One of the great universals of the human condition is the desire to learn secrets. When we encounter one, it’s incredibly satisfying. Children use secrets and gossip as ways to bond—the scarcity of information ties the two, the sharer and recipient, in a relationship of information, broken only if one or the other spills the secret to an outsider. This same sense underlies inside jokes. You had to be there: you had to be among the few who experienced the material in its glorious originality. The retelling diminishes the return.
Poems can mimic this in many ways. Directly, the writer can purport to simply tell a secret. Often, this is performed in a way that suggests a grand truth is being communicated, a nugget of wisdom. Indeed, most ancient religious proverbs are founded in just this manner. In their mother language the wisdom is often cobbled into verse so as to aid memory. The secret is snug in a mnemonic device.
➡ IN CASE YOU MISSED THEM: National Poetry Writing Month: an invitation | NaPoWriMo: a short exercise (Ten-Minute Spill)
In more modern times, we have had eras and phases of a different kind of secret-telling: the confessional poem. This mode of poetry has had its ups and downs in terms of general reputation. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, it went through a bit of a downturn as critics claimed that the style lent itself too much to insular communication, kind of a navel-gazing speaking-to-oneself. It is true that confessional poems can suffer from this flaw, but the same can be said of nearly any writerly project. The author can be too much with him/herself.
Still, the confessional has opened certain avenues in contemporary writing that perhaps were not immediately available or recognized. Quarrying one’s own past for polishable emotion can be quite valuable, if laden with danger from the dynamite. Confessional poets of recent times that I admire include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds. (Even Emily Dickinson could find her name on the list of confessional poets, though she is rather difficult to pigeonhole into one style or another.)
Note also that most confessional poets tend to be female. Whether or not this is actually situated in sex or is a byproduct of the Western conception of gender is an open question. Ellen Bryant Voigt in The Flexible Lyric reminds us that “[i]n roughly eight hundred years of English literature, only the most recent one hundred have included substantial participation by women” (p. 16). Several of these female voices have chosen to speak of subjects that otherwise would go unspoken, primarily because they lay completely outside the male experience.
For example, Ruth Stone, who did not receive literary accolades until in her sixties and whose husband’s suicide “marked her poetry for the rest of her life,” speaks of ovaries (even a “fertile ovary”) in more than one of her poems. Take also Rita Dove, who wrote a startingly intimate poem regarding her daughter and what they two, mother and daughter, shared bodily:
AFTER READING MICKEY IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN FOR THE THIRD TIME BEFORE BED
I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me . . . I’m Mickey!
My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we’re a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.
And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We’re pink!
she shrieks, and bounds off.
Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that’s wrong, too.
How to tell her that it’s what makes us—
black mother, cream child.
That we’re in the pink
and the pink’s in us.
But not all confessional poems need to center so much on what normally is taboo. The private is poetic only when it reveals something to the reader and enlarges the reader as a result of having been read. This is where the confessional has the potential to become art and to transcend the personal. In the sharing and the relating, the private has the chance to become universal. That space is where the poetry lies.
And not all confessional poets are female. I mean not to give that impression—it’s just that in the wake of several waves of feminism, the canon has been enlarged to include these voices. But as Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux state in The Poet’s Companion (1997),
We begin with ourselves. We are not only body, but heart and mind and imagination and spirit. We can talk about all those things, about what it is to be alive at the end of the twentieth century. Wendell Berry has written about marriage, Galway Kinnell about the birth of his children, Sharon Olds about motherhood and pet funerals and her first boyfriend. These and other poets began with the simple idea that what they saw and experienced was important to record, and that the modest facts of their lives, what they knew within the small confines of their limited, personal worlds, could contain the enduring facts and truths of the larger world. (p. 23)
Your prompt for today is to tell a secret! It doesn’t have to be long and involved. It can be humorous or downright serious. But let it be something that at least feels like wisdom to you. See if you can communicate that wisdom through carefully chosen words. (That is to say, don’t blab! Reveal.)