Confessional Poem

Author(s): MICHAEL ROBBINS

Source: Poetry, Vol. 197, No. 3 (DECEMBER 2010), pp. 167-169
Published by: Poetry Foundation
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25758567
Accessed: 30-01-2016 16:29 UTC

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 MICHAEL ROBBINS

Confessional Poem

You had awoodchuck and an opium ball.

The one ate through the furniture,
the other sat in its cage depressing me.
Now thewoodchuck sheds its skin.
I have a cow behind theDollar Bin.

You shouldn't drink diarrhea

unless you bring enough for everybody.
Turn it into a teachingmoment.
Asian-American Students forChrist
have the room until 2:30.

Rumi says no donkey is a virgin,

no, nor any beast that bites the grass.

Maybe it sounds better in Persian.

An unseen force propels the carts
across theWhole Foods parking lot.

The woodchuck hasn't been born yet

I'd rather than you as a pet.
keep
You'llsleep on wood shavings, I'll comb your pelt.
That animal loved you, his captor,
whom he hated. I know just how he felt.

MICHAEL ROBBINS

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 What are your thoughtsabout confessionalpoetry?

Well, I have lots of conflicting thoughts about it, to the limited ex

tent that I believe there is such a category. Certainly it has become
a bogeyman to be invoked whenever children threaten to write a
poem about their feelings. I think that Lowell, Plath, Berryman, and
Rich (although not Snodgrass or Sexton) are about as good as post
war American poets get.More important, they need to be read, not
dismissed as grandiose, self-pitying egoists. Because ifyou read them
with the care they deserve, you'll discover some of the most self
aware poetry of the twentieth century,which usually (and subtly)
ironizes its own worst tendencies. The poems anticipate and render

superfluous theirmost strident critics' objections. Plath isdownright

funny about what a drama queen she is.Doubtless therewas a time
when the confessionals' starhogged the firmament, inwhich equally
great poets like Frank O'Hara and George Oppen also shone. But that
time is past, and thework especially of Lowell, Plath, and Berryman
isvital to any contemporary poetics that hopes to understand the re
lation of affect to subjectivity and of individuals to the public sphere.

Many readerswill beput offby the linesabout drinking diarrhea. Should

or not? What are the lines
they be, therefor?

You think? If any readers are not put off by the thought of drink
I them not to send me e-mails. That was
ing diarrhea, implore poem
written out of anger with someone, a former friend. It's my poison
tree. But the lines are meant to encourage to share.
ultimately people
And stay in school. And don't do drugs.

Whence thewoodchuck?

If I explained thewoodchuck, then several people would be able to

guess who the poem's about.

The last linesaremore conventionallyrevealing, in someways, than others

in thepoem. Tell us about thoseyou have hated, and how theymight be
nibbling away at thepoem.

Now we get to it. Except for, say,Dick Cheney, Twouldn't want to

name any of those whom 1 have nated: their name is legion. But they

l68 POETRY

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 all nibble away atmy poems ? inmany ways, I'm writing for them.
I think hate can be a healthy emotion in literarycontexts? the brash,
exhilarating hatred of Nietzsche or Celine or Geoffrey Hill. What
William Logan says about critics? that theymust be good haters if
? is true of
they are to be good lovers poets too. Probably it is true
of anyone who wants to think hard about impossible problems. Odi
et amo? as thewoodchuck has it? is the only sane response to this
brightly burning world.
Speaking more generally, Iwrite from a deep hatred of liberalism,
its pieties of individual choice and self-correctingmarkets. Fredric
Jameson writes that we must

ourselves... that we are inside the culture of the mar

persuade
ket and that the inner dynamic of the culture of consumption
is an infernalmachine fromwhich one does not escape by the
taking of thought (or moralizing positions), an infinitepropa
gation and replication of "desire" that feeds on itselfand has no
outside and no fulfillment.

The liberal, on the other hand, believes that the system

is not really total in that sense, that we can ameliorate it, reor

ganize it,and regulate it in such away that itbecomes tolerable

and we thereby have the "best of both worlds."

I know perfectly sane, quite intelligent people who insist it is sheer

fantasy to imagine that therewill ever be any alternative to the capi
talist order.My poems try, in theirmodest way, to expose the ridicu
lous logic of thisway of thinking (some more than others, obviously),
even as they recognize its seductions, its inescapability.

MICHAEL ROBBINS

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