The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959

Author(s): CHRISTOPHER GROBE

Source: PMLA , March 2012, Vol. 127, No. 2 (March 2012), pp. 215-230
Published by: Modern Language Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41616812

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12 7-2 ]

The Breath of the Poem: Confessional

Print/Performance circa 1959

CHRISTOPHER GROBE

wear perfume? And I know everyone says that vodka has

WHAT wear no detectable DIDno detectable
perfume?odor,ROBERT
but if youodor, And LOWELL
were sitting in the frontbutrowI know if you SMELL everyone were LIKE? sitting says DID in that SYLVIA the vodka front PLATH row has
at one of Anne Sexton s readings, could you catch a whiff of those
thermosfuls of booze she drank to fend off stage fright? Such ques-
tions seem offensive, somehow, to the literary sensibility. Authors
are not supposed to have smells because, by and large, they are not
supposed to have bodies. And, with the exception of a private frisson
or two over the tactile pleasures of fine paper, neither are we readers
supposed to have, or else make much use of, bodies.
Much of that strange ritual the formal poetry reading seems
choreographed to enforce this prohibition. Why else, when called
on to perform their authority at such readings, do our literary titans
meekly clutch the podium at their abdomen, sport clothing that as-
pires to invisibility, and defer to the safer seductions of the printed
page by visibly scanning, word by word, poems they know by heart,
by breath, and by gut? The author, on such occasions, is merely the
onion-skin flap protecting the poem - the mercifully thin obstruc-
CHRISTOPHER GROBE is assistant profes-
tion to poetic meaning and not its conduit.
sor of English at Amherst College, where
What happens, though, when the poet s self (suddenly) is not just
he teaches drama and performance stud-
the conduit but the very content of poetic meaning? This is precisely
ies. This essay is drawn from his current

what happenedPo-
book project, "Performing Confession: when - in one of the defining coincidences of post-
etry, Performance, and New Media since
war American literary culture - confessional poetry emerged simul-
1959," which posits a coherent tradition of
taneously with a craze for poetry readings, live and recorded. If this
"confessional performance" that encom-
were a mere coincidence, it would be a cruel one, given the scandal-
passes such practices as poetry readings,
ously personal content that earned confessional poetry its name,1 and
consciousness-raising sessions, perfor-
yet we cannot rightly say that this private literature was ambushed by
mance art, drag acts, monologue theater,

publicity. Confessional poetry, I will argue, was from its inception a

blogging, vlogging, and reality television.

J © 2012 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA j 215

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2i6 The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 J P M L A

performance genre, infused, at every stage of
its creation and dissemination, with the syn-
esthetic "breath" of embodied orality. Ampli-
fying each other s effects, confessionalism and
the reading conspired to yoke the lyric I to its
living, breathing referent.
Performance practices are notoriously
difficult to study. They leave all sorts of evi-
dence in their wake - plans and prompts pre-
cede performance; archival and memorial
traces trail it - but none of these simply is the
object of study in the way that the literary text
is often presumed to be. This realization has
led many performance theorists to spurn the
archive, arguing, as Peggy Phelan influentially
did, "Performances only life is in the present.
Performance cannot be saved, recorded, doc-
umented . . ." ( Unmarked 146). Much recent
scholarship in performance studies, however,
is returning to the past and to the archive2 -
including, I would propose, Phelan's own
work on literature and performance, the first
fruits of which appeared recently in these
pages: "If we lose the intimacy of the con-
nection between literature and performance,
we diminish something vital in and between
them
day reader- anyone shameless enoug
to risk being heard through the o
can explore the implied parameters
teraction, but a historical consider
requires a third category of evidenc
printed editions and performan
namely, an account of the styles an
that shaped the interaction and con
possibilities. Hence, I draw on mi
traditions of elocution and oral inte
to demonstrate the shifting com
about what printed poetry was s
sound like, and I invoke the beats
larly Allen Ginsberg, who was a tou
the performed word among the con
and arguably one himself- as icon
etry's performative turn. I also pu
ner threads - Plath s catechistic r
Lowells shifting repertoire of re
cents, Sexton s interest in Method a
more - in the belief that all the ma
of performance, various and disloca
may be, contribute to that style
and of subjectivity- called confess
Aurality, Voice, Breath

of performances and poems, more

Our muscular
private senses are not closed syst
endlessly
math for calculating oversound, translated
the thing not into each other in
ence we call
in the words, not in the melody, not in the consciousness. . . . Our [m
nologies,
dance, not in the meter" ("Just Want" like our
946). In private senses , now
interplay and ratio
finding Phelans "more muscular math," how-
- Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenbe
ever, we have to break down the same wall
between archive and repertoire that Phelan
Marshall McLuhan surrendered th
herself was instrumental in erecting.
print in
In listening for the "oversound" of1962.
con- At that moment f
art printed
fessional poetry, I explore the forms matched
texts his intermed
of the confessional poets alongside live
so well as and
poetry. Beginning in t
and with increasing
studio recordings of their performances, but I fervor th
1960s,
do so while challenging the notion poetry
that there lived (with promis
neity) realms
exist two such pristine and separate in print,
as on vinyl, and thr
performance.
print and performance. For poets Caedmon Records,
writing un-
exclusively
der pressure of the reading, the excellenceto
ofmarket recorded lit
masses,
a poem lies not in the segregated was founded in 1952 and
perfections
of page and performance but its
incatalog. Other labels soon foll
the richness
acquiring
of the interaction between them. the voices of poets fro
Any present-

