Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother: Contexts in Confessional and Postconfessional Poetry

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My obsession with male poets’ mothers was inspired by Michael Collier while I was doing an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Maryland. Collier’s recitation of song 14 in a poetry workshop sparked my interest in the work of John Berryman. While I was at Maryland, in Dr. Sheila Jelen’s Holocaust literature course, I started thinking about the incorporeal presence of the mother-son bond in Holocaust texts and the longing expressed by men for their mothers, especially since prisoners were separated by gender in the camps. I moved to England and at the University of York I began to explore how male poets approached the intimate subject of their own mothers in their poems. As a young woman with three brothers, I felt drawn to this subject by my own need at the time to imagine and question what seemed like the most intense and unknowable human relationship. No matter the issues or histories of mothers and sons in the poems I read, it seemed to me that the mother-son couple emerged with richly discovered empathy, sacred praise, an insider language, an ars poetica, or at least clarity about one other, even if it sometimes seemed hurtful and self-incriminating.

Years later, when I was the mother of two small children, I became fascinated with the ways in which my lively young children, Juliet and Chadwick, embodied the beauty of creativity, intuition, and activity, making me more sensitive to language and to the representations of childhood memories in poems. My relationships with my children have inspired my writing life in part because, as Pablo Picasso says, All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Thank you to the first reader of this manuscript, Dr. Reena Sastri for her generosity, eager attentiveness, and expertise. Thank you to my creative-writing family at the University of Maryland for their encouragement and graciousness: poets Dr. Joshua Weiner, Michael Collier, Dr. Stanley Plumly, Dr. Liz Arnold, and Don Berger. I owe more than I can repay to the writers, scholars, and mentors who read and responded to sections of this manuscript or the entire book, some hailing from the University of York in England, others from the University of Maryland in College Park, and others from Xavier University in New Or leans. Thank you to Adam Phillips, Joshua Weiner, Jo Gill, Reena Sastri, Hugh Haugton, Trev Brougton, and Ronald Dorris. Thank you to Dr. Michael Olmert for modeling passionate curiosity and brazen creativity in writing and in life. I am grateful for writing workshops with incredible writers: Lindsay Bernal, Amy Kurzweil, Cocoa Williams, Anya Groner, Biljana Obradović, Amanda Page, Meg Vesper, Kat DeBlassie Page, Gerald Maa, Sofi Hall, and Sarah Beth Childers. I also wish to thank UNCF/Mellon for a Henry C. McBay Research Fellowship, which provided me with support to write chapter 4.

A special thanks to Jim Denton, acquisitions editor at the University of South Carolina Press, for his expertise and guidance. Thank you to the anonymous peer reviewers whose insights have shaped the revisions of this manuscript. Thank you to my graciously astute, fierce, brilliant, and wry copy editor, Karen L. Rood, at the University of South Caroline Press.

Thank you to my parents and first teachers, Phil and Mary Baker, who have sustained me through their compassion, prayers, and immeasurable love. I am grateful for my close-knit family, which also includes three brothers, Jason, David, and Johnny; my sister-in-law and Rae; my indomitable nieces, Maddy and Zoe; my paternal grandparents still soaring in their late nineties, Klinedale Baker and Jane Kemp Baker; and to the memories of my maternal grandparents, Jim and Betty Callen, and paternal great-grandmother, Marion Kemp. I am indebted to my in-laws for their love and nurture: Linda Saltmarsh and Frank Jazab; and Bill Saltmarsh and Nicky Lizotte. To my husband and the love of my life, Jason Saltmarsh, thank you for the writing time you created for me by caring for our babies. Thank you for making our home a home. We both know why our son refers to the vacuum cleaner as Dada. Thank you for the influence of your positive mindset, confidence, and supportive listening: I have you to thank more than anyone.

I also wish to express gratitude for the following reprint permissions.

