Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United States

212 Pages·2016·1.16 MB·English

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Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and
Arts & Sciences
Dissertations
Spring 5-15-2016
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Julia Eva Leverone
Washington University in St. Louis
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Leverone, Julia Eva, "A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United
States" (2016). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 811.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/811
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WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

Program in Comparative Literature

Dissertation Examination Committee:
Ignacio Infante, Chair
Mary Jo Bang
Charles Hatfield
Tabea Linhard
Paul Michael Lützeler
Elzbieta Sklodowska

A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United States
by
Julia Leverone

A dissertation presented to the
Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
of Washington University in
partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy

May 2016
St. Louis, Missouri
© 2016, Julia Leverone
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii

Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1: Gelman, Urondo, Rich, and Sexton’s Entrances into the Confessional Mode in the
Early 1970s ................................................................................................................................... 17

Chapter 2: The Poet as Subject and Multitudinous Self: The “I” and the Audience .................... 59

Chapter 3: Politics by Other Means: The Indirect Poetics of Acknowledgment of Olga Orozco
and Elizabeth Bishop .................................................................................................................. 102

Chapter 4: Engaging the Other: Inclusivity and Expanded Scope in Adrienne Rich and
Francisco Urondo ........................................................................................................................ 144

Conclusion: Confession, Relation, and the Abyss ...................................................................... 184

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 190

Appendix: Primary Collections Discussed in the Dissertation ................................................... 205

ii
Acknowledgments

The completion of this dissertation was made especially possible with a Dissertation
Fellowship from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St.
Louis. I would like to give special thanks to Conor Burke, my family, my committee, and my
program chair, Professor Lynne Tatlock. Thanks are also due for the advice from my friends and
colleagues Catherine Williamson, Tana Juko, Dr. Jessica Hutchins, and Dr. Nicholas Tamarkin.
For their help in my archival research, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of
Texas, Austin. Finally, I would like to thank my undergraduate advisor, Professor José Antonio
Mazzotti, at Tufts University where the very beginnings of this project took form.

Julia Leverone

Washington University in St. Louis
May, 2016

`

iii
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

A Daring Voice: Confessional Poetry of the 1970s from Argentina and the United States

by

Julia Leverone

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

Washington University in St. Louis, 2016

Professor Ignacio Infante, Chair

Daring to confront difficult socio-political realities on the page, Argentine and United
States poets writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s strove against systems of silence.
Implementing direct and indirect poetics, each set of poets embodied, in differing and
overlapping ways, elements of the confessionalist mode, at once relational and witnessing. Their
poetry in collections from these particular years reflected the risk in their auto-positioning as
subjects within their poems and with complex relationships with their audience, and in their
usage of language, sometimes fragmented, protective, or urgent. They committed personal
experience to the page, and in conveying their experience through narrative and lyric techniques,
they opened their lines to provide access to masses of readers who had known the same difficult
truths and shared in those realities. These poets, here represented by Juan Gelman, Olga Orozco,
Francisco “Paco” Urondo, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich, conducted a risk-
taking socio-political poetics of relation demanding awareness and change.
In the United States, the experiences that Bishop, Rich, and Sexton wrote of in their work
of this historical moment pertained to socially taboo issues—mental illness, alcoholism, abuse,
marital strain, non-normative sexuality, and unequal gender treatment—an address of which that
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had been fought for in the protests and movements in the 1960s. In Argentina, Gelman, Orozco,
and Urondo were writing of the increasing harms being committed by state military forces
against citizens and that threatened their own lives as subversives working counter to the
interests of their national government. These years constituted a time of darkening hope, as
Argentina headed into successive military dictatorships. In response, Gelman and Urondo, along
with other authors, developed a more pointed, witnessing, unmistakable, yet emotional and
intimate style of writing that paralleled that of the United States poets. Differing from all four of
these poets slightly, I also observe the indirect poetics of acknowledgment of Bishop and
Orozco, who wrote concurrently with the others, yet communicated autobiographical and socio-
political truths through more buried and protective technical means.
This dissertation observes the literary commonalities and discrepancies in these national
poetries that upheld the dual ethic of art and socio-political witness. I world the terms
“confessional,” “conversational,” and “testimonial,” cross-applying them to the different national
poetics and showing how each implemented aspects of the modes. I set forth with the assumption
that confessionalism is relational and necessarily enacts vulnerability, skepticism, a critical
stance, and risk in its very practice of communicating experience both personal and shared.
The trajectories in American literature and through events affecting both nations as well
as the globe—including protest movements for identity rights—led these Argentine and United
States poets to a fascinatingly common space despite their very disparate stakes for writing,
which later in the decade would lead to exile and death in the country to the south. These brave
writers harnessed devastating fact and made socio-political art by representing multitudes of
others with a belief and insistence on the power of language, knowledge, and relation.