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 127.2 1 Christopher Grobe 217

and styles. Meanwhile, emerged from anpoetry

the live age of oral performance-
reading,
once the prerogative that
oftreats
modernism s simply
the body as if it were avant-an
gardists and emeriti, fast became
embarrassing expected
prerequisite of
for having a voice.
poets at all stages of their
Wheeler varied careers.3
is blatant in this regard. When,For
in her a
short time, at least, the performance-
introduction, captured
she promises to study voice not
on LPs and repeated atmerely
readings - rivaled
as "a metaphor print
in literary texts" but
as poetrys main mode as
of circulation.
"a bodily phenomenon," her analysis veers
The rapid growth of into asound criticism
dry dissection of the human vocalinanat-
poetry studies over the omy: "Inlast two
order to speak, decades has
an individual pushes
drawn our attention to some of the McLu- air from her lungs through her vocal cords,
hanesque interplay that resulted, but it haswhich are muscular folds in the larynx," and
largely left the boundaries between mediaso on. She then proceeds to a disquisition on
intact. In his introduction to Close Listening
the nature of sound as compressed-air waves
(1998), Charles Bernstein, a pioneer of thisbefore noting that "[i]n a listener, in turn,
movement and impresario of the PennSoundcomplex mechanisms in the ear and brain
archive of recorded poetry, successfully ad-
translate these speech sounds into perception
vanced the master term aurality , which hethrough neural signals" (23). Essentially, po-
defines as "the sounding of the writing' as op-etry readings are where ear-brain combines go
posed to "orality and its emphasis on breath, to absorb the compressed air of lung-larynx-
voice, and speech" (13). Bernstein is simplytongue cooperatives- or, more to the point,
wary of those twin idols speech and presence, where poets and their audiences seem to have
but his definition has had the further effectsbodies only insofar as texts require them to.
of isolating writing as a medium and chilling Such anatomical litanies are common when
interest in the kinesthetic and bodily-emotivesound critics wish to dispense quickly with the
force of poetry4 - thus undermining one of
body. Bernstein, in fact, constructs a similar
his own stated aims: "to integrate the moderncatalog: "Aurality is connected to the body -
history of poetry into a more general historywhat the mouth and tongue and vocal chords
of performance art" (5). Performance schol- [sic] enact - not the presence of the poet" (In-
ars, after all, take for granted the deep and
trod. 13). If the body mentionable extended as
nonhierarchical imbrication of media, which far as the scalp, I would call this hairsplitting.
McLuhan champions and aurality disallows.5 McGurl s historical account of the creative
In common parlance and in criticism notwriting program can help us understand by
directly allied with Bernstein s, another wordwhat warrant theorists exclude the body from
takes on all the duties of aurality. That word, considerations of voice: technology - or, to
voice, dominates two recent accounts of this
be more precise, a conflation of the techne of
period in American literature: Lesley Whee-writerly craft and the technologies of audio re-
ler s Voicing American Poetry (2008) and the
cording and broadcast. These technologies not
chapter of Mark McGurls The Program Era only authorize the rhetoric of voice as airwaves
(2009) entitled "Our Phonocentrism" (227-70).
(incipient radio waves) but also mimic the aes-
Both show how voice implicates the real-worldthetic distance that writing programs taught
self through ideas of politics and personalthe poet to maintain. McGurls crowning ex-
growth (e.g., "finding your voice"), but both
ample of the importance of literal voice to lit-
focus on audible sound to the exclusion of erature in this period is the Voice Project run by
all other aspects of that vocable self. Conse-the novelist John Hawkes at Stanford University
quently, we have a body of scholarship on in the 1960s. In one exercise, a student in the
oral performance - and on the literature that program would "listen to her recorded speaking

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2i8 The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 [ P M L A

voice, . . . asking herself how her text might bet-
ter embody her voice" (255). To my ear, there
is something uncannily wrong with this idea:
that, in being mechanically extracted from the
body, the voice gains embodiment in text.6
By contrast, the mavens of the recorded-
literature industry (mid- century poetry's lit-
eral technologizers) focused not on creating
sanitized, stylized experiences of voice but on
remediating the effects of liveness and per-
sonal presence. Take the groundbreaking Yale
Series of Recorded Poets (YSRP), launched in
1959 with a recording of Robert Lowell read-
ing his "Life Studies" cycle. Far from wishing
the dissolution of the poet into technologized
voice, Lee Anderson, the driving force behind
the YSRP, describes his recording sessions
dency of sound criticism. Most contributors
to this subfield focus exclusively on either pre-
twentieth-century classics (which are allowed
to stand in for poetry as such) or the work of
twentieth-century avant-garde poets (who wear
their mediatic sprawl on their sleeves). The re-
sult has been either to generalize as transhis-
torical the particular multimedia urge of recent
poetry or radically to limit its effects to poets
who make their own awareness of it most ex-
plicit. Typical of the latter camp, two scholars -
one in each of the major collections of sound
criticism, Close Listening (1998) and The Sound
of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (2009)- profess
to consider a "wide range" of orally inflected
verse, only to identify it as the narrow span
between aesthetic allies: "Charles Olson to Al-

with poets almost as if they were therapy ses-
sions. He insists on a personal "acquaintance
[with poets] over a period of time" so as to
cultivate in them a "relaxed yet vulnerable
attention." Poetry reading captured in this
way was a quasi-confessional act whether
len Ginsberg" (Perelman 202) and "Allen Gins-
berg to Robert Creeley [a member of Olson s
set]" (Roubaud 20). By tracing the influence
of Ginsberg and the beats on the confessional
poets and by borrowing the idea of "breath"
from Charles Olson - who disdained and was

the poetry was confessional or not. When it
came time to market the YSRP to potential
subscribers, the editors wrote their brochure
as a hymn to low-tech ambience:
A poet is not a machine which, at the touch
of a button, will unerringly produce the nu-
ances and emotional overtones of the lines he
has composed
derson took his recorder "into the field" - to
the homes of the poets, to the living room,
the garden. ... In the background, at times,
faint noises from the outer world provided an
almost imperceptible but nevertheless enliv-
ening undertone. (Advertisement)
The benefit of recording, for new-media ma-
vens like Lee Anderson, was that it could cap-
disdained by them (Hamilton 354)- I hope to
look past mid-century factional skirmishes to
sketch the broader performative turn in Amer-
ican poetry. Olson concludes his influential
1950 essay "Projective Verse" by leading the
poet "down through the workings of his own
throat to that place where breath comes from,
where breath has its beginnings, where drama
has to come from" (61). Olson s dramatic breath
reaches deeper and radiates farther than the
aural anatomist would venture. Let breath , at
once visceral and ethereal, stand for the tensile
play between print and performance.
Secret Beatniks
I am a secret beatnik hiding in the suburbs in my

ture the teeming "sensorium" (Ong) lurking square house on a dull street .
-Anne Sexton
just beyond the realm of textuality- what
Caedmon Records (in its tagline) called "A
Third Dimension for the Printed Page." Anne Sexton wrote these words in a letter
By focusing on the confessional poets, in dated 1 April 1959. In it she jokingly calls
particular, I hope to counteract another ten- herself "the most about to be published poet

