The feminine confessional poetry and its relationship with the social scene in Romania,

during and after the communist regime

„Identity, the having and being an “I”, is what separates me

from all the others, and also what unites me with them (...)
Self is self-in-relation: no other kind exists”

Alicia Ostriker, I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens

Introduction

At the beginning of the 1960s, in the USA, a new poetic paradigm was born. It directly proposed,
for the first time in the history of literature, the replacement of the abstract lyric voice with the
biographical "I". The purpose of this substitution was to bring closer, possibly to overlap, the
poetry and the reality– which the poet tries, on the one hand, to (re)coherentizize, and, on the
other hand, to change. Working as a therapy journal, in which personal experiences (most of
them traumatic) are noted, any volume of confessional does not stop, as one might mistakenly
believe, at the level of the individual and the individual, but it transcends the boundaries of the
ego, encompassing everything that surrounds the poet because, as Daniela Moldoveanu also
observes in the Confessional Women's Poetry, the more the lyrical voice turns into a centripetal
force and it defines itself punctually–becoming a physically identifiable notion–, the more it
traces the boundaries of its own world and is delimited by the plurality of a generally valid view
of humanity, the best it manages to include the historical and social background 1. Therefore,
confessional poetry is both personal and deeply social.

During the period of relative liberalization and openness to the West which was enjoyed
by Romanians in the second part of the seventh decade and at the beginning of the eighth decade,
as a result of a new, yet shortly practiced type of politics experimented by the dictator Nicolae
Ceaușescu, the texts of the most important women poets associated to the confessional school

1
Daniela Moldoveanu, Poezia confesivă feminină (Confessional feminine poetry), MNLR Publishing House,
Bucharest, 2014, p. 24.
from abroad - Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrianne Rich- became known among those who
were, at that time, part of the young generation of national poets- Ileana Mălăncioiu, Angela
Marinescu, Mariana Marin, Marta Petreu, Mariana Codruţ. These foreign texts will strongly
influence the vernacular feminine poetry, oriented from then on to topics such as the mutilating
effects of the totalitarian regime on individuals or as the (self) difficulties of defining femininity.
The playful irony and parody, often used by the generation colleagues of the Romanian poets
named above, are replaced in the texts of these female writers by a dramatic tone, which presents
the female problems in particular and the pains of the community in general in the form of a
liberating scream, meant to trigger change.

If we look closely at the volumes of poetry published at the beginning of the third millennium,
after the fall of the Communist regime, we observe that there is, undoubtedly, a strong
relationship between the type of poetry written by the women before 1989 and the authenticist
poetry signed by poets like Miruna Vlada, Elena Vladareanu, Domnica Drumea, who made their
debut around 2000. Also practicing direct, autobiographic poetry, the poets belonging to the
young wave are related to their predecessors especially because of the social implications of their
volumes.

In the following lines I will try to present an analysis of the relationship between feminine
confessional poetry, as it manifests itself in particular in Romania (without losing sight the
connection to its origins) and the social and political sphere of the country before and after the
1989 Revolution.

Short (hi)story. From the romantic “I” to the confessional “I”

The one who draws attention to the apparition of the new paradigm and who also gives it a name
is M. I. Rosenthal. In a famous 1959 review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies, he notes: The use of
poetry for the most naked kind of confession grows apace in our day 2. He was referring, of
course, to the late 50s. A decade after the end of World War II, in a relatively relaxed climate,
the domination that the USSR manages to exert in Europe provokes a collective fear (turned into
paranoia) of invasion and nuclear attack by the "adversary" throughout the USA. In the
immediate post-war period, the taste of victory made people hope for a period of prosperity, and
2
Robert Lowell apud Christopher Grobe, The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to
Reality TV, NYU Press, New York, 2017, p. 6.
to believe that that period was actually "happening". However, as time passed, more and more
Americans had the revelation that they had lost their critical spirit and vigilance and that their
belief in prosperity was a lie. The euphoria of the victory was fading away, replaced by a general
disenchantment and disappointment. The strengthening of the powers of the outer enemy had the
role to bring to the surface from the depths of a seemingly clear "sea" the internal weaknesses of
a system about to collapse. Confidence in capitalist values began to shake and thus gradually a
feeling revolt arose. It is this feeling which, together with the sensation of defragmentation
experimented by the postmodern world, stimulated the production of a new kind of poetry,
extremely socially imprinted.