Dream Song #14 Life, friends from The Dream Songs by John Berryman. © 1969 by John Berryman. Copyright renewed by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. UK and British Commonwealth permissions excluding Canada are granted by Faber and Faber.

Excerpts from Unwanted from Collected Poems by Robert Lowell. © 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Excerpts from Kaddish [35 I.], Howl [10.I] from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg. © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. UK and British Commonwealth permissions are granted by Penguin UK.

Excerpts from Confessional from In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990 by Frank Bidart. © 1990 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. UK and British Commonwealth permissions excluding Canada are granted by Carcanet Press.

Excerpts from My Mother’s Lips and The Cup from Collected Poems by C.K. Williams. © 2006 by C.K. Williams. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Excerpts from My Mother’s Nipples [50 I.], Dragonflies Mating [7 I.] from Sun under Wood: New Poems by Robert Hass. © 1996 by Robert Hass. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

My Father’s Love Letters and Venus’s-flytraps from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.

Lost Key, from Orphan Hours: Poems by Stanley Plumly. © 2012 by Stanley Plumly. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Excerpt from Say Summer/For My Mother [10 I.] from Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970–2000 by Stanley Plumly. © 2000 by Stanley Plumly. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Cows and Linoleum: Breaking Down from Out-of-the-Body Travel © 1977 by Stanley Plumly. Published by Ecco Press. Used by permission of the author.

My Mother’s Pride and The Gas-poker from Boss Cupid by Thom Gunn. © 2000 by Thom Gunn. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. UK, British Commonwealth and Canada permissions are granted by Faber and Faber.

Introduction

At the Center of How I Think My Life—My Mother

In a letter to Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop remarks on the major poetic shift in his group of family poems that would be published in Life Studies (1959): "They all also have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch … when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated … like a long-waited-for sunrise" (Words in Air, 246).¹ A breakthrough back into life (An Interview, 244) is how Robert Lowell describes Life Studies, which charted new ground in American poetry by including deeply private material about his parents. This volume, along with two major works by Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956) and Kaddish (1961), shocked initial readers and critics, and, in Ginsberg’s case resulted in a highly publicized censorship trial.² Ginsberg and Lowell embody the term confessional, which also came to refer to poets such as John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Delmore Schwartz. These writers collectively invented a quirkier, more expansive free-verse prosody that included low-brow diction and taboos, and they showcased introspective, psychologically rich narratives and personal subject matter. What has remained unmentioned in literary criticism is that the confessionals brought to the forefront of American poetry a figure who had never before graced the stage in such a colorful, dominating way: the poet’s mother, complete with her own quotations and interiority as well as a history before motherhood. While female confessional poets wrote about their own maternal experiences, their male counterparts evoked their own mothers in their poetry.

Mother-son relationships play a particular role in the way American confessional poetry becomes obsessed with the most intimate spaces of family life and ignites a readership that feels it knows the person behind the poetry, in part because the reader has met the parents, especially the poet’s mother, through the poems. Lowell and Ginsberg are apparently the first American poets who represented their own mothers in major works that appear to speak directly to and about them.

The subject of this book is mother-son relationships in confessional and postconfessional poetry, and it foregrounds discussions about poetics: artistic identity, relational autobiography, and collaboration. Confessional poets of the late 1950s and the 1960s first shocked audiences and critics by including in their poetry such private matters as their mothers’ emotional and sexual lives. The importance of motherhood in twentieth-century poetry by men begets another untold story: the inheritance by postconfessional writers of confessional motifs of gender, mothers, and language. Postconfessional poets of the 1980s and 1990s responded to the rich subject matter of motherhood by situating family relationships—explored with immense detail and deep feeling—within the profoundly tangled webs of obscure texts or literary-historical reference. Postconfessionalism pushes the boundaries of confession by exploring more intimate terrain; yet it harkens back to the curiosity-cabinet collecting of modernism, except that intertexuality is made urgent and personal, lending to the poems emotional texture and tonal meaning in ways that no Eliot footnote had done.