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12 7-2 ] Christopher Grobe 219
a trend
around" (Anne Sexton 68), and that steeped
she could say them in criticism
so without exaggeration. In fact, the letter
precipitated, Lowell believed, a crisis i
perches not only on the brink
etic of Sextons
style, ca- of the (beat) reading s
lhe rise
exposed this
reer but also on the eve of confessional crisis. "At the time," Lowell
poetry.
She writes, "Cal and Snodsyrecalled,
both have books reading was sublimat
"poetry
appearing this April. Tho I haven't seenof
the practice Cals,
Allen Ginsberg. I was still
I hear it is full of personal ing
poetry and New
my old think
Criticism religious, sym
that he is either copying me poems.
or that .I'm
. . copy-
Much •good poetry is unsuit
ing him (tho I haven't seen audience performance;
his new stuff) or mine was incom
hensible"
that we are both copying Snodsy!" ( Collected
(71). Hear ť s Prose 284). In the
Needle , by W. D. Snodgrass ("Snodsy"),
leading won Studies , he fixed this
up to Life
the 1959 Pulitzer Prize after lem-not thanks
exerting an out- to any abstract realiz
size influence on Lowell ("Cal") andclaimed
but, he Sexton,
in a 1961 interview, th
but it was Lowells Life Studies
the that propelled
practical experience of performanc
confessionalism to the fore of Americas
been doingliter-
a lot of reading aloud. I we
ary consciousness. Suddenly, a leading
trip to Ameri-
the West Coast [in March 195
can poet - one who, with fewread at least had
exceptions, once a day and sometimes
stuck to writing political and
forreligious
fourteen versedays, and more and more I
of a dense and harshly metrical style
I was simplifying my - was
poems

writing loose, conversational verse (and

changes even
just impromptu as I read" (242-
prose) that brimmed with pathos
Finding and bathos
himself in front of audiences m
used
as it explored the minutiae of to Allen
a troubled Ginsberg than to Allen Ta
life.
As Lee Anderson put it, "TheLowell realized
parallels that unless he veered aw
are not
exact, but ... if Eliot after the
fromFour
"oldQuartets
New Criticism . . . poems," he
began to sound like Allen Ginsberg, then
"cooked." Life we
Studies , recycling "raw" perf
have a comparative shock." mance
Confessional po-
practices as textual innovations, w
etry, it seems, was a grand coming-out for all
true, bloody-centered medium rare.
Sexton
the "secret beatniks" in America and set.
s literary Sylvia Plath, the other tw
Surprisingly, Lowell agreed with
poets this
most as-
strongly associated with conf
sessment, defining his confessional style had
sional poetry, as a equally foundational co
partial concession to beat poetics. In histo
mitments speech
oral pre-performance- altho
accepting the 1960 NationalofBook Award
a more for
private nature. For Sexton oral p
Life Studies , he claims to be "hanging
formance on aa crucial role in revision a
played
question mark" between two workshopping. Maxine Kumin recalls t
poetic factions, "a
cooked and a raw": "The cooked, marvelously
oral presentation was the norm in the inf
expert, often seems laboriously concocted
mal poetry to
workshop that launched Sexto
career
be tasted and digested by the (Kumin
graduate and Sexton 119)- and th
semi-
nar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets
longtime friendship they formed in this or
of unseasoned experience are dishedcontinued
workshop up for on the phone: "they bo
midnight listeners. There is a poetry
had that
special can installed at their desks a
phones
only be studied, and a poetryused
that can only
them be the day to check out dra
through
of poems.
declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, 'We sometimes connected wit
and a poetry
of scandal" ("National Bookphone
Awardscall Accep-
and kept the line linked for ho
at apreceding
tance Speeches"). In the decade stretch,' Kumin
Life remembered" (Midd
Studies , mainstream American poets
brook were
142). in-
Weeks and drafts would pass
creasingly installed in university classrooms,
fore these phone partners would replace

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220 The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 | P M L A

performance with a typescript.7 Performance, Breath

then, was a bare fact of Sextons process.
We think and speak rhythmically all the time, each
For Plath orality was even more than phrasing , piece of speech, metrically equivalent to
writerly process: it verged on poetic religion. what we have to say emotionally.
In her journal, on 14 September 1958, she -Allen Ginsberg, letter to Richard Eberhart, 1956
vowed to make "reading aloud an hour" part
of her daily regimen ( Unabridged Journals
This idea of pushing the poem beyond the
421). She later justified the practice as "a way
merely textual was central to a burgeoning
to feel on my tongue what I admire" (508),
field of the late 1950s, and one in which Plath
but more than the physical sensation she
had some background:8 oral interpretation, a
sought a ritual experience: "Read pound [sic]
descendant of elocution and a near ancestor of
aloud and was rapt. A religious power given
performance studies.9 As Gerald Graff notes,
by memorizing. . . . Best to read them in the
elocution once constituted the sum total of
morning first thing, review over lunch and
literary studies, until it fell out of general fa-
catechize at tea. . . . The irrefutable, impla-
cable, uncounted uncontrived line" (514-15). vor in the late 1860s; when it rose again in the

