Some Notes On Confession (Part One)
Why is it that we can say things in poems that we can’t say in real life? I’ll admit, poems have gotten me into a lot of trouble and I suspect some of the poems I have written are behind a number of broken friendships and broken relationships—okay, just broken everything. But I’m not a confessional poet! Never have been. Still, I’ve told the same truth in many poems that I couldn’t tell people in real life. Probably, in real life, I’m just a coward and in poetry, I’m braver. But why? Poetry can function like a dark and creepy confession booth but at the same time, you don’t really have to be sorry, you don’t have to feel bad. You can tell the story and walk away.
Inevitably, after I give a poetry reading, someone will come up to me and ask, “but is that true? Did that really happen? Well, maybe. And I’ve had the same questions after reading the poems of my close friends who are poets. I think to myself “Becky never told me this juicy bit of information that she’s now revealing in her poem…was it real? Was it true?” Because unlike fiction, people inevitably assume that the speaker in a poem is the writer. I do it. I’m sure that you do it too. And poets can use this blurry line to their advantage.
Last year, a few of my students got a hold of one of my poetry books at the university library where I work. One of them stopped me and said “Dr. Simonds, do you really think about killing yourself every day?” I was taken aback. I had written this in one of my poems. “I do and I don’t,” I told her. I mean I did write a poem called “Poetry Is Stupid and I Want To Die,” so it must mean that sometimes I feel this way.
It happened and it didn’t. Maybe and maybe not. This is at least part of the story of poetry—it kind of happened that way sort of. We write poems to make stories out of our histories, and then we go on to believe the stories we tell and tell them again and again. Sure, poets are liars but they are also really, really good ones.
But enough about me. I’ve been reading some recent books by younger contemporary poets who work with aspects of confession, expanding the parameters around the discourse of the self, on their own feminist terms, but who also have only a tangential aesthetic relationship with the confessional school of poetry we associate with poets like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. These poets see the self as an a priori construct of language, history, patriarchy and capital, and so what emerges from these conceptual understandings of confession is a kind of play, not only of language but also of ethics and values that work to disrupt the oppressive structures of their worlds. Over the next few days, I’ll be writing about a few younger female poets who are working with aspects of confessional poetry, the first of whom is Trisha Low.
“I’ve Turned into A Parody of Myself”: On Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge
The first section of Trisha Low’s conceptual confessional project asks what it means to commit suicide and come back, older, wiser, more complicated and more pained, year after year in a double enactment of both Plath’s Lady Lazarus figure and biography. In a series of suicide notes arranged chronologically from childhood to young adulthood she meticulously chronicles the torment, whimsy, kitschy humor and melancholy of this struggle. “This is an apology,” Low writes in one note and “this might seem like some sort of confession” in another. Her logic is one of self-hatred, disavowal and feminine refusal wrapped in the context of legality, the last will and testament, the adolescent girl literally enclosed in the masculine architecture of a terrifyingly redundant bureaucratic language i.e., the oppressor’s in the boring details. There’s no way out, only passwords to give away to the remaining friends and family who will be there after she’s gone: “email password: dollcollector, UK bank account pin code 2189”; material possessions flow out of the book in a sort of somber comedy.
Morbid, excessive and self-indulgent might be ways to describe the tenor of this book, but that’s its aesthetic, what it’s trying to do. And, of course, the more suicide notes that accumulate, the more frightening because, though the notes get more desperate, more thought out, more fucked, after all she is getting older, the more meaningless they become in a stand-up routine of the girl who cried wolf. How could anyone believe her now? In our first world neoliberal order of affect, in our landscape of positivity and affirmation, the book is marked by its willful and persistent nihilism, the desire to not only be destroyed but to disperse the destruction of the self across the subject’s world, artifact by artifact and to make what’s left behind, the people, the world, the order, whoever will listen suffer. If suicide is the ultimate personal revenge provoking chaos, despair and destroying the people and things left behind, then writing the suicide note over and over is the revenge fantasy, the fantasy of destroying the order but never being able to really pull the trigger. It’s the tedious and desperate binge purge cycle that produces nothing besides enacting the formal order of our enslavement to the binding injustices of our world. To state in other terms, there never will be a compleat purge, at least not in this context. Question: What do intelligent teenage girls who know they have very little agency do? Answer: They think about suicide and develop eating disorders.