This book examines a handful of poems by the male confessional poets Lowell, Ginsberg and Berryman, who directly address, elegize, or invoke their own mothers. This study also looks at the postconfessional poets Frank Bidart, C. K. Williams, Robert Hass, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Stanley Plumly, who write the stories of their own mothers alongside metaphysical, cultural, or literary interrogations that circle around motherhood. To further investigate the boundaries between American and British literary tradition and between the so-called poetry wars of raw versus cooked poetry, I also look at an Anglo-American poet, Thom Gunn, and his turning to the postconfessional mode in his final book, despite his critical rejection of American confessionalism.

The split from modernism is showcased dramatically by Ginsberg, who evoked and elegized his mother in the most striking and unsettling ways in one of poetry’s most visible, public historic moments, forever transforming a poetics of art objects and rusty, junky Americana into a poetics of personhood for the people. Although the task of elegizing one’s mother is not as accessible as one might think, considering the ways in which the most familiar subject is often scarily unfamiliar and utterly defamiliarizing, mother poems seemed to suggest to audiences that poetry was not just for an elite academic class, worldly artistic niches, or the rich elderly patrons of the opera.

Following the breakthrough of personal poetry, postconfessional poets insisted on the significance not only of maternal lineage to artistic identity but also to the many ways in which motherhood linked back to creativity or survival in broader narratives or myths. This book investigates how a male poetics of motherhood facilitates the confessional lyric—for both male and female practitioners—and how postconfessional male writers apply confessional maternity to cultural, historical, or literary matrices to mythologize familial and artistic origins. This book asserts the importance of motherhood to an understanding of how mid-twentieth-century poetry, with its bourgeoning identity politics and mass appeal, became more intimate as the poet seemed to share directly with his audience the kind of woman his mother was, or seemed to be overheard in conversation with her—or represented his mother on her own terms, speaking through and even past her son directly to the audience.

BEFORE CONFESSION

When modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) asserts in Sunday Morning that Death is the mother of beauty (Collected Poems, 69), no reader would imagine the poet’s mother, Mrs. Margaretha Catharine Zeller Stevens, to be a presence in the work, and rightly so. Modernist impersonality and a commitment to symbols, images, and objects that often showcased poetic craft and precision largely precluded modernist poets from evoking their actual mothers in their work. In fact prior to the outbreak of American confessional poetry in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, motherhood functions as a cold trope: the chilling maternity of moons, death, and mythic bestiality. In Stevens’s Sunday Morning earthly mothers are to be derive[d] not from family relationships but from Mother Death, in whose bosom human mothers loll waiting, sleeplessly (ibid.) as the waking dead. In fact the adjective earthly presupposes archetypal motherhood rather than a particular woman.

The few American modernist poets who represent mother-son relationships include most notably William Carlos Williams and Langston Hughes. Before modernism, no American poets seem to address the subject at all. Williams depicts his mother in old age. As she represents the elderly foreigner not only in America but in her own family, she becomes you, old woman as if a kind of grotesque passerby at the bus stop. His mother, Elena, who lived until the age of 102 in 1948, is evoked in four poems.³ Across these poems, Williams represents Elena’s senility and anxiety with a lot of apparatus, mainly high-church symbolism that evokes T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Misrecognition scenes in Two Pendants: for the Ears have the chilling, haunting, harrowing feeling of modernist texts—the lostness of the Lost Generation—and evoke a withered maternity like Eliot’s blind Tiresias with the shriveled breasts. Without question Williams’s mother poems are precursors to Ginsberg’s, but the confessional mode allows for a more personal, invasive autopsy of the maternal body and for an even more unsettling union between maternal insanity or dementia and robustly jarring poetic language. Williams’s work provides a sense of the American idiom that surely influenced the confessional poets, who brought a more profane, taboo idiom and psychologically dense interiority to this idiom. In reading Williams against the confessionals, one sees the exhaustion of imagery and spiritual allusions as well as the emergence of domestic realism.

