Confession as Storytelling, Part Two
The lie that is the story of the self
I'm somewhat obsessed by being vulnerable in general, writing with vulnerability, and our human need to be seen and understood—coupled, paradoxically, with our proclivities to hide ourselves, to feel shame, to not risk being who we really are for fear of … banishment, ostracization.
“We're only as sick as our secrets,” as the old AA adage says. A secret kept in the dark grows and becomes more harmful.
Last week, in part one of this two-part series, I wrote about how literature has moved closer and closer to revelations of the self over the years, and how confession is a path to intimacy, absolution, reconciliation, grace, and more.
I loved pondering the nature of confessional writing when I had one of my favorite poets, Kim Addonizio, on the Memoir Nation podcast (which was then Write-minded), because she is often called a confessional poet, and it’s a label she is frustrated with.
In her poem, “Confessional Poetry,” from her new book Now We’re Getting There, she explores the nature of confessional writing, starting out with the painful image that “Writing is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror.”
She also compares writing to “sewing rhinestones on your traumas so you can wear them to a pain festival” and to “beating a piñata selfie with a pink rubber bat so you can pet the demons that fall out.”
Confession as canvas
But, no, she decides, pausing to counter the previous analogies: “the confessional is a mode among other modes,” she decides—it’s a form designed for a certain type of exploration, in other words, a writing technique.
Addonizio is often called a confessional poet because she writes about sex and drinking, and she feels that label is often applied to women and is often diminishing to their art.
In a scene that follows, she explores how the confessional is a genre to work within by tying risque sex to high-minded intellectual theory to the self-indulgence of social media in a single brushstroke that brilliantly critiques the label of “confessional poet” on several levels:
Right now I’m getting fingered in a museum bathroom during a Cindy
Sherman exhibit
while discussing Susan Sontag’s “The Pornographic Imagination”
& live streaming it on Instagram
Why don’t you follow me
The scene highlights how a supposedly personal revelation is part of a show, how it’s performative, and how the performative nature of the scene is part of the exploration of ideas.
Getting fingered in a museum isn’t just getting fingered in a museum, in other words; such sexual revelation is part of the mode itself, but not necessarily part of the literal life.
The poem goes on to recount the belittling threat of “a beef-witted male critic” who indexes her sins in a literary publication, “Supergluing my clitoris forever to the pillar of historical irrelevance.”
A confession is not just a confession; it’s a canvas, a musical instrument, a stage.
We feel how that disrespect, that misunderstanding, hurts beyond a sting. But she goes on, telling how she really likes “feeling something when I stagger into a poem.”
And this is it, right? This is what we want from a poem: for the poet to help us feel something.
Writing about what it’s like to be alive in the world
Addonizio flinches at the label of being called a confessional poet. “I am a poet of ideas,” she said. “I am not trying to confess my sins. I’m trying to write about what it’s like to be alive in the world.”
She said she’d been “tarred and feathered” with the label of confessional poet many times, and she felt that the label is usually applied to women poets as a way to diminish them.
“It’s dangerous to conflate the artist with their work in such a naive, direct way,” she said. By using confessional poetry as a mode, as a narrative form that works to serve expression, she has “no fidelity at all to writing the literal truth. I’m much more interested in the emotional truth and exploring ideas about things, so I’ll use whatever is at hand.”
A confession is not just a confession, in other words. It’s a canvas, a musical instrument, a stage.
It’s interesting because when I revisited Now We’re Getting There, I noticed that the opening quote was, “Everybody knows the captain lied,” by Leonard Cohen. It’s a clue to all the writing, all of the “confession” that follows.
The lie is the story of the self, in other words. Enjoy the lie for the truth it conveys, but know it’s a lie.
Today’s prompt:
Is there a secret that is making you sick? What if you wrote one sentence about it? What if you wrote five words about it? What if you wrote an apology to yourself?
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I love this. “Writing is like firing a nail gun into the center of a vanity mirror.” I signed up. I've received many confessions throughout this life. It's a sacred act to listen, receive, and hold stories sacred. Thank you, Grant.
years ago I started writing about a traumatic event I'd barely ever spoken of - I compared it to jumping into a pool filled with shards of glass. I had to stop at that time. now decades later I can speak and write of it with much more ease.
I've healed in ways getting that awful secret out. and I know the story I've told to the few I've told it to say it helps them feel safer speaking their secrets. we are told on one side of the river to be open, to share. then on the other side we're told that not everything needs to be out there. I suppose it's up to each of us where we float along between those two.