And what is interesting about the way that Low’s confessions are conceptual is that it follows a basic materialist logic that the truth is not in the confession after all, but rather in the order, in the structure, of the text. This is not to say that the writing isn’t good, it is. In fact it is almost too real and in that realism, there’s a kind of plurality (this could be anyone’s eating disorder, anyone’s suicide note), and thus this self-hatred takes on a new form—it is a self-hatred universalized, and we begin to see that a woman’s self-hatred is a necessary and sad cog in the wheels of capitalist society. Capitalist society is dependent on a woman’s self-hatred to keep going.
It seems a gross transgression for Low to turn teenage suicide into parody, let alone self-parody, but it’s the universality of the letters—the fact that any teenage girl real or imagined, could have written them is both painful but also possibly a site of liberation. I went online and typed in google “suicide note, teenage girl” and within two seconds this came up: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out, and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in. For you mom...the necklaces...For you, Nana & Papa...GingerSnaps (always reminds me of you)...For you Ingrid...The Happiness Project. And Dad...the Godiva chocolate truffles. I love you all...I'm sorry. I love you.”
And now from Low’s The Compleat Purge:
I guess you guys will have to deal with all my stuff–but just make sure for me, please, that these people get these things:
Tasha:
Breakfast on Pluto DVD
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe DVD
(This is embarrassing, but) Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire book (British edition)
King Kong DVD
The Corpse Bride DVD
Lord of War DVD
Revolver DVD
The Lords of Dogtown (for that blonde boy in Elephant, she thinks he’s really cute)
Chicken or the egg? It’s the same voice, the same form. At some point in this sequence, Low writes “I have become socialized to sometimes think of my life as some kind of high school movie with people, colors and words clearly delineated, hierarchies strictly defined.” And that is true, except that truth has nothing to do with belief and everything to do with the material reality of capitalist relations both in our fabricated lives and in our fabricated deaths. We can fake death, as she has, because death is also a kind of fake. “I have become a parody of myself,” Low writes and it could not have been otherwise, at least not without a collective engagement and refusal that moves beyond solipsism. The teenage girl is stranded, alone and abandoned with no way out; thus her desire for not only revenge but to brutally enact it over and over becomes unsurprising and universally meaningful.
In the nebulous sea of these suicide notes, Low gets to a precise truth in the form of a question which is how is that such affect, we never doubt the sincerity of the speaker, such sincere emotion can be made so counterfeit if we take counterfeit to mean something that can be passed off so easily as genuine. How can something so genuine, in the hands of this writer, remain so unbelievable? Even in the material outcroppings of our will to die, we are conformists because suicide notes are all the same.
This is all to say that there is structure to confession. In this case, the structure is the form of the suicide notes of a young girl and what we think to be the intimate longings, the deep sentimental desires are shown finally to be mechanical and easily reproduced for we are all shaped, molded and deranged by the same forces of racism, patriarchy and capitalism. We want the suicide note to be personal, but thank god it isn’t—there’s a way in which the mundane structure of it, the profane affect, tells us that our desires are not ours, that our deepest emotions and sentiments, in Low’s young protagonist, are not real, that they have been made and developed by forces that in themselves can one day change and this something not fueled by hatred but rather, love.
Which is to say that for such a revenge fantasy, as the Complete Purge is, one has never seen so many I Love Yous. The book brims with them. “I love you.” “I love you.” “I love you.” They close the letters. “I love you mom and dad.” “Just know I love you.” “I love you.” “Take care, darling, if you’re reading this I’m gone and I probably already miss you.” “I love you.” “I love you.” “Take care, I love you.” “I love you, take care.”
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