Williams’s Horse Show bemoans how a sixty-four-year-old poet has never known his mother and how—as she nears one hundred and is in the throes of delusional hypersensitivity to death—she speaks to her son openly for the first time. He returns the gesture: We talked of ourselves, / intimately, a thing never heard of between us (Collected Poems, 2:200). As Williams notes in an autobiographical sketch, I was conscious of my mother’s … ordeal as a woman and as a foreigner in this country. I’ve always held her as a mythical figure, remote from me, detached, looking down on an area in which I happened to live (I Wanted to Write a Poem, 16). By contrast Robert Lowell felt as if his family was so close they were fogging up his glasses. He inspected and interrogated them poetically in Life Studies, in what Helen Vendler calls an unrivaled family history in verse (Robert Lowell, 126). In Williams’s January Morning: Suite IV, he bitterly dedicates his poetry to his mother and disparagingly asserts that she will never understand it, as if you, old woman is a dull, blind readership that will have to try hard to grasp the meaning of poetry (Collected Poems, 1:103–4). The change from Williams’s Mother darling (2:201) to Ginsberg’s with mother finally ****** (Howl, 6) highlights the confessional breakthrough into a more profane disclosure of the poet’s family dynamics. Of course confession discovered more deeply the art of artlessness, the veneer of informality, and the persona of the poet unmasked. Yet the confessional mode breaks down barriers between poet and audience by performing intimacy.

Another important American modernist mother-son poem is Langston Hughes’s Mother to Son (originally published in The Weary Blues, 1926). Yet it does not represent Hughes’s actual mother so much as an anonymous folklore archetype of maternal burdens impressed upon the next generation. Hughes intentionally speaks not for himself or of himself but toward the creation of a black aesthetic. In The Negro Mother, Hughes develops the trope of the Negro mother and all the dark children in the world out there (Collected Poems, 155–56). As in Lullaby with its dedication For a Black Mother (64), he seeks artistic compensation and racial uplift for burdened black maternity; and, as in the well-known The Negro Speaks of Rivers, he lays out an imaginary motherland in Africa with rivers like ancient bloodlines as a source of artistic and cultural identity for African Americans through the archetypal speaker (23). Out of a weary motherhood, the poet constructs the weary blues. In all these manifestations of black motherhood, Hughes does not speak of his own family or directly to his mother but of a racial genealogy and heritage for African Americans writ large through the consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance. In their modernist renderings, Williams and Hughes do not connect a personal motherhood to their own poetics or identities.

Even as male modernist poets avoided the subject of their mothers in their poetry, female poets seemed even more afraid to address maternity. For women authors at the time, even to find a female ancestor in literature was complicated, let alone to write of one’s family lineage as an artistic one. Although Virginia Woolf said, We think back through our mothers, if we are women, (A Room of One’s Own, 79), she does not say that this dreaming back through family history qualifies as an artistic quest, but rather she maps the familial tree onto literary genealogy in an unsuccessful search for a matrilineal artist-mentor. Maternity functions in terms of societal critique as the obstacle to literary production, literary circles, literary ghosts, and literary reception. Alicia Ostriker intuits that female writers such as Bishop, Moore, and Louise Bogan sought to distance themselves from the token female ancestors of the past, assuming that before male poets and critics, women should not appear too bold; yet Ostriker discovers ways in which Moore and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) offer themselves to us as mothers, through this power that has been half-hid in a benign critical underworld (What Do Women (Poets) Want? 492) by holding up artistic values of vulnerability, subversiveness, and enclosure and becoming mother-muses for their audiences. H.D. uses mythological, maternal, spiritual creator figures that come to life in lines such as She herself is the writing (Hermetic Definition, 7). Ostriker notes that both H.D. and Moore were extremely close to their mothers and involved them in their artistic processes (What Do Women (Poets) Want? 491), but this interdependence is not apparent as such in the poetry itself. In fact the entanglement between Moore and her mother may have prevented direct representation of motherhood. As with modernist male writers, maternity remains mostly disembodied, as ethereal muse-mother-creator-lover figurations in the work of H.D., or as female mothers that do not necessarily or always correspond to human ones, in the work of Moore.⁴

