NaPoWriMo Day 13: Confessionals

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “The Truth the Dead Know” by Anne Sexton

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

What is something you cannot be honest about in your everyday life? What is something you want to tell people, but feel too much shame or embarrassment to say it? Freewrite for 8-10 minutes.

Poem: “The Truth the Dead Know” by Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

This full-throated poem is a confessional poem, or a poem from the confessional movement in poetry—a period in which certain poets, Anne Sexton included, wrote poems that were intensely personal and self-revelatory. Before this period, which peaked in the 1960s, poets certainly wrote poems about their personal experiences, but were perhaps more discreet and less intimate in their poetry. The confessional poets (who sometimes railed against the term) changed this: for them, all aspects of life were fodder for good poetry—and plenty of good poetry happened.

This poem was actually quite original for its time, particularly its dedication to Sexton’s parents, which poems had hardly done until then. But I love this poem for more than just its dedication. The poem has this tension between its form and its emotional intensity: I can feel the speaker’s pain pressing against its formal cage, resulting in rhymes that hardly register as rhymes, and in lines poignant as “I am tired of being brave.” Moreover, death is inescapable in this poem, and, unlike poets of the past whose language might romanticize or lyricize death, this poem is as stony and erect as a tombstone.

Despite its novel intensity, Sexton still makes plenty of formal craft decisions. The first stanza is steeped in Germanic words (“gone,” “church,” “grave,” “hearse,” etc.) which give the poem a harsh, if grounded, feeling. The final stanza is mostly monosyllabic, accentuating the few polysyllabic words (“without,” “refuse,” “knucklebone”) and their own sense of lack and death. And of course the poem’s rhyme scheme further structures the poem, with largely Germanic-root images emphasized in a poem that travels the graveyard.

Pay attention to those images and the emotional intensity of the work. Sexton never tells us the intensity of her feeling, but she doesn’t need to—the mood evoked from the poem’s deathly imagery allows the poem to explore the brutal finality of death.

There are plenty of poems in the recent canon that are far starker, more vulgar, more willing to engage with human nature’s worst impulses. But I like this poem as an example of the confessional because of its negotiation with its own restraints, and because the poem doesn’t have to name its own feelings to express them: I feel the speaker’s feelings through the poem’s journey; I end this poem just as windswept and barren as she is.

Prompt

Write a poem that confesses something. Don’t shy away from the intensity of your feelings.

If it helps, write your poem to a single person. Who do you want to confess something to? What do you not want them to hear? Tell them anyway.