It is necessary to draw a parallel between the causes responsible for the sensation of
defragmentation present in the USA and these that were present in Romania before the
Revolution, as the two states had a totally different political and economic organization model.
However, strangely, as we will see, the general atmosphere was the same in both places, and it
included anxiety, fear, a feeling of “lost-self” and a need of change. The American man, living in
a capitalist society, felt disintegrated under the force of a system which, although at a discursive
level sustained individuality and its expression, made also possible to break it like a mirror, in
which the reflections, distorted by advertisements, television shows, technology etc. got mixed
with the original with the original- in a deformed image of the "I". The humans were crushed
under the pressure of a necessary continuous adaptation to the norms of survival and success,
norms in which were in a permanent transformation, being generated by a huge machinery that
people could no longer control and understand. In the context of a collective obsession and desire
to regain the unified self, the feminine consciousness begins to ask more and more questions
about the elements that define it from the inside and not from the outside. After gaining a room
of their own, the first confessional writers went beyond what Elaine Showalter describes as the
female aesthetic3- a stage in which women's literature had reached in around 1930 and which,
according to the American critic, closed the feminine experience in the glass sphere of

3
„The female aesthetic was to become another form of self-annihilation for women writers, rather than a way of
self-realization. One detects in this generation clear and disturbing signs of retreat: retreat from the ego, retreat from
the physical experience of women, retreat from the material world, retreat into separate rooms and separate cities”,
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1977, p. 240.
aestheticism- trying to discover a specific feminine way of existing in one's own body and also
an authentic way of living. In Romania, at the base of the identity crisis, there was also a
machine that man couldn't control, its steering wheel being in the hands of the State, but unlike
the situation in the USA, the Romanians acknowledged its operating mechanism, as well as its
objective, namely the annihilation of individuality. This knowledge made it possible for them to
disassemble the machine in 1989 and to replace it with another, similar to the one overseas
(against which, as shown by numerous books of poetry published after 2000, shortly after being
used, disappointment is shown). Turning our eyes to the women poets, they, like their sisters in
the American space, were trying to discover a specific way "to be" - in writing and sex - but in a
world where, in addition to cultural stereotypes, they also faced limitations imposed by the
regime, double from those of men, if we consider the loss of possession of their own body, as an
effect of the birth control laws which will be discussed a little further. For this reason, the
subversive character of the poetry written by Mariana Marina, Ileana Mălăncioiu, Mariana
Codruţ is much stronger than that of the texts written by their generation's men colleagues.

An indispensable observation in this point of the essay would be that, unlike the romantic
poetry whose social activism crystallized around a collective revolt that spoke through the
depersonalized lyrical voice, the confessional poetry is illustrative for the assuming of the revolt
by a single individual and therefore its manifestation is a personalized one. Of course, since this
revolt appears as an effect of the action of external irregularities, its ability to speak for others /
on their behalf is not canceled. Probably one of the most relevant texts in this regard belongs to
the American poet Allen Ginsberg, who, in 1956, three years before the "baptism" of the
confessional movement, published his shocking poem America: „America I’ve given you all and
now I’m nothing/America two dollars and twenty seven cents January 17, 1956./ I can’t stand
my own mind./ America when will we end the human war?/ Go fuck yourself with your atom
bomb./I don’t feel good don’t bother me”. Preceding and the official apparition of confessional
movement, this poem perfectly reflects its main characteristics: personal involvement of the
author and a high interest shown to the social problems.

Thus, it is noticeable that the apparition of the confessional poetry in the USA was not a
"miracle", this kind of literature did not come out of nowhere, but is linked to a long tradition of
a more or less use of a direct lyrical voice, which starts with Walt Whitman4 and goes up to the
Beat Generation. However, the 60s are the ones that definitively and explicitly impose it.
Undoubtedly, it could not have appeared without the above-mentioned attempts, whose
fundamental role justifies, along with the argument coming from the historical background, the
idea that confessional poetry was not accidentally born over the ocean. The naturalness with
which the Romanian poets acquire this kind of writing is due, as I mentioned, to a strange
overlap of the deficits of capitalism and communism.

Writing about modernity in the American space (of course, Yeats, Pound, Eliot are
mentioned) and following the poetic transformations produced over more than half a century, to
the border with postmodernism, M. L Rosenthal also dedicated a chapter to Robert Lowell
(considered to be the “father” of the confessional poetry) in The Modern Poets: A Critical
Introduction, resuming the ideas conveyed in the 1959 review to which he made several
additions. One of the strengths of his exposition is the differentiation of the subjectivity typical
of romanticism from that specific to confessional poetry, a necessary differentiation considering
that both romantics and confessionals appeal to the first person singular to directly expose a
series of emotions. The difference consists, says Rosenthal, in the fact that although romantics
used this kind of exposure, they didn't give the game away even to themselves 5. In other words,
they did not use the first person singular assuming that they thus reveal themselves to the reader
as real beings, in flesh and bone. The lyrical voice was used as a mask, meant to mediate the
contact between the reader and the writer.

