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While the great poet, James Whitcomb Riley, a native poet from my hometown of Greenfield, has a strong sense of Indiana and his Hoosier-ness. I compare myself to Whitcomb Riley, only in the sense of place, because my understanding of poetry was shaped around his work growing up in Hancock County. I am personally influenced by other poets such as Sylvia Plath, Walt Whitman, and James Wright in style and in content. My poetry contains a mixture of confessionalism and pastoral poems and doesn’t shy away from critiquing every aspect of place, family, and mental illness. These intersecting ideals and styles (confessional and pastoral in fixed forms/free-verse) place me at a crossroads of my own, where navigating my position within these frameworks alters my view of the Midwest and how a mental illness may, in fact, be worse off because of the isolation, dissociation, and perception.

A recent trend in the study of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath often dissociates Confessional poetry from the subject of the writer and her biography, claiming that the artist is in full control of her work and that her art does not have naïve mimetic qualities. However, this study proposes that subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection, enable a powerful transformative dialectic. Specifically, it demonstrates that an emphasis on the subjective can help manifest the process of transgressing the law of One. The law of One asserts a patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social closed system and can be opposed to the bodily drives and its open dynamism. This project asserts that unique, creative voices are derived from that which is individual and personal and thus, readings of Confessional poetry are in fact best served by acknowledgment of the subjective. In order to stress the subject of the artist in Confessionalism, this study employed a psychoanalytical Kristevan approach. This enables consideration of the subject not only in terms of the straightforward narration of her life, but also in relation to her poetic language and the process of creativity where instinctual drives are at work. This study further applies a feminist reading to the subject’s poetic language and its ability to transgress the law, not necessarily in the political, macrocosmic sense of the word, but rather on the microcosmic, subjective level. Although Sexton and Plath possess similar biographies, their work does not have the same artistic value in terms of transformative capabilities. Transformation here signifies transgressing of the unity of the subject and of the authoritative father, the other within, who has prohibitive social and linguistic powers. Plath, Kristeva’s the “deadmost,” successfully confronts the unity of the law, releasing the death drive through anger. Moreover, Plath’s psychic borders are more fluid because of her ability to identify with the pre-Oedipal mother. This unsettling subject is identified by shifts in texts marked by renewal, transgression, and jouissance. Unlike Sexton, Plath is able to achieve transformation as she oscillates masochistically between the “inside” and the “outside” of her psychic borders, and between the symbolic and the semiotic. Furthermore, this enables Plath to develop the unique “Siren Voice of the Other.” In comparison, Sexton, the “dead/less,” evades any confrontation with the maternal and the performance of death in her poetry. Her case is further complicated by the discovery of a second mother. As a result, passivity becomes a main characteristic of her work. This passivity remains until the maternal abject bursts in her text and she reacts to this by performing cleansing rituals, and gravitating toward a symbolic father. Without the dynamism of transgression, Sexton’s work is heterogeneous but does not achieve ultimate transformation and jouissance. Confessional poetry, in this sense, takes on a new dimension. The life stories of the poets become important not for their pejorative, pathological aspects that focus on narrative mimesis, but rather for their manifestation as an aesthetic process. The subject of the writer becomes important as an aesthetic identity in the poems, which are rooted in real life. The main concern then becomes the aesthetic transformative dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic in her work of art.

Magister Artium - MA / This portfolio of poems, prose poems and short fiction pieces is quasi-autobiographical and tracks the trajectory of my life, from childhood in Cape Town (‘pre-exilic’) to emigration abroad (‘exilic’) and return to Cape Town in late middle age (‘post-exilic’). Themes explored include the deceptive nature of memory and the risk of imbuing a childhood recollected in later life with affective or narrative nostalgia; the psychologically dislocating nature of exile on personal identity and notions of home; and Cape Town as both an imaginary construct and a multi-layered reality: specifically, ‘my’ Cape Town – now as well as half a century ago – and ‘other’ Cape Towns, reflecting a diversity of highly unequal experiences within this city. The dominant mode of expression chosen to explore these largely personal themes is confessional.

Lost in Perception is a manuscript of narrative poems that are unflinching honest explorations of the self—emotional states-of-mind such as anxiety and anger, and states-of-being such as feelings of self-worthlessness. Confessional in nature these poems derive from familial relationships, domestic abuse, desire, sex and/or a combination of the aforementioned. To an extent, Lost in Perception is a manuscript of a diarist. It features a number of poems concerning a romantic relationship with an alcoholic that present a cohesive narrative within the collection. The narrator in Lost in Perception views the self as divergent from the self it once was and should be again—the self lacks well-being or wholeness—to become whole again most of the poems turn toward the natural world. The narrator perceives the self as existing in an unnatural state and what exists in nature is harmonious. The narrator wishes to take something from nature and apply to the self such that the self becomes whole again. There are two primary landscapes within Lost in Perception—Florida coastal lands and Southwest Virginia Appalachian foothills and valleys. The natural world is also the space where the narrator enacts an emotional response to work through personal turmoil. The narrator turns toward nature as a place to figure out and/or admit something about the self, rid the self of negativity and to articulate a desire—primarily for change to occur. Lost in Perception is an unabashed and clear presentation of an individual who once felt whole, but who now feels broken or stuck. / Master of Fine Arts

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In the tradition of academic satire, Lady Lazarus is the fictional biography of the daughter of American rock musicians. In her late teens she rises to fame as confessional poet, who, despite only publishing one collection of poems during her brief life, becomes an overnight sensation. Author Andrew Altschul is satirizing academia’s need to be a part of popular culture and in doing so, privileges the ability to use controversy and conventional beauty to sell books as opposed to creating quality art. By focusing on how the author uses Hans Robert Jauss’ horizons of expectations, unreliable narrators, anecdotes in biography and the economics of fame as a deciding factor in academia, the author has created a dense and punitive opinion of academia’s inclusion of popular culture into its world.

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