A Quote by Cate Marvin

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.

Cate Marvin

Quote Topics

Autobiographical Dramatic Find Mind Mode Monologue More Much Poems Poetry Poetry Is Slippery Than

Quote Author

Cate Marvin
American - Poet
Born: 1969

As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet.

Matthea Harvey

As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments.

David Shields

One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing.

Kiese Laymon

I hate the confessional. I love leaving the confessional. I hate going to the confessional. I would be a mess without it.

Lino Rulli

I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them - most poets straddle more than one school.

Denise Duhamel

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.

John Darnielle

Confessionalism relates to writers of color. I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers.

Shane McCrae

I get told I'm a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word "confessional". I don't like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don't want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

Beth Orton

It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional.

Thomas Pynchon

Poetry is difficult, I mean interesting poetry, not confessional babble or emotive propaganda. Reading a new poet is discovering an entire world, what Stevens called a 'mundo' and it takes a lot of time to orientate oneself in such a world. What we have to learn to do then, as teachers and militants of a poetic insurgency, is to encourage people to learn to love the difficulty of poetry. I simply do not understand much of the poetry that I love.

Simon Critchley

Fifth Harmony as a group represents more confidence, more girl power, more unity. They're anthems, as opposed to confessional songwriting about one person's life when there are five individual women.

Camila Cabello

I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

Anne Lamott

I think now there's much more of a confessional culture. That's not my bag. I come from a slightly older school of thought: 'give 'em nothin.' You don't plead guilty.

Ben Mendelsohn

"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion.

Matthea Harvey

Some of my favorite poems are "confessional" poems written in the voices of aliens ("Southbound on the Freeway" by May Swenson" and "Report from the Surface" by Anthony McCann), sheep ("Snow Line" by John Berryman) or a yak ("The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia" by Oni Buchanan).

Matthea Harvey

I didn't really like confessional poetry or things. They seemed sort of dated to me, or just corny.