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“Bad confessional poetry has always raised my hackles, because it goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.” —Rita Dove, The Paris Review

“Western man has become a confessing animal.” —Michel Foucault

Is Confessional Poetry Bad?

I recently came across an age-old argument resurrected: Poets should not use the word “I”. This argument insists that poetry that draws on personal experience is in some way cheaper, easier, and more juvenile. As one poet on social media put it, “For beginning poets, everything is personal.”

I’ll admit: I’m biased. My books of poetry are deeply personal. Numinous Stones, my latest chapbook, was a spiral out of grief through verse. Every line I write is a reference to something I love or something that’s happened to me. Like most writers, I started out in high school writing bad teenage emo poetry, and I never thought that one day, I’d share those words with the world, nevertheless have people relate to my poetry and tell me that they love it.

My very first ever published poem was deeply personal. I wrote it about my troubled relationship with my brother. After “For Lonnie” was published, several people reached out to me to thank me because they also had fraught brother relationships or had lost a brother and were grieving. The personal has been the beating heart of my poetry since the beginning.

So, as someone who looks at everything as personal (In fact, this is the topic of my next poetry book. I am, after all, a cancer.), I’ve always found this anti-personal trend to be a personal attack. 🙂 

But really, it’s also oblivious to the current reality of popular contemporary poetry. The truth is, readers love a good confession. Who wouldn’t? If someone says to you, “let me tell you a secret”, all of a sudden, you’re listening. The person who is actively seeking out a book of poetry to read in today’s book climate is someone who wants to read a personal story. They want to FEEL—and poetry that is impersonal is often divorced from emotion.

This is the topic of my new poetry workshop taking place in April for National Poetry Month.

Confessional Poetry
DATE: 4 Weeks Starting April 7th, 2025
TIME: Asynchronous, Self-Paced via Writing Workshops
Price: $299
Where does the line between poet and poem blur? The poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, and Elizabeth Bishop in the 60s, 70s, and 80s became iconic for its controversial use of the “confessional voice.” This genre has arguably shaped contemporary poetry today. In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to write a confessional poem, but also, how poets can harness personal experience to reach an ideal reader. This workshop juxtaposes classical confessional poetry with contemporary poets who have harnessed the power of trauma to make the private public. Break down barriers, write with authenticity, and embrace the catharsis of confession. 

Confessional poetry is the foundational bedrock of today’s contemporary popular poetry.

As of today, the bestseller lists for poetry are peppered with the personal. In January 2025, the American Booksellers Association came out with its list of poetry bestsellers. On it were some of the heavy hitters of popular poetry: Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey (10th Anniversary Collectors Edition), an anthology of poems inspired by music’s most confessional writer, Ty (Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift), A Bit Much by Lyndsay Rush, which is literally about being too much (and the humor of the feminine experience), Amanda Lovelace’s 10th instapoetry collection, she followed the moon back to herself, Mosab Abu Toha’s poems about life in Gaza, and Water, Water by Billy Collins, about “the beauties and ironies of everyday experience.” Pretty much the only books on this list that aren’t “personal” or identity-focused are the books that are about nature by Mary Oliver and Ada Limón (You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World is actually about humanity’s relationship to the natural world.)

Today’s contemporary poetry is one of politics and the personal. While poetry as a field is still largely dominated by white cis-gendered straight men, it’s easy to argue that the works that gain the most traction among awards and readers today are far more diverse than in the 1960s when confessional poetry began. What started as a movement of the personal, the revelation of inner worlds, imperfection, and the gritty truths of the body, grew into an examination of personal identity.

What conservatives would angrily call “woke propaganda” pretty much fills the poetry world today. The 2024 National Book Award for Poetry, for example, contains books about the personal experience of current events, from the destruction of Palestine to blackness to the immigrant experience to Indigenous identity.

Today’s contemporary poem on the personal is, as Regan Good says, “a kind of poem that is self-mocking and dead serious, metaphysical and secular. These are not poems of “self-expression” or personal epiphanic resolution. Rather they articulate moments of primary existence: a graph of language, time, and identity such that the resulting artifact–the poem–is indivisible. The best confessional poetry uses detail from life to position the poem’s speaker in psychic moments from which truths—hilarious, grave, desperate, terrifying, fraudulent—are spoken” (“Essay on Confessional Poetry; My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did” in Fence)

Confessional poetry has two purposes: It allows us to share a secret with the reader and invite them into our world, but it also allows for a personal journey. It makes writing not about making money or conforming to some arbitrary idea of what art is, but about writing as catharsis.

“Only by ruthless scrutiny of personal weaknesses–and the relinquishing of one’s reason to associative thinking—are clear, moving, necessarily fleeting portraits of the self possible.” Regan Good (“Essay on Confessional Poetry; My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did” in Fence)

It strikes me as odd, to say the least, that there are poets and educators still counseling poets against using the “I” in poetry, given how wildly popular and successful personal and identity-based poetry is today.

“All writing is personal, as Yeats believed, insofar as it projects out of your own being, often out of the tragedy of your own life. But it is also impersonal too. Aphantasmagoria takes over. The self is an other. The writer is an explorer fording through unmapped terrain, through the deep rivers of language.” —Edward Hirsch, Chicago Review, 1995

How Did We Get Here? The Women of Confessional Poetry

According to Christopher Grobe, American poetry turned confessional in April 1959. At this time, Anne Sexton was rising to fame, W.D. Snodgrass had published Heart’s Needle, about his divorce and estrangement from his daughter, and Robert Lowell published Life Studies, a memoir in verse about mental illness.

