Response to "No Room in the Booth"

I am going to be less formal with this piece, as it struck a particularly out-of-tune chord with me.

From Kathleen Osip's "No Room in the Booth: An Appreciation of Confessional Poetry":

"It is important that the formal rigor of the confessional poets take its rightful place beside their absorbing narratives because they sometimes seem to have opened the floodgates of self-indulgence in American poetry. They may be seen as using the pram containing the infant Contemporary American Poetry down the slippery slope leading to what Harold Bloom scornfully calls the School of Resentment, whose denizens elevate a content of victimization and social protest above a poetics of the sublime that will move and enlighten and individual reader."

I could not agree more, and to be honest I was literally overwhelmed with gratitude at having the privilege to read these wise words. The floodgates have yet to be closed, but rather they are being dismantled, the waters fed, by none other than my own generation. If the post-Confessionals laid the groundwork for this self-indulgent attitude towards the natural art, then my generation has certainly secured rights to the rest of the territory. I would even go so far as to say they have zoned the area residentially, and are in Phase Three of its development.

More from Osip:

"In circles that assume (emphasis added) a love of and knowledge of and respect for the art of poetry, the adjective 'confessional' is quite likely to be an automatic pejorative; shorthand for poems written out of self-pity with little or no concern for language, form, or aesthetic felicity."

Let us therefore make a careful distinction: the original Confessionals did something unprecedented. They synthesized the cult of personality with the original American poetic styles, and did so at the most opportune time.

It is up to the later generations to either venerate or tear down this ideal.