Thread by @supermattachine, hi guys!! you had really interesting answers yesterday to my question about [...]

Stephen Ira

supermattachine

hi guys!! you had really interesting answers yesterday to my question about the confessional. I have another, adjacent question! I feel like as a young poet, esp as a young queer&trans poet, contemporary poetry encouraged me to disclose and rehearse my traumas frequently.

I first learned to do this thru listening to recordings of popular slam poets & competing in youth slams. later, in college, I realized that cis poets could take me seriously if I appeared to be writing from a source of enormous transsexual trauma (and of course, I was).

but as time when on, I realized I had more to talk about than the horror of what had happened to me, and was displeased to find that if I wanted anyone to listen, I was trapped in the confessional mode.

I think this is a pretty common experience and I& #39;d like to know how you think that experience relates to the more buttoned up, WASP-y, wealthy, midcentury confessionalism we were talking about yesterday.

feels important for context to say that I /do/ come from a WASP-y wealthy background, but a lot of the youth poets I was around who shared this experience w me did not! most didn& #39;t, I& #39;d say, esp in my experiences of slam community.

btw, I& #39;m fully prepared for the answer to that question to be something like, "I don& #39;t think there& #39;s much relation there." there may not be. I& #39;m just like quarantined and I reread Life Studies yesterday and I grew up with Andrea Gibson, u know? just working thru it all~~

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