Confessional poetry represented a turn in how poets approached the poem. The “confession” aspect of the term suggests spirituality: The image of someone confessing their sins behind a curtain to a priest. Poetry before this period was often narrative—great epics telling of history or romantic love poems that could apply to anyone. The confessional poets changed the poetry world because they wrote about difficult, messy, and often uncomfortable topics.

I suspect the fact that many women poets are writing in the confessional mode is part of why it’s seen as so distasteful. If we look at the two major confessional poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, both are considered poor representations of the perfect, prim, well-behaved woman. Both wrote about mental health in unflinching, gendered ways, which made society uncomfortable. Both made choices in life that society did not agree with.

As Diane Middlebrook puts it in the essay “What Was Confessional Poetry?”, this early confessional poetry “was thoroughly middle-class postwar art—produced by [a small number of] WASP writers.” But its impact was huge.

Women confessionalists also came to fame alongside another movement that has been discussed as adjacent to confessional poetry: the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Poets like Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lorde formed an alternative feminist poetry that pushed back against the expectations of black and, in Lorde’s case, queer women.

These poets made space for the radical femme and queer poets of the ‘80s and ‘90s. As Eileen Myles puts it, “I remember when I first came around the poetry project I was informed by some of the older poets that personal poems were over. I guess it depended on who was a person and whether they had been one yet. I was willing to suppress it for a while” (Poetry in the 80s). This time period saw the dawn of the activist poem, as Myles notes, “Poetry in the eighties could function as litanized activism, you could really stare at the streets in your work, perform them, the times with all their nooks and crannies and contradiction, broken mirrors were an invitation to poetic excess. All these lives living next to each other was also kind of like the web before anyone had it.”

The internet was the next boon for personal poetry. It removed the barriers to publishing so that anyone could put their poems online, and today, Instapoetry is just one iteration of that practice of skirting the poetry gatekeeper.

Today’s most popular poets are often women, and they write poetry for women. Yet even young women have ingested and regurgitated the idea that this is in some way bad because it is accessible. As one young woman writes in a college newspaper of Rupi Kaur, “Kaur’s work allows little room for analysis because of its reliance on aphorisms and other tricks that are meant to make poetry sound ‘deep’” (Rupi Kaur Is Killing Poetry, Washington Square News, NYU’s Independent Student Newspaper, 2019.) The aphorism, by the way, has a deep history in ancient poetry; the word goes back to the Greek gnomic poem, which was a way of putting sayings into poetry in order to remember them for oration.

What troubles me about the argument that personal poetry is in some way bad is that this argument is inherently harmful. It says: Writing about yourself is cringe. No one cares. No one wants to hear about your feelings. Your experience doesn’t matter, even if you haven’t seen it represented in poetry before.

It’s hard not to see this de-legitimization of the personal for what it often becomes: a de-legitimization of marginalized voices. These kinds of arguments rarely have substance behind them—instead, they rely on a belief that older is better, formal is better. Let’s be honest, it’s often also: Whiter is better. Cis is better. Straight is better.

It’s not that confessional poetry has no craft; it’s that we were never given the tools to analyze craft that isn’t rooted in authoritarianism.

The Personal Is Where Connection Happens

As a freelance editor and poetry teacher, one goal I have in working with writers is to bring out the emotion in their work. Poetry can be for fun; it can be for experimentation; it can be simply pretty and celebrate the joy of words; but very memorable poetry always has a deep current of emotion. The reason we memorize, say, Shakespeare’s sonnets, is that we love them, and they make us feel. We read to feel.

It’s easy to get caught up in the object of the poem and forget its role is to connect with the reader. Leonard Cohen said, “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” Similarly, Muriel Rukeyser said, “Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry.”

What makes up experience is emotion. We define who we are by the experiences we’ve had, and those are a set of memories tied together by certain emotions. The first time you fell in love. The first time you were hurt by someone. Your most successful career moment. The first poem you ever wrote. What comes first is emotion.

One argument is that confessional poetry “privileges the particular” and that good poetry should always be “universal.” But this forgets two important points:

1. Highly specific and detailed personal poetry can still speak to a reader and, in fact, may speak to them more.

There’s an exercise I do with my poetry class where I ask them to include the five senses in their poems. I ask them to describe a place that matters to them using these five senses. One poet described a very specific pattern of tile from their childhood bathroom. What surprised us all was that another poet in the class remembered the exact tile and found it relatable. For the rest of us, it was just one of those beautiful details that helps ground a poem.

2. Not every experience is universal.

We must take care when we say that poetry should be universal. The reality is that for most poets, the poetry celebrated by the Academy of the poetry canon was not universal. It represented a privileged, white, cis, het, straight, male experience. The point of personal poetry is to celebrate the non-universal because that which is universal can also be problematic.

It was this discussion of the universal vs. the specific in my poetry workshops that led me to create a confessional poetry workshop. I want to celebrate the form and everything it allows for. I’m thrilled that we are seeing a death of poetry defined as “good” because it is traditional. Instead, we can let people love what they love.

How to Write Confessional Poetry: A Writing Prompt about the Personal

Here’s a writing prompt to try out writing in the confessional mode. Write a poem about two juxtaposing life experiences. For example, you might choose a positive experience and a negative experience. Describe how you felt in those moments. How would you describe your emotions? What might be a fitting metaphor that could apply to both situations?

Upcoming Workshops from Your Host with the Most Writing Prompts, Holly Lyn Walrath

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