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| But can you have your cake and eat it too? |
My recent article “Conceptual Confession: Asymmetrical Emotion in Writer-Reader Relations in Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge”, published in the Journal of Modern Literature (43: 4), discusses the connections between conceptual and confessional poetry in Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge (2013). The article is a part of my project Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry.
First, we need to understand what confessional and conceptual poetry are. The former refers to a type of poetry that emerged in the 1960s and that focuses on self-expression of what are often intimately personal feelings, while the latter refers to a more recent inclination in poetry to apply a concept to the making of the text, which has often meant the use of pre-existing text materials in writing.
While conceptual and confessional poetry have often been viewed as polar opposites, not least because the use of concepts and/or pre-existing text material seem to be far removed from authentic, personal expression, Low’s work demonstrates that they are not as far apart as many have assumed. Through examining emotions like boredom, fascination and shame and through engaging affective repetition and emotional excess, The Compleat Purge uses conceptual approaches to manipulate emotions in ways that are similar to confessional poetry’s reciprocity. I argue that Low’s “conceptual/confessional writing induces vulnerability even when it is not expected, asking readers to maintain what I call a ‘difficult relation’ to the text” (109).
As such, the article is the first I wrote for my project “Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry” (though not the first to be published from that project). One of the premises of the project is that recent American poetry offers various “difficult relations” for its readers, asking them to not only receive the emotions examined by the poems’ speakers, but also to maintain a flexible position where, as in Low’s work, for example giving in to emotional vulnerability needs to be counterbalanced with the kind of readerly superiority that experienced readers of poetry may be inclined to adopt as a blanket approach. Though one might assume that you cannot have your vulnerability and eat it too, Low’s work demonstrates that this is quite possible (122-123).
Work Cited:
Siltanen, Elina. “Conceptual Confession: Asymmetrical Emotion in Writer-Reader Relations in Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge”. Journal of Modern Literature vol. 43 no. 4, Summer 2020, pp. 108-126. DOI: 10.2979/jmodelite.43.4.07
If you are interested in this article, please log in to JSTOR through your university library to access it or contact me by email.