This catechistic approach extended to her own

1920s, it did so not in English departments
poems as well. After all, in an earlier journal but in schools of speech (46-47). Adapting to
this less belletristic environment and push-
entry, prefiguring the language she would use
to describe her Poundian catechism, she had ing back against forces that might collapse
commanded herself to "[s]ay them aloud al- oral interpretation into emerging drama de-
ways. Make them irrefutable" (285). partments (see Rein, ch. 2 [25-49]), scholars
Although such private pre-performances of oral interpretation sought to standardize
were always foundational to her writing, it was the field s practices by establishing an anti-
only with Ariel , her most influential and most theatrical, pseudoscientific goal of neutrality:
confessional volume, that the performative methodical unobtrusiveness of voice and ges-
surpassed the textual as the primary mode of ture. Chloe Armstrong and Paul Brandes, two
Plath s poetry- an odd claim to make about latter-day proponents of this neutrality, cap-
a posthumous volume of verse but one about ture the paradoxical nature of this project in
which she was adamant in a 1962 interview. the opening image of their 1963 textbook, The
Oral Interpretation of Literature. They begin
"I've got to say them, I speak them to myself,
. . . whatever lucidity they may have comes by quoting, approvingly, the British aestheti-
cian Harold Osborne: "There is no conceivable
from the fact that I say them to myself, I say
way in which the experience communicated
them aloud" (Interview 170). Even describ-
by an artist in a work of art can be ЧокГ by
ing Ariel's orality, she falls into the repetitive
rhythms of catechism: "I've got to say them . .any
. one person to any other person except by
I speak them ... I say them ... I say them."pointing silently to that work of art in which
the experience is embodied." "This book,"
A. Alvarez, an early champion of Plath s work,
they continue, "is concerned with pointing si-
recalls that she would not permit him to lay
a finger on the manuscript of Ariel until shelently to the art that is embodied in literature"
had personally read the poems aloud to him (3). The oral interpreter, under the regime of
speech, aimed to speak in a voice that was no
(194). Indeed, if it were not for the money and
fame books bring, it is unclear whether Plathvoice at all - the voice of text itself. (This is the
would have published her poems - or, as she tradition to which Bernstein s aurality is heir.)
once put it, "mummif [ied them] in print" - at Many mid-century scholars of oral inter-
all ( Unabridged Journals 515). pretation, though, made a clean break with

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 12 7-2 ] Christopher Grobe 221
this neutrality. Don Geiger, a
of professor
consonants). But at
just the
when the progression
toward the body
University of California, Berkeley, reaches
was theits nadir, an echo
most outspoken of these newrings like a foreshock
barbarians ("hand and"), and sud-
- and
an appropriate spokesman denly
sincewhathis career
might have been Ginsbergs crash
flourished alongside the beat-led
landing intorenaissance
the grotesque, the asshole, rises
of oral poetry across the bay.10
insteadGeiger turns
into an effect beyond rhyme - "-hole
the argument for neutralityholy!"
on its- a ululation
head: linking
"one the lowest to the
of the most misleading of all oral
highest, readings
making the asshole, is
in fact, the pur-
a 'neutral' one. . . . Actually, est
by reading
echo of the holy.'neu-
Extended to every line of
trally' that which snarls and smiles
the poem, . . . of
this method the
letting the text and
its sounds
reader probably suggests largely that speak
allfor themselves could satisfy
litera-
ture was written by the same both the neutral author"
listless and the aural reader.
However,
(14). Instead of teaching students in "Footnote to 'Howl'" Gins-
techniques
berg manipulates
for rendering themselves proper not only the textures of
and properly
inconspicuous in the face of vocal
the production
literary buttext,
the very motions and
Geiger "simply hope [s] that emotions
[their] slouch
of the andwho fail to pay
body. Critics
garble will disappear with the text-directed
attention to the embodied practice of Gins-
seizure" (6). One need only listen towill
bergs poetry contem-
at best underestimate the
poem and at to
porary readings by Allen Ginsberg worst misjudge its function
under-
stand what a "text- directed seizure" sounded entirely. I lay particular emphasis on func-
like in the Bay Area at this moment. Gins- tion. If New Criticism often rode under Ar-
bergs readings would lure no one into believ- chibald MacLeishs banner ("A poem should
ing that a "listless author" wrote his poems. not mean / But be"), the art of Ginsberg and
They "snarl and smile" (and coax and weep), Geiger is based instead on the principle that
and so does he - as the recording "Howl" and a poem should not mean but do. Seen in this
Other Poems richly attests. light, the New Critical fear of paraphrase
"Footnote to 'Howl,'" a litany of blessings finds its travesty (its reductio ad absurdum,
perhaps) in the Armstrong-Brandes mode
that begins with fifteen straight repetitions of
the cry "Holy!" represents the albums stron- of oral interpretation - but Geiger, despite
gest "seizure": "The world is holy! The soul his deference to Cleanth Brooks's idea of po-
is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! etry as drama, gains real critical standing by
The tongue and cock and hand and asshole reference to theories that we could call, with
holy!"11 In this early line, Ginsberg conflates justifiable anachronism, performative.12 Ex-
panding on Kenneth Burke s "dramatism"
the grand (the world), the ideal (the soul), the
absurd (the nose), and the sensual-grotesque, and R. P. Blackmurs idea of language as "ges-
engulfing all in a single wave of blessing. The ture," Geiger claims not only that literature
philosophical point, though, enters as a sonic can and should be experienced "as a dra-
effect. Near assonance (world, holy) develops matic form of discourse" but that the student
into near rhyme (soul, holy) before being sub- should be "working toward a performance in-
sumed into a bass-line hum of nasals (skin, volving his own organic reactions" (12). The
nose, tongue, hand and) and an accelerating poem, here, is a prompt to performance-
spray of consonants (s/cin, tongue, cock). This one continuous with, and filled with, bodily
tracks Ginsberg s mental move from the ethe- meaning making.
real (soul and vocalic breath, the two original So what would organic reactions uncover
meanings of psyche) to the visceral (flesh: vi- in "Footnote to 'Howl'" that our neutral
brating with nasality, sinewy with the work reader missed? What does the poem do - that