For the romantic poet, the existence of a transcendental dimension is undeniable.

Therefore, the mask mentioned above has the role of erasing the outline of individuality in order
to illustrate the (cursed) condition of being human, in most of the cases a genius (trapped in this
lime-tree bower my prison, as Coleridge says ) in an inferior world, and not to highlight the
particular features of the poet. The confessional writers, on the other hand, were trying to
eliminate this mediation. By doing so, they showed their faces and souls with all their
imperfections, using exposed vulnerability as a technique by which the reader is confronted with
the spiritual nudity of each author. The reader witnessed the "becoming" and "revolting"
4
Fidelity of the analysis power to the authenticity of one's own subjectivity - this is the essential lesson learned from
Whitman by all American poets of biography and person, Gheorghe Crăciun, Aisbergul poeziei modern (The
Iceberg of Modern Poetry), Paralela 45 Publishing House, Pitești, 2002, p. 321.
5
M. I. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York, 1965, p. 226.
adventure of the poets, he was from that moment a new type of "priest"6 who, in exchange for
renouncing his status as a penitent judge, had the chance to deeply understand human nature and
therefore to understand himself.

This renunciation makes possible for the therapeutic effect of the confessional text to
manifest itself bi-directionally: both the writer and the reader feel it, as Judith Harris observes in
a chapter she dedicated to women's confessional poetry in Signifying Pain: Constructing and
Healing the Self through Writing: „This turn toward social responsibility is far more
complex...for only through the personal experience of pain does pain become disinterested and
indicative of a universal context”7. As also highlighted in the previous lines, the “poets’
adventure” shall be seen as an adventure that takes into account both the inner tectonics of the
human being and the impact of history (of external, political, social, cultural, economic) factors
upon it.

As for the distinction between the modern and the confessional "self", the situation is as
clear as possible. If modernity proclaimed the "death of the author" through the mouths of some
of its most representative poets, starting with Mallarme (as Roland Barthes observes in his
famous essay8), the confessional poetry can be regarded as a resurrection of this author.
However, with the resurrection of the author, there was a significant modification of the reading
act itself. The reader, positioned in the foreground in the literary modernity, found himself, with
the birth of confessional poetry, placed not below the level of the writer (as in Romanticism), but
on the same level with him.

One of the main aims of confessional poetry can be described by the verb "to befriend" -
a friendship of the writer with the reader based on the attempt of the first "to tell himself"
honestly. But the following question naturally arises: Why would the reader want to enter into

6
Both in the English dictionaries (see Cambridge or Oxford) and in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian
Language, the primary meaning of the word "confession" is that of confessing certain facts, thoughts or intimate
feelings for restraint. (to a priest or a religion representative), Dicţionarul Explicativ al Limbii Române, Univers
Enciclopedic Publishing House, Bucharest, 2016, p. 240.
7
Judith Harris, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, State University of New York
Press, NY, 2003.
8
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author: „for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to
write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the
realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, performs, and not oneself”. Essay consulted online, on
Tbook: http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf.
this intimate, friendly relationship with the author of a text? What exactly would make him want
to listen to a stranger's dramas?

Talking about (him)herself/ talking about others

Any statement that seeks to clarify these dilemmas should start from the observation that
there is no such thing as a stranger. First of all, the profile of the confessional writer, like that of
the reader, is the profile of an ordinary, concrete being, moving between the limits imposed by
his/her own human condition. We should not, therefore, be surprised by the attention paid to the
relationship between personal identity and corporeality, which becomes a basic theme for
confessive poets (especially for the women poets) and which is an essential issue for the
postmodern people in general.

Even though the confessional poets, especially those who have started writing after 1989-
like Elena Vlădăreanu, Miruna Vlada, Ruxandra Cesereanu - talk about the difficult personal
situations due to the existence of gender stereotypes and about their intimate experiences as
women (which include menstruation, sex, birth, marriage, etc.), if we give a closer look on their
texts, it is not difficult to find that, ultimately, these texts do not communicate a series of
information and feelings valid only for their authors, but also for the many others. A pertinent
remark in this direction is made by Emily Boshkoff-Johnson, who, in an analysis of one of
Elizabeth Bishop's most well-known texts, In the Waiting Room, notes: „Because the poem is
confessional, using the I form of the speaker, it provides an experience by which the reader can
place themselves in the body of the speaker and feel what it might be like to be a young girl
faced with her own impending maturation. This is the hallmark of what the confessional school
of poetry allows us to do, and how it provides a perspective on the female body that could not
otherwise be obtained”9.

