speak your truth

Confessionalism at its best is speaking your truth.

show 'em hell

After their first portfolios were turned in, the creative writing teacher thought one of the students must have misheard the admonishment “Show, don’t tell,” as “Show ‘em hell.”

slow reveal

Even if a poet doesn’t tend to be autobiographical or confessional, inevitably some personal characteristics will be revealed in her/his choice of observations and in the style of writing.

puzzles me most

Though scarcely a confessional poet I write about my life. Impossible not to, really, since it’s what puzzles me most. The lyric voice permits me to acknowledge that, when I write about frames, I may also be writing about my life and, conversely, though I write about what looks like my life I might as well write about any object that is both discrete and amenable, cordial and solitary. Much as any person is. Much as a frame tends to be.

Of the letters of the alphabet, only one works as a perfect frame. It is the O of the gold frame of Michelangelo’s ‘Doni Tondo’, of the mouth of Beckett’s Not I, the o of omphalos and origin, of globe and moon, of look and book, of for and good. Of open and store. Of close and lose. Of hole and whole. Of do and don’t. Of hold and go. Of no and not. Of alone and know and so and old and, yes, love.

—Vona Groarke, Four Sides Full (The Gallery Press, 2016)

rough to read

So much suffering in those lines, you felt it was written with claw marks.

questionable choice

Asking the poet you once dated to write an epithalamium for your wedding

tell ail

Confessional poetry: Dire diary.

sirens in the distance

Ambulance chaser of in extremis moments.

continuous shriek

The confessional poet’s writing style could be described as ‘scream of consciousness’.

no outré there

A confessional poet whose life might be mistaken for that of a saint.

escape artist

The confessional poem is a ‘Houdini box’ from which the self emerges gasping. To gasps of the audience…and then to their rising applause, for having transcended such distress.

audience to the rescue

After the luridly personal poems were read, the audience wasn’t sure what to do with their hands, whether they should be clapping or scooping up the mess.

voice overlord

They called her ‘confessional’ in order to silence her. [Thinking of Plath.]

pyschological flowering

Not confessional; rather the soul exposed in its full archetypal and psychological flowering.