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222 The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 [ P M L A

is, what does it do to (and through) the body? need not even see the holy H s of the "Foot-
On the page, "Footnote to 'Howl'" looks like note" as an actor s trick. Perhaps they simply
an exuberant cry of joy, and nothing in our create an outlet for the sobs that "Howl" s fi-
"neutral" rendition of the text would con- nale provokes. And if the danger of Moloch
vince us otherwise. But nothing could be is that it will create "consciousness without
further from the truth embodied in Gins- body" and "never return . . . soul to . . . body
berg s performances of the poem, and once again," then what could return the tension
we have studied the way in which the poem s of "Howl" to its tonic better than a poem
construction scripts this alternative perfor- that physicalizes the threat of Moloch as a
mance, we will have no choice but to accept heaving-breathed despair - a form material
that we not only mistook the theatrics of the enough to be purged?
piece, not only misunderstood its tone, but The poem's scattershot blessing, then,
also failed to grasp its very meaning. Celebra- comes not from directionless ecstasy but
tory this "Footnote" is not. Perhaps practicalfrom a desperate need to survive a crippling,
considerations alone should have alerted us stifling form of anxiety. In this sense, the
that pure rhapsody would not suffice. Afterexclamation "Holy!" is, counterintuitively,
all, fifteen repetitions of "Holy!" are difficultmore truly a howl than anything in the poem
to sell in performance if you simply rely on it footnotes. It is not a celebration of the ho-

finding different tones of escalating exuber- liness that exists in the world but a desper-
ance. Instead, in the 1959 studio record- ate, clawing attempt to carve out a space for
ing of the poem, Ginsberg uses these fifteen holiness amid the "bop apocalypse" - to per-
repetitions to induce a tearful panic, taking formatively invoke holiness. Ginsberg suc-
advantage of an actors trick: the H at the be- ceeds in doing so, late in the poem, once he
ginning of each word forces a heaving breath reaches the line "Holy time in eternity holy
and, repeated fifteen times, triggers a fraught eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy
emotional state. Thus seized by a physically the fourth dimension holy the fifth Interna-
induced panic attack, Ginsberg uses the poem tional holy the Angel in Moloch!" The long,
to talk himself back to peacefulness. The ho- unpunctuated, lowercase expanse of this line
lies continue, but the lines, and therefore the visually mimics the flattened calm of Gins-
breaths, become longer and slower until fi- berg s voice. He has reached the point where
nally he returns to a state of calm. his blessing can envelop even Moloch, the in-
If we turn our attention to a larger per- stigator of those heaving sobs of "Holy! Holy!
formance context, we must also account for Holy!" Ginsberg injects one more threat of
"Footnote" as the last act of "Howl"s ritual despair, represented by a line whose staccato
drama. The poem proper ends with two short punctuation matches, even exceeds, that of
sections that create the panic attack "Foot-the first: "Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity!
note" must assuage. The first decries the evils faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magna-
of Moloch, a figure for industrial, corporatenimity!" At the height of the lines crescendo,
power but also for the despair such power in- represented by the two capitalized words, his
stills in its victims. "What sphinx of cementvoice nearly returns to the vocalic sob song of
and aluminum bashed open their skulls andthe opening lines, but if tears are shed they
ate up their brains and imagination?" the sec- are tears of victory: a reclaiming of the body
tion begins. "Moloch!" "Moloch!" "Moloch!" as "Holy! Ours!" and wholly ours. A final long
is the insistent strophic answer, "Moloch inbreath returns him to peace: "Holy the super-
whom I am a consciousness without a body!"natural extra brilliant intelligent kindness
In the light of this larger dramatic arc, weof the soul!" None of this is apparent in the

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 12 7-2 ] Christopher Grobe 223
poem until the reader explores
niscencesthe possibili-
- literally, drawls. Lowell inher-
ited a southern
ties not only of phonetic texture butaccent from of
also his New Critical
the physical and emotional mentors, such as John Crowe
manipulations of Ransom, and
breathing patterns. The poemseemed to emphasize
is not a smuglyit in readings when-
celebratory tasting of consonants and
ever his poetry wasvowels
at its most nonchalantly
conversational
but is aspirational, in every sense of the (an unsurprising
word. habit given
Read in this way, the poems in essay
the glowing the Lowell
cul-wrote in 1948, "Mr.
Ransom's Conversation,"
minating section of Lowell's Life Studies re- about his mentor's
veal a single, repeated breath
poems). Inpattern and though, Low-
the last two stanzas,
feeling structure. With long, slow
ell disrupts the breaths,
poem's lolling calm.
the poet surveys the details of his life, the
texture of his memories. His Each
linesmorning at eight-thirty,
hiccup, his
breath roughens around objects, the beaming,
inattentive and lost yet
loaded with his "calc" and "trig" books,
irrefutable things of memory, like water ed-
his clipper ship statistics,
dying around jutting rocks. At the height of
and his ivory slide rule,
this progression, just where any
Father reader of
stole off with the his
Chevie
"New Criticism poems" mightto expect a dense,
loaf in the Maritime Museum at Salem.
rhetorical or involuted gnarl He
of called the curator we get
syntax,
instead bluntness, dullness,"the
and, above all,
commander of the Swiss Navy."
cliché, understatement, found language.
Fathers death was abrupt and unprotesting.
These textual failures- "I feel awful,"
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
"We are all old-timers," "My mind's not
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
right" (and, in later books, his
ellipses)- emerge
last words to Mother were:
as the climax of both his poems and his
"I feel awful." po- Poems 176)
( Collected
etic process. When an interviewer prompted
Lowell to talk about his tendency
In the YSRP to include
recording of this poem, released
"an idiom or a very common almostphrase either
simultaneously with the printed text
for the sake of irony or toof
bear more
Life Studies mean-
, Lowell's voice gains a sudden
ing than it's customarilyrhythmic
asked to bear,"
urgency at the beginning of this ex-
Lowell responded, "They come later
cerpt; the volumebecause
even increases over the first
they don't prove much in four
themselves, and leans in toward
lines as if he suddenly
they often replace something that's much
the microphone.
more formal and worked up" ( More
Collected
than the Prose
sudden intensity of tone,
248). This echoes his story (earlier inlistener
though, a close the will
in-notice the ragged
terview) about finding his confessional style
breath these lines stage for Lowell - a break-
on a reading tour through beat country, but,
through past lazy, front-porch reveries. In
unlike those off-the-cuff simplifications, this
fact, he performs the first two lines of this ex-
is a measured act of negative
cerptor
withdestructive
even shorter, more stifled breaths
revision, purposefully placing
than the punctuation ofat
inadequacy the printed poem
a moment where we expect epiphany.
would seem to permit - a less histrionic ver-
The poems about his father's finalofdays
sion, perhaps, Ginsberg's heaving holies -
each demonstrate this structure.
addingLet
each us
fewcon-
words as a correction or
sider "Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,"
addendum, the information in.
crowding more
poem that culminates in his father's death.
Moving on to his father's possessions, Low-
Most of the poem drawls its
ell'sway through
voice broadens a new object - the
at each
connected but unremarkable series of remi- books, the statistics, the slide rule - in a long,