Moore approached poetry as a grammarian, a wit, and a hobbyist-librarian, collecting minutia about animals, sports, museums, and architecture. She rarely allowed seismic repression and violent juxtapositions to erupt through the data-dense surface but instead allowed meaningful silences to be suggestive. Moore is among a few American writers of any time period to be intimately entangled with her mother, even sharing the same bed and living for most of her life with her mother until her death when Moore was sixty. In her own way—in her own historic moment of impersonal modernism that later proved fertile ground for a confessional outbreak—Moore did evoke her mother and mothers generally in a handful of poems such as Bird-Witted, A Face, and The Paper Nautilus. Furthermore Moore obliquely refers to her mother as her poetic collaborator by including this postscript to her Selected Poems (1935): Dedications imply giving, and we do not care to make a gift of what is insufficient; but in my immediate family there is one ‘who thinks in a particular way’; and I should like to add that where there is an effect of thought or pith in these pages, the thinking and often the actual phrases are hers (108).

Dan Chiasson implies that Moore uses family data in a kind of scholarly way, as a revision of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, in that the notes are derivative of family conversation, diaries, and letters (All about My Mother). This mining of personal material, specifically the quotations Moore used from her mother and her father, lays groundwork for a confessional poetics that transforms parental voices into personal narratives for poems. Chiasson notes that Moore wrote hardly a word before her sixtieth year without her mother by her side or in the next room (ibid.), and this context is critical to understanding how Moore evoked her mother in echoes, turns of phrase, or even symbolic mother birds, and how Moore tended to suggest more than she said about her maternal collaborator. In Silence Moore quotes her father as saying, Deepest feeling shows itself in silence, not in silence but restraint (Complete Poems, 91), and this manifesto prizes not absence of emotion over presence of emotion, but absence as presence. In her own chilling, subdued response to her father’s words in Silence, Moore merely draws attention to her father’s unsatisfactory offer of temporary shelter rather than a home (ibid.). In Moore’s poem Bird-Witted, a mother bird provides scraps for her three fledglings despite the onslaughts of a cat (105). This poem evokes the complexities of mother-child collaboration through the metaphor of a vicious mother bird who nourishes her babies at great personal cost to herself yet dubiously provides for her young with a negating abundance at times or with absolute terror that chills the blood (106). Maternal and fledgling mouths share uncertain fates. They fall into desperate violence and a kind of generational curse of desire and dissatisfaction.

As evinced in the meetings Moore and her mother conducted with prominent writers, the mother-daughter relationship was not always about a controlling mother but also about a resourceful daughter—one who even shared her mother’s severity and talents with other writers, such as Elizabeth Bishop.⁵ The difference between Moore’s tactics and Ginsberg’s, is not in the material itself but the invention of intimate disclosure to the reader. Ginsberg and the confessionals tried to make the reader feel that he or she was accessing private material directly, following a clear narrative as if he or she were a close friend one confesses to. The announced narratives of a Lowell or a Ginsberg assume friendship with general readers on the basis of sharing life stories. In contrast to all other genres, the invention (and hyperbole) of autobiography is that it is exclusively about one’s life.⁶

More broadly American modernist free-verse poetry still derived from the same British obsession with vertical line, snap-shut closure, imagery, motifs, and the occasional manifesto—and with cataloging, indexing and controlling objects, artifacts, images and things. All the thingness detracts from the personhood and personalities of family members, lovers, and the self—the topoi that were so crucial to not only confessional poetry, but to other key poetic movements of the mid-twentieth century, such as the Beats and the Black Arts Movement. In 1913 Pound emphasized the apparition of rather than the faces themselves in a well-known two-line poem: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough (In a Station of the Metro, Selected Poems, 35). He does not see any faces; he does not need to. He is a poet abroad, underground at the subway, thinking of myth, flowers, life-death cycles, and painting. Confessional poetry replaced apparitions with faces, and flowering wet branches with the family tree and American rootedness.