Discussing the replacement of the lyrical "I" with the biographical "I" in her book
dedicated to female confessional poetry, Daniela Moldoveanu stressed the importance of the
impact that the background in which the existence of an individual unfolds has on him/her, a
background to which the individual reacts. The poet thus becomes "a lightning bolt", taking over
9
Emily Boshkoff-Johnson, All the long gone darlings: Using Confessional Poetry as a Lens to View the Western
Cultural Symbolical Formations of the Female Body, in Psychoanalytic Psychology, consulted online on APA
PsycNET: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0035497 .
the energies in the environment in which he lives and then releasing them through text, whose
evocative power is combined with a huge potential for subversion. In other words, confessional
poems can be regarded as illustrative paintings for the great problems of the time in which they
were written, paintings in which the readers, contemporaries of the writer, can see their image
overlapped over that of the author, who inserted himself into the centre of her/his text. Readers
see this way the reflections of their sufferings and are urged to revolt

Female confessional poetry in Romania

 Before the 1989 Revolution

The social dimension of confessional women's poetry can only be understood by taking
into account its relation with the emancipation movements of the women who dominated the
second half of the 20th century and with the social and historical background on which these
movements take place. If over the ocean confessional poetry crystallizes concomitant with the
second feminist wave that happened around the 60s, in Romania, where the poets came into
contact with the American lyrics during the "respiro" period between 1964 and 1971, the interest
into this kind of poetry shown by the rebellious ladies who begin to reach, into their texts, the
sensitive points of femininity on the one hand and those of society in general on the other, cannot
be separated from the status that women had during the communist regime.

Relevant in this regard is the anthology entitled The Status of Women in the Communist
Period. Public policies and private life, coordinated by Alina Hurubean, in which, in a series of
extremely diverse studies (some of anthropological nature, others of legal-administrative or
medical nature), the authors try to offer, by putting together several images of /about the woman,
an overview of the position and the roles which she had to fulfill during the period from 1947 to
1989. An interesting exercise is to look at the changes suffered by the woman's image during
these 42 years, changes that appeared according to the needs that the regime had. A common
observation in almost all the studies is that the gender policies promoted by Communism were
aimed at legitimizing the regime and not genuine emancipation of women, since the "equality"
acclaimed at the discursive level and later socially implemented did not imply equal affirmation
and respect of the values of both women and men, but rather "the imposition of the masculine
standard and the treatment of women as men"10. In addition to the ideological advantages, there
were, of course, some more pragmatic ones, insofar as the ladies were useful as working force in
the industrialization process (at first) and (later) as machinery for producing children. In
Romania, the communist-type modernization strategies, focused on emancipation and gender
equality, had, in reality, contradictory effects, in the sense that they led to the diminution of
some gender differences that led to the inferior status of the woman, and, at the same time, they
consolidated gender inequalities and seriously violated individual rights and freedoms. 11

It cannot be denied the fact that women were also offered some benefits (small and yet
not insignificant) for the triple responsibility - worker, wife, mother - they had, a responsibility
that broth them close to death during the last years of the regime (the compulsory fulfillment of
the maternal function by the famous decree 770/1966 caused a disastrous number, in the deepest
sense of the word, of more than 10,000 women's deaths as a result of their attempts to abort
under miserable conditions and by inferior methods12). However, A major leap occurred at the
time of the enactment of the education reorganization law of August 1948, when women became
beneficiaries of mass education efforts. Also, the high degree of employability (in 1970 about
75% of the female population over the age of 18 was active in the field of work) made it possible
to increase the economic independence of women, who could act for the first time outside the
financial limits imposed by their life partner or by their parents (in the case of the youngest).

Although in the first years of the new regime the idea of sexual freedom had become
quite fashionable in the revolutionary groups, it was not very successful at masses, so after 1960
the official discourse returned to the promotion of an idealized image of the traditional family.

