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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'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't, I'd say, esp in my experiences of slam community.
btw, I'm fully prepared for the answer to that question to be something like, "I don't think there's much relation there." there may not be. I'm just like quarantined and I reread Life Studies yesterday and I grew up with Andrea Gibson, u know? just working thru it all~~
