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 Glaveneau, 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 i...