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224 The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 | P M L A

articulated arc until the phrases have filled the poem, I suggest, lies neither in the text nor
his mouth as awkwardly as the objects must in its "neutral" voice but in a synaesthetic in-
have filled his father s arms. With this cata- teraction of text, voice, and body: its "breath."
log, as with the gasping, recursive lines at the
beginning of this stanza, Lowell seems to be
"Performance" circa 1959
prolonging his second-to-last stanza- delay-
ing what must come, at last, at poems end. [A] performative will, for example , be in a peculiar
Still breathless from this lengthened, crescen- way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage ,

doing list, Lowell tries one last time to stave or if introduced in apoemy or spoken in soliloquy
off the poem s inevitable end - repeating his on stage.
-J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (22)
father s lame naval joke in the tone of a man
defeated, by the stanza if not by life. And yet
this line and its proper wit also bring Lowell According to Austin's oft-quoted caveat,
back to a certain fragile self-possession- not nothing could be less performative than what
the drawling placidity of earlier stanzas but a I study here - poems, spoken in soliloquy, on
blunt, stiff-upper-lip style of Bostonian con- stage - and yet this term, along with meta-
trol. It is as if the anger and anxiety over his phors of performance and theater, permeates
fathers death have been crowded out of Low- scholarly discussions of confessional poetry.
ells account of these final moments and dis- These references typically have nothing to
placed onto the seemingly insignificant story do with the actual performances these poets
of his daily trips to the Maritime Museum. gave - or with any meaning of performance
The final line completes the signature particular to mid-century America. Instead,
Lowell performance. "I feel awful," suppos- critics use such metaphors to depict the genre
edly the elder Lowells dying words, enters either as artificial and insincerely theatrical
as an awkward anticlimax to the poem. De- or as a kind of performative deconstruction
spite the preceding restraint, which seems (avant la lettre) of identity.13
to provide insurance against such outbursts, This conflation of performativity, per-
Lowells delivery of this line verges on sen- formance, and theatricality, each unmoored
timentality. He swallows the phrase asham- from actual performance practices, is the
edly- chokes on it, nearly. M. L. Rosenthal ironic legacy of Jacques Derrida and Judith
writes, in his review of Life Studies , that Low- Butler, who undercut Austin not by refut-
ell "cannot breathe without these confessions, ing but by generalizing his caveat. What
however rank they may be" ("Poetry" 154), language, they ask, is not playful, fictive, iter-
but what is most obvious to one who reads able- that is, performative? This pessimistic
these poems as performative or hears themextension of (anti)theatricality across "the en-
read in performance is the extent to which hetire field of what philosophy would call expe-
can barely breathe his way through them atrience" (Derrida 9) preempts another, equally
all. This is not (necessarily) because he is fulldamning critique of Austin - and one more
of fresh feeling each time he reads the poem relevant to the mid- century milieu in which
but because Lowell, like Ginsberg, scripts aconfessional poetry operated.
breath pattern that mimics the conditions of Simply put, Austin got poetry and theater
such emotion. What might on the page lookwrong. At the moment he was writing (1955-
wry or resigned becomes in performance a62), both were seeking the sort of direct,
site of barely repressed outrage at his fathers real-world forcefulness that he assumed they
unpoetical nature, at death, and at the absur- lacked. His caveat makes sense in the context
dity of his own condition. This truth aboutof an illusionistic theater, where actors play

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 12 7-2 ] Christopher Grobe 225
fictional characters behindsocial
an encounters.
impenetrable . . . The key factor in this
fourth wall, or in relation structure
to theis impersonal
the maintenance of a single defi-
and aesthetically autonomous poetry
nition champi-
of the situation, this definition having
oned at the height of literary modernism,
to be expressed, and thisbut
expression sustained
both these regimes were under
in the facesiege. From
of a multitude of potential disrup-
Allan Kaprows happeningstions"
and(254;theemphasis
earliest
added). At Goffman's
"transitional
performance art to the popularity ofpoint" between cynicism and
Method
acting (à la Marlon Brando), avant-garde
sincerity, and iconically by
the space occupied
mainstream performers alikeFelmanwere envision-
s Don Juan, the goal is not to get away
with a cheap
ing ever-denser relations between illusion
lived but to maintain a per-
expe-
rience and live performance. From
formatively the
instated raw
reality; so, too, with mid-
and socially engaged poetry of performances.
century the beats to like to end by
I would
applying
the autobiographical verse of this understanding of performance
confessionalism,
poets too were seeking what Lowell
to the poetry of called "a who is so often
Anne Sexton,
breakthrough back to life"interpreted
( Collected Prose
as performative in the antitheatri-
calhere
244). If there is any free play sense but who found unity, beyond frag-
whatsoever,
it is like that described by Shoshana
mentation, in Felman inof performance.
the iterability
The Scandal of the Speaking Body, which leads
us not away from sincerity but toward a dif-
"Breathing Back" as Confessional Practice
ferent kind of sincerity: "Modern Don Juans,
they know that truth is only anafter
Shortly act.theThat is of Life Stud-
publication
why they subvert truth and ies
do, not
Lowellpromise
wrote in ait,
private letter that
but promise themselves to iť"[something
(111). Ifnottruth is again was said" in
to be said
an act, these Don Juans throw
that themselves into
book (Rosenthal, New Poets 67). Nothing
couldahave
it with all the authenticity of been further
Method from the truth. He
actor.
This vision of performance without
and other poets of his generation would lit-
(anti)theatricality was also the premise
erally of the
say these poems again - and again and
various heuristic models of performance that as they toured
again, over several decades-
emerged across literary and cultural circuit.
the poetry-reading stud-
ies after World War II. For instance, Erving
Of this generation, Anne Sexton was the
Goffman, who uses performance metaphors
poet most troubled, and yet most influenced,
to discuss social interactions in The Presen- by this reality. In 1959 she wrote enthusias-
tation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), specifi- tically about the pleasures of reading and
cally guards against connotations of fakery. vowed to perfect her performance technique
He concedes that there is a "natural move- (e.g., Anne Sexton 89). By later years, however,
ment back and forth between cynicism andshe was threatening never to give poetry read-
sincerity" in peoples self-presentation yet in- ings again, describing them in a vitriolic 1973
sists that we focus on "the kind of transitionalessay as "freak shows": "You are the freak. You
point that can be sustained on the strength ofare the actor, the clown, the oddball

