Confessional Poetry and the Materialisation of an Autobiographical Self

Abstract

ABSTRACTLittle has been said about what happens when the writing subject cobbles together a self from the material of language in an always-unpredictable creative experiment. This is undoubtedly in part because life-writing scholars are not conventionally life-writing practitioners. In this article, informed by my experience writing confessional poetry and by socio-material scholars of creativity such as Vlad-Petre Glăveneau, I explore how the technologies of poetic language – bearing affordances and constraints, embodying social and cultural histories, and therefore exerting their own intentionality – are exercised in the creative act, giving rise to a phenomenological alienation of the autobiographical subject that is often explained in terms of unconscious forces or ‘madness’. I begin by discrediting myths linking creativity and mental illness in order to destabilise a traditional view of confessional poetry as generated by individual pathology, before going on to theorise the phenomenological lacuna in authorial subjectivity that such myths represent in relation to the potent technologies of poiesis. Ultimately, this article argues that confessional poetry arises from a distributed socio-material practice in which the agency of the author is negotiated through the agency of writing materials in the creation of autobiographical artefacts, thus exposing another limit in the field of life writing.