The Moaner … writes in the personal or expressivist mode. The focal point is the “I” and the feelings and experiences of the “I.”

Look at “Western Wind” a very old, very basic “moan.”

From 16th century England.

Western Wind

Western wind, when wilt thou blow,The small rain down can rain?Christ! If my love were in my arms,And I in my bed again!

“small rain” = light rain, mist?

The personal mode is what most of us think of when we think of poetry, and it’s what most of us write when we first begin writing poems: we’re “letting our feelings flow” etc.

A SUB-SET of the personal mode is the confessional mode. The “confessional poem” was inaugurated by such poets as Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, and Robert Lowell in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This type of poemYoung poets writing in this mode today are sometimes referred to as the “post-confessional poets.”

The Confessional ModeThis kind of poem, with roots in the Romantic period of English literature as well as (to some extent) in antiquity, tends to do the following:

Reveals something normally hidden or unspoken. Explores subject matter that isn’t usually discussed out loud; challenges the line between acceptable and not acceptable, private and public. May broach such intimate subjects as family traumas, mental illness, troubled romantic relationships, moral transgressions, etc.

Focuses on personal life: family, relationships, childhood. Focuses on personal neuroses, personal “issues,” illness,

fears, conflicts, loneliness.

Tony Hoagland’s “Adam and Eve”

Look at “Personal Poetry Sampler”

(available as a link on our Schedule and also as a file in our Class Library)

1. What’s the situation in “Adam and Eve”? Who’s talking and where are they? What’s happening?

2. What is the speaker confessing to?3. How does he initially present his confession? 4. In the course of the poem, how does he actually

use, transform, or redeem that confession, if at all?

5. What do you make of all the questions in the poem?

6. What do you make of the final lines?7. Based on Hoagland’s poem, what, would you say,

are the benefits and drawbacks of the confessional mode?

If you are having trouble with a poem, or even if you aren’t, you should ask yourself what a poem’s basic “situation” is. It’s a good first step to understanding poems that are especially difficult, and it’s also part of what is call an “explication” of a poem: a basic paraphrase.

Hoagland’s “Adam and Eve”Strategies:

• Shocks us with first line—sets us up to JUDGE him.• Addresses the issue of shock and offensiveness from the get-go

(postconfessionalism).• Doesn’t EXPLAIN things away. Instead he repeatedly asks specific

questions, some of which are self-critical. The poem is very reflective, thinky.

• Despite the abstract thinkiness of his poems, he virtually always includes some very specific, vivid, concrete particulars.

• Deflects possible embarrassment with humor.• Works with the problem, doesn’t just state it. Acknowledges his own

culpability. • Ends with an interesting, paradoxical insight about confronting our own

evil head-on as a way to truly find our own compassionate nature.

Lisa Lewis• Like Hoagland, thinks long and hard about

her subject matter—but not to explain it away. Uses poem as a vehicle for inquiry into her personal experience as it is linked to LARGER issues.

• Like Hoagland, always provides ultra-specific, gritty details which balance, support, illustrate, and refresh the abstraction.

• Works hard toward—earns—the conclusions she draws at the end?

What are the dangers of this sort of art?

• Self-absorption• Solipsism• Narrow interest• Alienation of reader• Embarrassment. You know, the feeling that

makes you want to say….

That was more information

than we really needed, Billy Bob!

It’s fine to write about very

personal experiences, but it’s

important to also plant a deep

taproot; that is, the writer

must also find the universal in

the particular; the small

isolated self and its wee

experiences connected to

something larger. Otherwise,

it just becomes diary writing.

Poems by Greg OrrHow does this poet

avoid the hazards of the confessional mode?

What are his strategies for handling deeply “I”-centered poems?

How does he encounter and shape the expressive impulse?

It’s important to know that

he accidentally shot and

killed his own brother

when he was 12 years old.

Wrote about this event

almost exclusively in his

first book or two. Is now

something of a spokesman

for the “post-confessional”

movement.

How does a poet write about

such horrific material?? Should

he write about it at all?

BTW,

here’s a news article Orr wrote recently, after the accidental shooting, by a young girl, of her instructor at a shooting range:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/opinion/sunday/reflections-on-a-shooting-range-death-from-one-who-knows.html?_r=3

Litany I remember him falling beside me,the dark stain already seeping across his parka hood.I remember screaming and running the half mile to our house.I remember hiding in my room.I remember that it was hard to breatheand that I kept the door shut in terror that someone would enter.I remember pressing my knuckles into my eyes.I remember looking out the window onceat where an ambulance had backed upover the lawn to the front door.I remember someone hung from a tree near the barnthe deer we'd killed just before I shot my brother.I remember toward evening someone came with soup.I slurped it down, unable to look up.In the bowl, among the vegetable chunks,pale shapes of the alphabet bobbed at randomor lay in the shallow spoon.

In this poem his strategy seems to be simple description. He recounts, clearly and concretely, one of the central and most horrific events of his life. He doesn’t explain his feelings, he doesn’t reflect on the experience; he simply describes it, exactly as he remembers it.

The formal device of “anaphora”

also helps him to talk about a

horrific and emotionally difficult

experience. Anaphor is the

repetition of a word or phrase at

the beginning of each line of a

poem. It can create a somber,

almost hypnotic effect. Here it

adds rhythm and interest, and

prevents the poem from being

“merely” personal.

“Gathering the Bones Together”This Orr poem is much more metaphoric than “Litany.” Uses what has sometimes been called the deep image—a type of image which springs from the unconscious, is sometimes dream-like & associational. (Some images in the poem may be from actual dreams.)

Groups of 4

Each group take one assigned, numbered segment of this poem and discuss briefly:

1. What kind of language appears in that segment? How is the speaker talking at that point?

2. How does that segment advance or contribute to the poem--the impressions, sensations, themes, or meanings that are building as you read it?

Each group will share with class, and then we’ll consider:

• What did you experience as you tried to answer the questions? • How do we talk about something as evocative and resonant and sometimes odd

as a poem?

In addition to their personal and confessional flavor, Greg Orr’s poems have touches of what’s called the visionary impulse.

The visionary mode will be covered in our next unit, but you might take an early peak at some of the assignments on our schedule.

Additional poets of the personal mode

Sharon Olds…is also in your Confessional Poetry Sampler, and there’s a separate link to her work on our schedule as well. We won’t be discussing her, but, if you’re interested, she would make a good subject for your end-of-semester essay.

Assignment for Original Poem in The Personal Mode

www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/222/.docx

Critique Form for Drafts

www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/222/Critique Personal Poem.docx

For Tues. the 1st, bring a print-out of your draft, and 2 copies of the critique form.

You will critique two of your classmates’ drafts and in turn receive two critiques of your own draft.

• Everyone should have brought 2 copies of the critique form for today.

• Everyone should have brought 1 copy of their draft for today.

• Save the critiques you receive today! You will staple them to the final version.