Overall the modernist poets are known for their difficulty, and even in their most avant-garde moments, are stuck proclaiming and probing aphorisms, creeds, and ideas. William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)—so often quoted as saying No ideas but in things (Paterson, Collected Poems, 1:263)—is still speaking in the lingua franca of ideology and anchoring poetics in tangible objects such as purloined, juicy plums (This Is Just To Say, 1:372) or an unnamed neighbor’s vintage red wheelbarrow (Spring and All, XXII. The Red Wheelbarrow, 1:224). The modernists’ keen, scientific observation at times alighting into imaginative, symbolic possibility is still a long way from the emotional and psychological acuity with which confessional poets observed their parents. Williams’s ideas, savage and tender (Paterson 1:263) precede Lowell’s parents, savage and tender. Anne Sexton’s one-line manifesto I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it (originally published in All My Pretty Ones 1962; Complete Poems, 63) has always felt like a brilliant jab not at religion, but at modernism by suggesting that libraries should be filled with performative, living stories that audiences want to hear live.

CONFESSION

Beginning with Lowell and Ginsberg, poets’ mothers "seemed to be poetry: their mothers’ actual phrasing and storytelling were used in poems that explored family dysfunction, lore, and language. Poems elegizing and exploring family matriarchs became the progenitors of American confessional poetry, suggesting that family relationships are a worthy subject of poetic inquiry and a reason unto themselves to split with modernist impersonality. Confession shut down object fetishism and cult worship of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the colonizers of eras, translations, allusions, and footnotes. The new objects, debris, and raw materials for confessional poetry became increasingly intimate, familiar, detailed, and inextricably bound to an everyday language of nuance and particularity that bespoke personality. Referred to as the new American poetry" in an anthology by that title edited by Donald Allen in 1960, works of the Black Mountain poets, the New York school, the San Francisco renaissance, and the Beats were just gaining notoriety as experimental writing that defied modernism. Although confessional poets were not represented in Allen’s 1945–1960 compendium, they offered an affront to modernism just as bold as those Allen included.

The confessional poets approached subjects largely excluded from American poetry in the past: intimate and sexual life, emotional wounds, family drama, and psychoanalysis. Elizabeth Gregory clearly defines the major characteristics of this poetry: [It] draws on the poet’s autobiography and is usually set in the first person. It makes a claim to forego personae and to represent an account of the poet’s own feelings and circumstances, often by reference to names and scenarios linked to the poet. The work dwells on experiences generally prohibited expression by social convention: mental illness, intrafamilial conflicts and resentments, childhood traumas, sexual transgressions and intimate feelings about one’s body are its frequent concerns (Confessing the Body, 34).

Many critics have downplayed the confessional poets’ artistic skill, misreading the poets’ artifice of authenticity or what Steven Gould Axelrod calls the fiction of [being] non-fictional (Robert Lowell, 112). Rosenthal’s book review Poetry as Confession (1959) and Robert Phillips’s The Confessional Poets (1973) ultimately emphasized the poet’s biography and openness about it rather than his or her craft.⁷ The term confessional, which M. L. Rosenthal coined in a 1959 review of Life Studies, continues to spark critical debate. Thomas Travisano notably abandons the paradigm because it implies a lack of craft, suggesting instead the self-exploratory mode (The Confessional Paradigm Revisited, 32–70) while Adam Kirsch also problematizes the term, offering the metaphor of the wounded surgeon to evince not only the poet’s emotional wounds but also artistic, technical skill. Yet Kirsch’s metaphor conjures up an incompetent physician, in no better shape than his pitiful patients—and hardly solves the issue of confessional poetry seeming like therapeutic drivel instead of art.

