Something of a fruitful discussion is going on over at the Poetry Foundation blog, in response to my Rachel McKibbens post. It isn’t directly regarding her work, since as the commenters go, I seem to be the only who has read her book (it’s barely been released, and her book launch is next week), and Amber may be the only one who has seen her perform, and as for everyone else, they are concerned with terminology. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, but I think it has the potential to be objectifying. It is strangely distancing, but how does one engage a poet s/he hasn’t read or seen perform.
Whereas I have discussed the importance of her poetry as testimony, others have asked what the difference is between “poetry as testimony,” “confessional poetry,” and “documentary poetry.” Working definitions of “poetry as testimony,” and “documentary poetry,” as provided in the comment stream tell me that a primary motive in these poetries is the assertion that the speaker’s story is necessary to be heard. I am sure others will say the same is true of confessional poetry, which I understand as a mining and dredging of the details of one’s personal life. Now, someone else asks what the difference is between testimony/documentary versus first person narrative. I think this last question is comparing non-equivalents.
The reason I bring this up here is because I wonder exactly how important it is to delineate or differentiate clearly between “confession,” “testimony,” and “documentary.” Craig has commented that from what he can tell from my excerpts of McKibbens’s work, all three seem to be in operation in her poetry. I agree with this; in general, I wonder whether any one poet’s work is strictly one and absolutely not any of the others. Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” for example, I commonly hear referred to as confessional poetry, but I believe labeling it as such diminishes its hard political and social commentary, i.e. its traveling outside of the I that is the poet and his own personal, individual life. In other words, “Howl” accomplishes all of the above.
So the poem written with multiple targets, the poem as a primary document, the poem as historical document, which I believe is very important. In my community, I constantly speak of poetry as evidence, given the absences and exclusion of certain voices and perspectives in the literary and historical canon. If that is the one takeaway from my write-up on Rachel McKibbens, then good.
It seems very important to differentiate between testimony and confession, if only b/c “confessional” is often used pejoratively to dismiss any work that has challenging, potentially disturbing autobiographical content. Witness stand vs. confession box is a great way to tease out the nuances. So that it’s less about nailing down textbook definitions of terms than about getting more clear about how poems function, how they mean.
Testimony and documentary seem to go more hand in hand, in that both are concerned with public issues like social justice and consciousness raising. Testimony’s power is subjectivity; documentary’s power is (assumed) objectivity. But I think confession’s gotten a bad rep, as synonym for self-indulgence. Honesty about one’s private self, real honesty in this area, can only lead to greater honesty & responsibility in relation to the larger public realm, and vice versa. So yeah, in work that’s rich in meaning, all kinds of elements are going on b/c all these elements are going on in real life as well.
Belated thanks for your response, Pam. Admittedly that is also my bias, to be generally dismissive of the confessional poem as self-indulgent, unless I can find an additional social or political reading in the poetry as well (i.e. the personal as political). I know it’s an unfair bias, but it’s one I am pretty clear about: that I favor work which handles social, cultural, historical themes.
re: “Testimony’s power is subjectivity; documentary’s power is (assumed) objectivity.” I am still thinking about this, though my immediate reaction is to agree with you. Certainly, the strength of McKibbens’s work is its brash subjectivity.
Thanks also for responding to confessional box versus witness stand. I get confused by textbook definitions and their limitations so it helps me to place these in more “real life” situations.
hi Barbara, I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the testimony/subjectivity and documentary/objectivity thing whenever you get a chance. In my mind, those aren’t meant to be either/or modes, even tho this habit of setting up binary oppositions seems to suggest it. I’m more thinking about/towards the different modes of “authority” that we ascribe to “authorship.” There can be objective and subjective authority, often in the same author and text. I like your witness box comparison b/c it highlights the importance of a subjective authority like McKibben’s testimonial speaker. Also, your Harriet posts in general bring up for me the question of how to respond to various subjective authorities as an insider/outsider reader. I may have to tunnel into Harriet to talk about this more.