Even though, theoretically, women had gained their freedom, they did not enjoy this gain
for too long, because in the absence of contraceptive means and having the choice abortion
forbidden, they were forced to devote their energy and material resources to the growth of
children and families, within which patriarchal values persisted. Far from the smiling female
10
See Alina Ilinca and Liviu Marius Bejenaru, Gen, revoluţie şi război. O analiză comparativă asupra emancipării
femeii în Uniunea Sovietică şi România comunistă în Statutul femeii în perioada comunistă. Politici publice şi viaţă
privată (Woman’s status during the communist regime. Public politics and private life) , coord. by Alina Hurubean,
European Institute Publishing House, Iaşi, 2015, p. 72.
11
Vladimir Pati, Ultima inegalitate. Relatiile de gen in Romania (The last inegality. Gender relationships in
Romania), Polirom, Iaşi, 2003, p. 99.
12
See Corina Doboş, „Decesul s-a produs din vina femeii...”, fragmente din universul medico juridic al
pronatalismului ceauşist în Statutul femeii în perioada comunistă..., cited before, p. 170-190.
models presented between the pages of the Woman magazine, models who succeeded in a
superhuman way to reconcile the figure of the hardworking worker with that of the loving wife
and that of the happy mother with six children, most of the Romanian women were living a
dramatic life, marked by overwork and deprivation of their sexuality and body, which had
become state propriety, being seen as a factory destined to produce as many future workers as
possible. The opposition to this falsification of the woman's image, as well as to a "dirty history"
that had brought the population to the point where the preservation of dignity often coincided
with the death sentence is one of the greatest merits of women's confessional poetry written
before 1989.

All poetry books signed before 1989 by Mariana Marin, considered to be one of the most
representative faces of her generation, are illustrative in this perspective. In The Secret Annex
(constructed around Anne Frank’s story- where Anne was an alter ego of the author-, living in a
monstrous world -that stand for Romania during the communist regime- where people had to
hide their identity, their real feelings and believes to survive), as well in A war of ten thousand
years, the poet dared to speak about the social problems that mutilated ( in 1999 she also
published a volume named The mutilation of the artist as a young man) all that was sincere, good
in a human’s soul. These volumes were very influential among young people and they
contributed undoubtedly to the building of a revolutionary atmosphere. When it comes to female-
specific issues, two other poets- Angela Marinescu and Marta Petreu- signed some very
provocative books, where they expressed themselves in a very new way for the female literature
in Romania. In Bring the words!, as well as in The morning of the young ladies, Marta Petreu
gave up the sentimental voice of the old-type poetesses, and, like her "sister" Angela Marinescu,
she used a percussive tone, she spoke about sexual desire, about domestic limitations and about
living a country were no contraception was available. However, some critics consider that the
openness towards sexuality, a significant step for the emancipation of the woman, is made,
initially, under the sign of a masculine virility13, which was totally replaced only after the
Revolution, by the poets of the next generation, total owners their bodies, were able to explore
the field of feminine pleasure also taking into considerations the specificities of the gender.

13
See Corin Braga , Postmodernismul literar românesc – bătălia dintre generaţii (The Romanian literary postmodernism-
the battle between generations) , in „Echinox” magazine , no. 6-7-8-9/ 1995.
 As also mentioned before, we cannot help but notice the bizarre situation of talking about
confessional poetry, related to the capitalist, democratic society in which it was born, in a
country that was under the sign of totalitarianism. If in America, where the confessional poetry
first appeared, the liberalist background was the one which directed the poets to a type of writing
that had and still has the individual "I" in its center, an "I" who advocates for his rights, in
Romania this background is created (also) through poetry. So a reversal of the situation is taking
place. The text contributes to the emergence of a new kind of society and of a new political
organization and not vice versa.