Despite the problems the confessional mode presents to critics, readers, and the poets themselves, and despite the various alternative paradigms that have been proposed, the term confessional still circulates in useful discussions of midcentury and postwar American poetry. Furthermore the term postconfessional signals the endurance, diversity, and malleability of confessional writing.⁸ For example Jo Gill highlights the metanarratives common in much confessional verse; a confessional work may be just as preoccupied with its own status, with its own discursive processes and with the nature and limitations of the mode as it is with the true story or ‘secret’ ostensibly at its heart (‘Your Story. My Story,’ 69).

Confessional poetry was part of a world of political movements, sexual revolutions, and racial consciousness that declared the personal to be political. Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) challenged societal norms, moral codes, and the repression of the 1950s, triumphing over censorship through publicity, personality, and poetry. During widely sought social change, the domestic, sexual and familial aspects of life came to the forefront and become politicized. Political movements crossed barriers between areas of life that had previously been seen as separate. Community activism and the public role of art (from music to poetry) highlight the shift from apathy to advocacy, from silence to outspokenness in the face of injustice. The political climate of the anti–Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, second-wave feminism, Roe v. Wade, and eventually the Gay Liberation Front brought politics and morality to bear on the way people lived their lives and affected private spaces as well as spaces on the border of public and private: homes, schools, water fountains, bathrooms, transportation, voting booths, department-store dressing rooms, women’s health clinics, and bedrooms. A new poetry sprang up to address these issues in both overt and covert ways. Many poets of the 1950s and 1960s were active in the antiwar movement to protest Vietnam, and they sought political expression through their confessional writing. Poetic schools of the mid–twentieth century reflected a world of change: confessionals, Beats, Black Arts Movement, New York School, and avant-garde. The confessionals were at the forefront of this change, and one undiscussed aspect of their poetry is the centrality of the poet’s mother and the major poems about artists’ mothers written during this period. As gender identities and roles were in flux, male artists began to imagine their own mothers’ sexuality, individuality, and language, and to identify emotionally and creatively with their mothers. Psychoanalysis was in vogue, and the Freudian influence of locating emotional pain in one’s fundamental relationship with one’s mother brought new significance to a seemingly familiar figure.

Confessional poetry reflects counterculture gender roles that defied the late 1950s Father Knows Best silent, tough-guy masculinity, rejecting the homosexual paranoia and patrolling of McCarthyism as well as the dominating momism trio of overbearing mother, effeminate son, and emasculated father. Confessional poems by Lowell, Ginsberg, and Berryman cover emotionally complex terrain, moving from identification with one’s mother to collaborative citations of the maternal voice to an exploration of where mother and son overlap and where they part ways. The interest and visibility of women’s sexuality increased with several cultural landmarks: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1948; translated into English in 1953) and Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), as well as the Kinsey sex studies of 1948 and 1953. The male poets analyzed in this book were influenced not only by the performance of womanhood in culture, but also by an important dialogue they had with female confessional poets.

As men were writing intimate elegies about their mothers or imagining the girlhood of their mothers, women were also exploring motherhood, mostly their own rather than the experience of their mothers. Strangely, or not so strangely since American poetry had been male-dominated, poems about motherhood came first from Lowell and Ginsberg. Confessional poet John Berryman not only wrote poems about his alter ego Henry’s mother but imagined motherhood through the persona of literary ancestress Anne Bradstreet, one of the birth mothers of American poetry alongside Phillis Wheatley. Lowell’s students Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton later emerged on the scene and wrote directly about their experiences as mothers and explored through dramatic personae other facets of womanhood and sexuality. Sexton rewrote children’s fairy rhymes for a new era