a little self-illusion" (21). In a final flourish,people secretly hope your voice wi

he abolishes the metaphor of the stage and, (that gives an extra kick)" ("Freak
absent this theatricality, is left with some-Yet she once believed that she could s
thing of Felman s commitment to ingenuousproper balance between "the handw
performativity: "7 bis report is not concerned the tablet of the soul" and the "show
with aspects of theater that creep into every- ets "are asked to make ... of it" (35
day life. It is concerned with the structure of relished the strange interplay of dee

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226 The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 [ P M L A

and penetrating publicity. In a 1962 essay on a model of how "the private poet who wrote
her poem "Some Foreign Letters," she writes, the poem" becomes visible through "the pub-
"The final test of a poem often comes during a lic poet" onstage, is fundamentally about re-
public reading. I have almost always read this vivifying aged, mummified texts. The poem
poem during a 'reading' and yet its impact moves methodically through old letters that
upon me remains strong and utterly personal. her late great-aunt (a woman Sexton calls "an
I get caught up in it all over again. By the time extension of myself" ["Comment" 16]) had
I get to the last verse my voice begins to break sent home during a youthful trip to Europe.
and I, still the public poet, become the private Every few lines, Sexton enters the present
poet who wrote the poem" ("Comment" 17). tense of another letter- "This Wednesday in
A decade later, she would condemn audiences Berlin," "This is Wednesday, May 9th, near
for wanting to hear her voice tremble, but in Lucerne," "This is Italy"- and attempts, as she
1962 she considers a catch in her voice a sign puts it at the end of the first stanza, "to reach
of the poem s and the performances success. into your page and breathe it back. . . ."15 But
This break, a sort of textual failure on a par there are further layers of experience that she
with Lowell's clichés and ellipses, signals that is "breathing back" in this poem - the pres-
the boundaries between past and present, tex- ent tense of encountering these letters for the
tual record and lived experience, privacy and first time and the present tense of creating a
publicity are breaking down. poem about them. These presents accrue like
The fact that Sexton was reading Stan- sediment until the presence of performance is
islavsky on the Art of the Stage in early 1964 imbued with archaeological depth. The per-
(Anne Sexton 231) implies that she was still forming self becomes a palimpsest of multiple
actively exploring this sort of ingenuous per- pasts, each experienced, however fragmen-
formativity five years into her career on the tarily, as its own present.
reading circuit, and, though her enthusiasm This trick of breathing back the docu-
for readings was never unmixed, we have no ments of the deceased was a constant motif
reason to believe that this attitude shifted be-
in Sexton's early poetry - perhaps her single
fore the abortive revolt marked by "The Freak greatest theme. In her second book, All My
Show."14 Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose Pretty Ones , it is her newly deceased parents
theories of acting had been popularized (and whom she is breathing back. Echoing the rhe-
warped) in America as the Method, was pri- torical patterns of "Some Foreign Letters,"
marily concerned with the same problem that Sexton focuses in the title poem of this book
must have dogged an itinerant confessionalist on the ephemera that she must choose to
like Sexton: "Why was it then that the more I keep or to discard in the wake of her parents'
repeated my roles the more I sunk backward deaths: "This is the yellow scrapbook that you
into a stage of fossilization?" (Stanislavsky began / the year I was born," "These are the
454). Stanislavsky solved his problem with snapshots of marriage," "I hold the five-year
techniques that inspired practitioners of the diary that my mother kept / for three years"
Method to load their performances with co-(49-51). Sexton continues to pursue this idée
vert autobiographical import and embodied fixe in her third book, Live or Die , where she
"sense memory." Role-playing, for them, be- conflates her own trip to Europe in 1963 with
came a form of virtual autobiography. similar trips taken by her mother and grand-
Long before she read Stanislavsky's work, mother. In "Crossing the Atlantic" she writes:
though, this task already lay at the heart of
Sexton's poetic project. "Some Foreign Let- I have read each page of my mothers voyage.
ters," the poem that she proudly holds up as I have read each page of her mothers voyage.

