The Postmodern Postconfessional Lyric

Abstract

The authors of the books treated in this review—Paisley Rekdal, Bryan Dietrich, Laura Kasischke, Denise Duhamel and Timothy Liu—are heirs of both Boston and New York, the confessional writers of the late 1950s and the early postmoderns, the New York School writers getting their start in the same period. They balance autobiographical material against a skepticism about the nature and limits of the self. Most of them aren’t “confessional” according to any current understanding of the term; nor are they generally experimental enough to be classified wholesale as postmodern. They have in common the self as subject. These poets wrestle with the self in both its postmodern, culturally overdetermined incarnation and its romantic, inherently soulful manifestation. But let’s talk terms. Certainly “the postconfessional lyric” could use an introduction. As for “confessional,” well, as Joan Aleshire has so eloquently said, “To say that a poem is confessional is to signal a breakdown in judgment and craft” (16). Meanwhile, “the postconfessional lyric” is a contribution to the discourse by poet and critic Gregory Orr. In comparing the postmodern and confessional modes, Paul Hoover’s recent essay in The American Poetry Review is extremely useful. He points lucidly to both Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams as influences on the early New York School writers: Stein for her sensibility about the limits of language, Williams for his embrace of the physicality of plain language. In an analysis of Alice Notley’s work, Hoover says, “While confessionalism presses toward the heroic and mythic, Notley’s approach to the