The Massachusetts Poetry Festival 2017

“The word doesn’t mean anything,” John Berryman famously ranted about the descriptor “confessional poetry.” Using poems they admire and poems of their own, panelists discuss what “confessional poetry” has meant since 1959 and how they themselves implement craft to revise, reshape, adopt, and examine it. Does confession require autobiographical faithfulness? How can tools like metaphor, white space, humor, form, and rhythm reveal or obscure individual experiences? Do we have expectations and biases that affect who we expect to confess, and what we expect them to dish about? Can poetry really be “confessional” at all? What does it mean both to believe that “the personal is the political” and to interrogate whether "expression" and "inner lives" are even the subjects of poetry? The panelists bring a wide range of backgrounds and experiences to these questions and to crafting poetry that contends with them.