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 12 7-2 j Christopher Grobe 227
Just learned
I have learned their words as they as she staged moments of access to
Dickens'. (134) her female ancestors through their docu-
ments, she breathed herself back from the
As Plath did with printed
Pound s poems,
page in performance Sexton cat-
- assembling,
echizes her mothers and her great-aunts
out of the Is scattered within and across po- le
ters. She makes them "irrefutable."
ems, a confessional corpus. This corpus, for
The companion Sexton,
to alwaysthis poem,
appeared "Walking
in triplicate. We see
in Paris," revealsthis
the goaltheof
logic in "Crossing her
Atlantic," where Plath-lik
catechisms. In it her
she returns
trip to Europe to
is legible only in her
palimp- great
aunt s letters, which she had
sestic combination with theexplored
voyages of her earlier
in "Some Foreign mother
Letters": "I
and grandmother. "Theread
Double Im- your Par
letters of 1890, / Each night
age," Sexton's I take
most iconically them to m
confessional
thin bed / and learn them as an actress
poem, follows the same logic (35-42). Like learns
her lines"
Sexton (135).
many of her poems, wrote these
this one conflates three word
soon after reading Stanislavsky
generations of women in her family.for This the fir
time, and like anytime,
Method actor,
though, she places herself not she
at the is learn
ing these lines notendin an attempt
of a shape-shifting genealogy but toat the recogniz
the distance between herself
perdurable and The
center of the exchange. the poem "charac-
ter" of her great- aunt but
tells the story to
of several make
years the
she spent away foreig
ness of
scripted the
from other melt
home- alternately in a mentalaway.
hospital
and at her mother's
"Walking in Paris" eventually takes house - and is addressed on a
resonance deeper than theatrical
to her daughter Joy. metaphor. S
grows ecstatic at Within
the these constraints, held
exactness of in ten-
the paralle
between her trip and
sion between
her the double
great-aunts,
image of mother and exclaim
ing, "What is so daughter,
real as Sexton explores a long sequence
walking your streets!
I too have the soreof first
toe persons
you as she tells
tend the story with
in seven cotton"
(135). numbered sections:
This
comparison for instance, "I am thirty back dead
of breathing
documents to the ritual who
this November," "I, chose two times /of
theater to retracin
had been percolating
kill myself" (35),in
and, in Sextons
one jumbled sequence, imagin
tion since her first book of poems, which en
All that summer I learned life
with a poem that juxtaposes rifling throug
back into my own
her dead mother s papers with descriptions o
seven rooms, visited the swan boats,
"the devout" of Boston following "the hou
the market, answered the phone,
of The Cross" ("The served
Division
cocktails as a wife
of Parts" 42-4
In this context, the incantatory
should, made love among my
rhetoric of a
her breathing back takes on
petticoats
religious res
nance. "I have read . . . / 1 have read . . . / 1 hav
learned . . ." becomes a true catechism. "This
On a purely tex
is Wednesday, May 9th, in Lucerne," "This is ing. Where doe
Italy," and "This is the yellow scrapbook" be- fit on the time
come like the deictic words of the Communion Sexton's life? H
liturgy, performing, like them, a strange trans- she speaks and
formation that is neither theatrical nor literal: How distant is sh
"This is my body," Sexton is saying, "This is my This is where
blood." Who would suspect a priest of wishing comes in to gro
to problematize the self by saying so? In readings of "

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228 The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959 | P M L A

of performed identity does not lead to per-
formative free play but in fact offers a path-
way out of a textually induced free play. If,
as she implied in her essay on "Some For-
eign Letters," the broken voice signals the
moment when temporal, ontological, and
categorical divides among selves collapse in
on one another in a sort of unity, there is a
clear moment of such unity in "The Double
Image." In a 1964 recording, she introduces
the poem by saying that in it "I keep telling
her [Joy] and telling her, and telling me" the
"truth of why she did not live with me since
she was a baby" (Poetry), The triplet of "tell-
ing . . . and telling . . . and telling" should
recall both Plaths catechisms and the gen-
erally triple self Sexton "breathes back," but
the shift from "telling her" to "telling me" is
most revealing. The repeated practice of tell-
ing and telling and telling, for Sexton, always
winds up referring to, and revealing, the po-
et s own self. And so it should not be surpris-
ing that in this reading her voice catches on
the passionate lines "Today, my small child,
Joyce, / love your selfs self where it lives,"
trembling on the phrase "self's self." This
sentimental line, punctuated by the "fail-
ure" of a breaking voice, is an injunction to
herself, as much as to Joyce- and "where it
lives," at that instant, is on the stage of the
YM-YWHA Poetry Center in New York City.
The vertiginous swirl of Is in "The Double
Image" is held together by the presence of
the one I that channels them and breathes
them back. They all exist on the same plane, 1. M. L. Rosenthal coins the term in "Poetry as Con-
one known to anyone familiar with autobio- fession," his review of Lowell's Life Studies.
more rhabdian " ("Notes" 75; from the Greek
rhabdos, a solo performer preceding the in-
vention of multicharacter drama)- but no
other form of poetry has had so clear an ef-
fect on performance practices as confessional
poetry has. Its influence on slam poetry, a
largely autobiographical performance form,
is undeniable, but its impact on the autobio-
graphical monologue as practiced since the
1970s is most direct and widespread. Spald-
ing Gray, a pioneer and popularizer of that
form, avidly collected recorded literature and
cites among his chief influences LPs by Lowell
("My Life" 163) and Ginsberg, the latter in his
more confessional vein, "Kaddish, not Howl"
("Art"). Performance scholars have made
little of Gray s insistent claims on a poetic
inheritance but meanwhile Gray, along with
feminist performers influenced by Plath and
Sexton, has indelibly marked the now ubiqui-
tous "one-person show" with the sound and
feel of poetic confession. This style - which
we, following Peggy Phelan, might call the
oversound of confessionalism - has spilled
beyond the bounds of poetic and performa-
tive genres. It will only appear to those who
are willing to disregard the boundaries be-
tween archive and repertoire, autobiography
and confession, print and performance.
Notes

graphical monologue theater, the sliver-thin 2. See, e.g., Diana Taylor's The Archive and the
Repertoire , Daphne Brooks's Bodies in Dissent , Robin
divide between retelling and reliving, other-
Bernstein's Racial Innocence , and Rebecca Schneider's
ing and appropriating. Performing Remains.
3. For overviews of this history, see Hall; Wheeler,
ch. 5 (127-63); Middleton, chs. 2-3 (25-103).
The Confessional Performance Tradition
4. Bernstein's latest essay on the topic hints at an
encouraging shift: he briefly mentions "nonthematized
Charles Olson almost certainly was not
emotional dynamics" among the elements "intensified in
thinking of the confessional poets when performance" ("Hearing" 145).
he predicted that poetry and performance 5. Tellingly, the scholars most likely to escape these
would converge in a form of theater "once critical schemata focus on the visual aspects of poetry.

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 12 7.2 J Christopher Grobe 229
Barth,
For them, poetry's status as text and itsJohn. "Author's
status asNote (1968)" Lost in the Funhouse.
a visual
medium built with (yet distinct from) New York:
textAnchor, 1988. xi-xii. Print.
are inextri-
cable in the sense McLuhan intends. See Reed;
Bernstein, Charles,Drucker.
ed. Close Listening : Poetry and the
6. John Barth explored these issues in his
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