Without enjoying the freedom of expression benefited from the USA poets, Romanian
confessional writers were forced to use a series of techniques to deceit “Procust”, like the
parable- in the case of Ilena Mălăncioiu - the metaphor and the metonymy, and also irony and
especially bitter self-irony. Only with these misleading techniques could it be possible to write in
the ninth decade of the last century a poem strongly linked to the socio-cultural context in which
it was born and which constitutes its predilect field of exploration (...) Only with these
misleading techniques could it be possible to write in the ninth decade of the last century a type
of poetry strongly linked to the socio-cultural context in which it was born and which constitutes
its predilect field of exploration (...) The poetry is no longer important as a space of a privileged
timelessness, but as a reflection of the reality- the scene of a dramatic life, important now is not
the metaphysical world, but the biographical self of the writer14. Although Gheorghe Crăciun
made this remark concerning all the eighties poets, probably the closest to the true meritassigned
to them are the confessional female poets, more authenticist than textualist. They experienced the
communist horror up to the dispossession of their own body. It shall be stressed that although the
confessional paradigm is linked to the literary postmodernity, it does not respect the typical
postmodern attitude that Radu G. Ţeposu spoke of - a distant, implicated self of the writer, the
recovery of the past through an ironic filter, the sarcasm, the pastiche - none of these are specific
to the texts of the prerevolutionary female confessional poets, for whom the biographical
component is essential (with the exploration of the psychological and physiological dimension of
the self) and also for whom the social-political component of poetry is indispensable. Is for this
reason why it can be considered that in the DNA of the poetry written by the women poets who
made their publishing debut around 2000 has inscribed the genes of the confessional
14
Gheorghe Craciun, book already cited, p. 283.
prerevolutionary poetry. Without doubt the volumes signed by Elenea Vlădăreanu, Miruna
Vlada, Domnica Drumea etc. are direct descendants of confessional texts published before 1989.

 After the 1989 Revolution

Only with the 1989 Revolution and with the gradual installation of democracy and the
capitalist system it could be spoken speak of a real synchronization with USA literature and
culture (improperly said, since in the meantime it has become a culture of the masses, which no
longer takes into account the political boundaries). An increasing number of people now have
access to radio, television, the internet. The man is left only with fragments and small pieces of
reality, being aware that the overall image is a huge puzzle, and that the pieces are always in the
contraction. 15 All these transformations, accompanied by a deep feeling of disappointment with
the new political and economic happened when people started to discover the dark side of what
their ancestors or even themselves idealized, as the years passed by after the Revolution. Poetry
was not insensible to the new reality and it continued to function as a weapon against social and
political injustice. This fact is brought to light by Mihai Iovănel, who, in a recently published
book - Ideologies of Literature in Romanian Post-Communism - makes a convincing analysis of
how the ideological paradigms that appeared in the Romanian space after 1989 entered the
literary space, invading it and bringing it near the border with sociology.

After the last decade of the twentieth century, in which the poetry was oriented towards a
"hermetic" vision and a globalizing humanism, being marked by a kind of mystification of the
biography (relevant in this sense are the volumes published in the 90s by Ioan S. Pop or Cristian
Popescu), towards the end of the century the biographical component, along with the social and
political one of the lyric, returned to the foreground. An essential moment in the evolution of
post-December poetry is the publication in 1998 of the Fracturist Manifesto of Marius Ianuş (to
which Dumitru Crudu made a few additions later), which contained in nuce most of the
directions in which the poetry of the beginning of the millennium evolved. The rebellious
attitude is visible even from the first rows of the manifesto, which reminds in its tone of the
avant-garde manifestos of the first half of the twentieth century. Fracturists advocated for a kind
of poetry capable of causing "fractures", of violating the reader, and especially of exploring the
reality without any cultural mediation. Thus, the fracturist poetry aimed the refusal of notions,
15
Daniela Moldoveanu, book already cited, p.32.
concepts, names, labels of all kinds, to reach again the living complexity of the real and the
individual16. The connection to the ordinary, everyday life should not be made by the mere
observation of the world, starting from general to reach the individual, but vice versa, starting
from the personal experience of the individual towards a wider perspective of the world. It is
necessary, the fractalists say, the focus to be moved from the object to the subject. The personal
reactions of the biographical self to the real are important.

All these traits by which the fracturists define themselves are, visibly, quite similar to the
essential characteristics of the confessional poetry that Mariana Marin, Magnda Cârneci, Angela
Marinescu, etc. had practiced. The differences that they proposed arose, largely, from the
possibilities offered by the new regime: on the one hand, direct, sharp criticism of a political and
social nature (moreover, the fracturists call themselves anarchists; if many of the confessional
poets who wrote before December 1989 used self-annihilation for purification, the plan of
destruction now moves to the outside) and on the other hand, the use of scriptural techniques
with a specific purpose, that of preserving the sensation of ingenuity17 (elevated to a supreme
rank) and not as a mean of avoiding censorship.

For writers who became famous after 2000, Emily Dickinson's words - "Tell all the truth
but tell it slant" - had no value. The new poets no longer relied on the accuracy of language itself
and its force to render a personal state. They focused more on the force of the images that could
be obtained through words, be them visual images, auditory images or any other kind. Anyway,
this should not surprise us, given the new cultural constitution of Romania. Anyway, the use of
the visual dimension of what the fracturists call "imagistic complex" was not strange to the
confessional pre-assemblers, who often resorted to shrill, shocking (Marta Petreu) or disturbing
images. At the center of the fracture movement lies the authenticity, understood almost identical,
if not completely identical, with the meaning that it had for the confessional poets: The
authenticity we hunt is related to the following consideration: one cannot determine the birth of
a state -through poetry, my obs.- without having experienced it or any close mental experiences
related to it (no matter if it only happened at an imaginative level)18.