v
Introduction

The function of the act of confession in twentieth-century poetry minimally retains the
qualities of the Catholic confession and the tones of guilt and absolution this implies, and it does
not quite align with legal confession either, the product of interrogation. On a basic level, the
confessional act in confessional poetry does share a discursive nature with confession’s
traditional contexts, dependent upon the transfer of information about personal experience from
the confessant to the confessor. In this dissertation, I advance the critical discussion on
confessionalism as a mode of relation, primarily working forward from the contributions of Jo
Gill, Jeremy Tambling, Michel Foucault, Thomas Travisano, and Zachary Pickard. In
confessional poetry, I see the truth confessed as not only individual; when the poet conveys
personal experience, fraught and difficult to admit, he or she does so in part to evoke the memory
of experiences his or her readers possess themselves, to call that memory forth. I see
confessionalism as a testimony of the self—distinct from the testimonial mode, as I will show—
who is a representative for silenced others. Confessionalism is political, and seeks, upon
establishing connection, justice for the pervasiveness of harmful experiences that have largely
gone unacknowledged by a public, even one that contains multitudes of individuals who have
experienced those very harms.
The Argentine poets Juan Gelman, Olga Orozco, and Francisco “Paco” Urondo wrote
concurrently with U.S. American confessional poets Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and
Adrienne Rich, a starting point for my comparative justification. No Argentine poets have ever
been considered to have been writing within the confessionalist mode, though their literary
production has been described in ways that very closely approximate descriptions of
1
confessionalism, especially in Mario Benedetti’s critical production surrounding communicative
poetry. Thus, my analysis of these poets must be understood as speculative, though working
toward an understanding of the function of historicity and risk in poetics from the time period
extending from the late 1960s through the 1970s. The main objective of this dissertation is to
cross-apply analyses of these works as conversational, communicative, testimonial, and
confessional. I take up the existing analyses of confessional poetry that do prioritize its relational
scope and techniques and apply these aspects to the poetry of Gelman, Orozco, and Urondo. I
consider the work of the U.S. American poets—who are already acknowledged critically as
pertaining to confessionalism, and even in a socially representative or relational light—as
sharing the qualities of revolutionary and political poetry. The comparative practice I undertake
in this dissertation is described by Djelal Kadir’s term “to world,” that expansive-inclusive,
“highly repercussive and consequential verb” (6). I bring into comparison a heretofore never-
compared set of work by drawing connections among examples from Gelman, Orozco, Urondo,
Bishop, Rich, and Sexton—in other words, I “world” confessionalism by stretching the mode
across the equatorial divide and applying it to the poetry of these Argentines.1 As such, the
research in this dissertation contributes to transamerican studies.
As Kadir notes that “the invocation of something referred to as ‘world’ repeatedly
correlates and becomes coeval ideologically with cultural and political thresholds at traumatic
cusps of history,” the contemporary historical and literary moment balancing on the early 1970s,
I believe, held a dual aperture for Argentine and United States writing that gave fruition to

1. As “worlding” involves expanding an awareness of texts not frequently explored, part of the newness of
this dissertation’s analysis is that Urondo has not received much critical attention (in Spanish, let alone in English),
nor has his work appeared in translation into English except in Hernan Fontanet’s scholarship and in my own
translation endeavors outside of this dissertation.
2
parallel techniques that certainly qualify them as poetics of witness, but that can be further
refined as pertaining to confessionalism (5). Of course, each country’s writers formed part of
different, though not alien, historical, social, political, and literary trajectories and contexts that
influenced and placed pressures upon the writers from distinct angles in the late 1960s and
1970s. The greatest difference between the Argentine and United States cases was this: that the
pressure to not speak, to not dare, would culminate in mass execution in the former country, and
in social and emotional damage in the latter, which still ruined and took lives, but not
systematically. Regardless of the outcome or the degree of violence awaiting them—indeed,
against the murkiness of the possible threats—these writers took on the responsibility of
representation; their circumstances arrived them at a similar rhetorical and creative space, and in
this dissertation, I consider the techniques of that space as common to and affirmative of the
confessional mode. I see this set of poets as taking part in intimate autobiographical witness
within a poetics that also performed advocacy for socio-political change. In both national
contexts, the repressions these poets wrote against—the repression of bodies in Argentina, and
the repression of identities in the United States—were perpetuated by silence and ignorance.
Knowledge was a way out of this circumstance, and the confessional poets built their work
instructively so that readers might learn to be cognizant that the experiences they shared within a
given national context constituted injustices. Beyond this motive, the poets examined in this
dissertation wrote toward promoting the special capacity for poetry—and language, and
beauty—to convey truth and solidarity in its form.
Not all writers of this time and in these two countries chose to reflect the reality of their
socio-political circumstances in their writing, though there were open discussions of the need for
this ethic among the literary communities in each country (put forth by Rich in her prose, for
3