catchy enough, theyll read it. Other readers (especially those who read lots of poetry, like myself) quickly grow bored over yet another "divorce poem", yet another "menopause poem", etc. Not that Im unsympathetic, but many of these poems say exactly the same thing in a sloppy, imprecise way- after youve sat through twenty of these poems, do you really want to hear the twenty-first? Much of Anne Sextons poetry bores me on a second read- to me the "I" is somewhat exclusionary.

Of course, the proof is in the pudding (i.e. the finished result tells you how good your attempt was). Its possible to write excellent and engaging personal and non-personal poems about the same subjects. (As William Matthew's writes, "Dull subjects are only subjects we have failed.") The stakes go up when there is a large body of poetry already written on the same subject in the same voice. It might be more difficult to write an engaging personal poem about menopause since most of the other poems about menopause have already articulated the most common concerns associated with it. Its then hard to make the poem sound "fresh" or catchy. By the same token, its awfully tough to write a third person poem about "nature" without sounding like something done in the 19th century; the reason being that hundreds of thousands of poems were written about nature in the 19th century.

Sometimes changing a first person narrative to a third person can transform an personal event into something more emblematic and evocative for multiple readers. Other times, speaking in the voice of a person (first person narrative) can make an abstract event personal, just like (on a microscopic level, a specific image can personalize a concept, say Wilfred Owens image of a boy repeatedly sharpening a bayonet makes the de-humanizing aspects of war concrete.)

The choice is yours, and Id advise you to choose anew for each poem.

© RJ McCaffery