16
See Marius Ianuş, Manifestul fracturist (the Fracturist Manifesto) , consulted on the site poezie.ro
17
We do not throw any tools or techniques to the garbage, we want to continuously improve them. But for us the
most powerful effect of art is ingenuity, Ibidem.
18
Ibidem.
 The poetry published around 2000 crystallized around two main centers, each of them
also divided into numerous cells: the authenticist center, which developed from Fracturism,
including poetic subtypes such as minimalism, depressionism, etc. and the neo-expressionist
center, continuing the nineties tradition. Reflecting on the organization structure of the
globalized world, these centers were not isolated, between them there were numerous
communication channels that united one poetic subtype with another, giving rise to a hybrid way
of writing specific to each poet. However, what was common to most of the female poets that
made themselves known at the beginning of the third millennium is the obvious feminist
militancy, the importance they give to social issues, as well as the confessional character of their
writings. Speaking of their bodies, now their own possessions, they continued what their
predecessors began. Sexuality, menstruation, matrimony, rape, they wrote about all these
experiences and issues in a striking tone, meant to destroy any stereotype that could be
associated with femininity. Their purpose was to establish a new, real image, of what it means to
inhabit a female body.

In this regard, the first volumes signed by Elena Vladareanu, namely Pages and fractures
are extremely illustrative. In these volumes, containing violent and shocking sensory images, the
author spoke about all her youth fetishes, about her lack of self-trust as a teenager that didn't fit
the common sense of beauty, about rape, hair removal, make-up, misogyny. The immediate
effect on the reader is that he/she feels the need to ask him/herself about the idea of common
sense, about the gender roles and about everything that is linked to a woman image because of
the tradition, the media, advertising, and, not least, education (or a lack of it). In her next
volumes, all constructed as projects that wanted to re-shape the society and to bring awareness
regarding certain issues, she kept treating taboo and social-related topics. For example, in
europe. 10 funeral songs, Elena Vladareanu talked about the disappointment in front of a present
that had nothing to do with the idealized future waited so much before the Revolution, about
unemployment, poverty, a Europe that only needed Romanians as cheap workforce and a world
whose meaning was replaced by a continuous desire to buy and to consume. The consumerist
way of living is also attacked in another book, private space, which was made together with a
visual artist, Dan Perjovschi. They tried to draw the reader's attention on the mechanized, robotic
type of living of today people, who work only to have enough money to consume and whose
existence is marked by perfect sterility. The difficulties of becoming and being a mother- like
having no personal time, gaining weight, having sex again after birth, developing a relationship
with the child, are presented on a natural tone, which tries to demystify the much glorified and
unreal image of a mother who seems to live in a total euphoria and happiness after her kid is
born in Non stress test. Elena Vladareanu also spoke, in money. work. free time about the poor
paying of artists, whose work, starting with the modernists (as Bourdieu underlines in his Rules
of Art), could gain symbolic power in indirect proportion to financial benefits, being from
Baudelaire on to the confessional school separated from reality, and made only for its sake. As
this modernist perspective persisted in the Romanians understanding of art, becoming a part of
the (ironically) traditional view on it, Vladareanu whished, through her lyrics, beginning from
her poet- experience, to show the world that artists are ordinary humans, who have families, who
need to eat, to pay rent and bills, who, in other words, need to be paid for their services.

Not only Elena Vladareanu, but also many other women poets of her age, through their
dramatic tone, through their lyrics of revolt and, not least, through their courage, could and must
be considered direct followers of the confessional female writers that published their books
before December 1989.

