Postconfessionalist Breakthrough in Glück’s Poetics

Abstract

One of the purposes of confession in confessional poetry, as stated by Diane Wood Middlebrook, is breaking through via the breaking of taboos. This act implies a deliberately bare language of honesty, where poetic complexity is entrusted to the intricacy of emotions, encompassing issues of attachment, social alienation, or mortality. Often touching on family relations, Louise Glück’s poetry too is deceptively uncomplicated. Resembling the cadence of ordinary speech, her poems create the sense that the speaker is a real person, a homogenous entity with a body and a birth certificate. There is a tension, however, between content and form in her lyric, in that it is specifically the reliability of the voice that the content interrogates. She reflects on this manifestly in “The Untrustworthy Speaker,” namely the (un)reliability of the poetic persona as a conveyor of its life events. Doing so, she breaks away from the confessionalist mode of autobiography, in which the confessional “I” lays bare the contents of the poet’s life in a gesture of protest against polite society, as an attempt to reveal the real “I,” or as an act of cleansing. Pinpointing the break achieved by Glück, Gregory Orr classifies her as postconfessional, simultaneously demarcating a stream of contemporary American poetry that complicates the notion of self found in the confessionals. It is easier to see what Glück is breaking away from in terms of confession, but much more enigmatic, what the relationship of her poetry is to breaking through. In this paper, I will attempt to grasp Glück’s postconfessionality by studying the possibility of breakthrough in her poetics, illustrating it with lines from “The Chicago Train,” “The Night Migrations,” “The Untrustworthy Speaker,” “Dead End,” “The Wild Iris,” “Snowdrops,” and “Dedication to Hunger.”