1. 
   
2. 
   
3. Home
4. 
   
5. Sound, Shape, and Space: Received and Invented Forms
6. 
   
7. Telling Secrets: The Lyric “I,” Epistolaries, and Confessions
8. 
   
9. The Poem in Telephone Lines and Other Thoughts on Tone, Talk, and Voice in Poetry
10. 
    
11. Writing Out of Surrealism
12. 
    
13. Duende, Deep Image, and The Poetics of Spells
14. 
    
17. The Poetics of Liberation
18. 
    
19. Writing the Body
20. 
    
21. The Racial Imaginary
22. 
    
24. Writing in the Field
25. 
    
26. Docupoetics and Other Forms of Lyric Research

Telling Secrets: The Lyric “I,” Epistolaries, and Confessions

For Further Reading

We highly recommend reading these full essays we alluded to and quoted from in this chapter: 

• You’ll have to order Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey from the library or bookstore to read her essay “On Secrets.” But in the meantime you can read an interview with her about this work at The Paris Review.
• You’ll have to go through JSTOR or another of your library’s databases that archive articles and papers from journals of literary criticism to find the full text of M. L. Rosenthol’s influential article “Poetry as Confession,” but you can easily find a synopsis of that work, among others, in this overview of the development of Confessional poetry in this article at The Poetry Foundation website.
• Aristotle’s Poetics serve as a foundational influence in much of the Western World, and they are widely available in various translations. Here’s one.
• Enheduanna, the first recorded author in history, was a featured topic on the podcast “History for Weirdos” in March ‘23.

We’d also like to point you towards some individual poems we alluded to throughout the chapter:

• W. S. Merwin, “Separation”
• Poems by Kaveh Akbar, including poems that use the apology as form
• Carolyn Forche, “Letter to a City Under Siege,” & “As Children Together”
• Robin Coste Lewis, “The Mothers” (response to Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Kitchenette Building”)
• Robert Hayden, “The Winter Sundays”

The Confessional Poets

The Confessional poetry movement radically transformed the way poets think about the relationship between the writer, the speaker, and the reader. The iconic writers associated with Confessionalism as a literary movement were primarily writing and publishing in the 1950s and 1960s. If you haven’t encountered them in literature classes on American Literature or Modernist poetry, we recommend checking out their most iconic poems. 

• Sappho
• Enheduanna
• Anne Sexton
• Robert Lowell
• Sylvia Plath
• John Berryman
• Toi Derricotte
• Ruth Stone
• Gerald Stern

Epistolaries & Other Experiments with Membranes

• “Envelopes of Air,” Correspondence Between Natalie Diaz and Ada Limon
• Richard Hugo’s epistolary poems are collected in 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, which you can order from your library or local bookstore. You can find excerpts from the project here. 
• Remedios Varos’s letters can be found here.
• “Letters from Two Gardens,” Correspondence in poems between Aimee Nezhukumatathil and Ross Gay.
• Ellen Welcker is a poet whose work might be described as “talky,” and also aligns with New York School; in this poem, “Ellen Welcker You Have No Events Scheduled Today,” she plays with the speaker addressing herself, who also happens to share a name with the author.
• The pre-confessional, epistolary, universal address of Emily Dickinson to all of us in “I’m Nobody–”

The Post-Confessional

In the chapter we discussed some of the poets currently writing in conversation with the traditional of confessional poetry. But there are so many more! If you are interested in this mode for your own writing, here are some other poets we suggest you read for inspiration and to deepen your understanding of the tradition.

• Olena Kalytiak Davis, especially her poem “The Lyric ‘I” Drives to Pick Her Children Up from School: A Poem in the Post-Confessional Mode.”
• Airea D. Matthews, whose book Simulacra included a number of poems written in conversation with work by Anne Sexton.
• Sharon Olds is a poet well known for thinning the membrane between the autobiographical circumstances of the writer and those of the speaker of the poem. 
• Marie Howe is another poet celebrated for her deeply personal approach to poetry. Her later book Magdalene plays with this reputation, by featuring a series of poems about women, like herself, named Marie or Mary.
• Richard Siken often writes ekphrastic poems, inspired by works of art, that also frequently center a first person speaker who gazes inward towards a personal emotional landscape even as he gazes out at the canvas.
• Eduardo C. Corral is another poet whose work is known for being as highly lyrical as it is deeply personal. 
• Judith Beveridge is an Australian poet whose poems gaze outward as often as they turn inward. You can see in her moments of formal restraint a use of the lyric I that has some of the same pressurized restraint associated with work by Sexton, Plath, and Lowell. 
• Laura Read is a poet from Spokane whose poetry collections have all been largely autobiographical and whose use of the Lyric “I” includes a third person “she” who multiplies and stands in for the author-as-speaker, such as in her poem, “Jane Doe 1-9,” which might easily also go into our chapters on Writing the Body or Liberatory Poetics.
• Katharine Whitcomb’s poems span Surrealism and the Lyric “I” gracefully, as in her poem, “Hotel Vienna.”
• Eugenia Leigh’s work in both her collections engages mental health, the body, and the confessional, as in “My Whole Life I Was Trained to Deny Myself.”