Conclusion

Repudiating the model of silent, submissive femininity, the most important of the women
poets who published their first volumes before 1989 - Mariana Marin, Mariana Codruţ, Marta
Petreu, Angela Marinescu - gave voice, with astonishing violence of language and imagination,
on the one hand to the frustrations accumulated over time by the second sex, and on the other
hand, to the suffering and soul mutilation experienced by women, in particular, and by the entire
population of the country in general during the communist regime. Strongly influenced by the
confessional literature that appeared in the USA in the 1960s, they wrote a kind of poetry that
sought to counteract the effects of the official discourse on the image and roles of women and the
rights and duties of the population to the state. Full of courage, they assumed a dangerous
position, both against tradition and totalitarian regime. Their lyrics, which soon became popular
among cultural and literary cycles and also among ordinary people, managed to raise serious
questions about the necessity of revolt.
Although the abolition of communism finally took place, in 1989, the situation of post-
December Romania is not at all a flourishing one, and a decade after the glorious moment of
December 25, the young generation began to express their harsh opinion on the irregularities that
characterized the new type of government and the capitalist economic system, the one that made
possible the appearance of confessional poetry in the USA. Practicing further and carrying on
what the first confessional poets had begun 20 years ago in a completely different political
regime, Elena Vlădăreanu together with the other poets who make their debut around 2000, had
(and still have) a critical attitude towards the social and political background in which they live
and against the mentality that governs it. They deal with a range of sensitive topics such as
female sexuality, rape, abortion, domestic violence, cultural misogyny (and beyond), the
dehumanizing and (unexpectedly) deindividuation effects of capitalism, based on their personal
experiences.
Renouncing the autonomy that modernism had imposed on art, reestablishing the link between
literature and reality, the confessional poets intuited what many researchers in the human domain
from the French space pointed out in the 80s: words are powerful and capable of changing the
senses of the world.

Bibliography:

1. Poetry books:
VLĂDĂREANU, Elena: Pagini (ediţia a II-a), Editura Vinea, Bucureşti, 2003.

VLĂDĂREANU, Elena: fracturi, Editura Pontica, Constanţa, 2003.

VLĂDĂREANU, Elena: Spaţiu privat, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 2009.

VLĂDĂREANU, Elena: Non stress test, Editura Casa de Pariuri Literare, Bucureşti, 2016.

VLĂDĂREANU, Elena: europa. zece cântece funerare (ediţia a II-a), Editura Tracus Arte,
Bucureşti, 2018.

VLĂDĂREANU, Elena: bani. muncă. timp liber, Editura Nemira, Bucureşti, 2017.

MARIN, Mariana: Un război de 100 de ani (utopii şi alte poeme de dragoste), Editura Albatros,
Bucureşti, 1981.
MARIN, Mariana: Aripa secretă, Editura Cartea Românească, Bucureşti, 1986.

2. Theory:

BOURDIEU, Pierre, Regulile Artei (Ediția aIIa), Editura ART, București, 2012

CRĂCIUN, Gheorghe: Aisbergul poeziei moderne, Editura Paralela 45, Piteşti, 2002.

GROBE, Christopher: The Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to
Reality TV, NYU Press, 2017.

HARRIS, Judith, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, State
University of New York Press, NY, 2003

HURUBEAN, Alina (coord.): Statutul femeii în perioada comunistă. Politici publice şi viaţă
privată, Editura Institutul European, Iaşi, 2015.

IOVĂNEL, Mihai: Ideologiile literaturii în postcomunismul românesc, Editura Muzeul

Literaturii Române, Bucureşti, 2017.

MOLDOVEANU, Daniela: Poezia confesivă feminină, Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române,

Bucureşti 2014.

PATI, Vladimir: Ultima inegalitate. Relaţiile de gen în România, Polirom, Iaşi, 2003.
ROSENTHAL, M.I.: The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press,
New York, 1965.

SHOWALTER, Elaine: A Literature of Their Own: British women novelists from Bronte to
Lessing, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977.

Webography:

BARTHES, Roland, The Death of the Author: http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-

content/death_authorbarthes.pdf

BOSHKOFF-JOHNSON, Emily: All the long gone darlings: Using Confessional Poetry as a
Lens to View the Western Cultural Symbolical Formations of the Female Body:
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0035497

OSTRIKER, Alicia, I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Bishop, Olds, and Stevens:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44884398.pdf?casa_token=omBLzblC5soAAAAA:3whYv5l-
_2aQUZNuptc7HeFrYkgEjDvTWDpERQ-C6h1SFi4MUIB2GuvyPQbNZ2h2if4-
aMewVy6FMpzBPcK5LiN6ksFyBO3fpUc6s1EwJuS6tc36hFc0 (the quotation from the
beginning of the work can be found on the page 240)

IANUŞ,Marius, Manifestul fracturist:

https://www.poezie.ro/index.php/essay/202813/Manifestul_Fracturist

From magazines:

BRAGA, Corin: Postmodernismul literar românesc – bătălia dintre generaţii, in Echinox Magazine,
no. 6-7-8-9/ 1995.