Confessional poetry is not my subject here, and is not at all so simple a subject that it can be dealt with quickly. Yet a few remarks are called for. Poems of the confessional school--whose "I" voices are the authors' voices and so intended, and whose texts are so often aggrieved and aggressive, frantic and self-involved--seem to me more catharsis than art, more memoir than poem. I turn from them having learned a little about the authors perhaps, but nothing at all about the world beyond personal frenzy, the huge energies it can produce, the darkness it can long for, the anguish and anger that can pour forth from it, like rain. In a hundred years I suspect such poems will be seen as a derivative of therapy, that exercise in which the "I" is encouraged to become, as once indeed in infancy it felt itself to be, the center of the world.
And yet such poems can and often do demonstrate enormous skill, and within their frantic pages human suffering and human courage is plain to see. I think it quite possible that their fabric of rent privacy, of pain and frustration, is one of the elements that played an important role in preparing the climate in which the more recent school of poetry has blossomed, producing poems in which private life, personal experience is used by persons from many ethnic or cultural backgrounds. But, in these cases the stories are told for a clear purpose--to reveal something of a previously ignored part of humanity, to reveal injustice, to inform and thus move, to excite change. In such poems the subject is never the poet only, or the poet's life only; rather the personal experience is presented as part of history, and part of the present--the present that could bend like hot glass, should the human heart at last listen--should the human reader enter the poem and understand, through the experience of the poem, what it has not understood before. The work of art is, as we know, available to all--to the well and to the ill. Paintings by psychotic patients, with their terrible dance upon the canvas, are often enough stunning. But it takes health--and health takes release from the crushing fist of self-concern--for poems to escape their own creator and genesis and belong to the world of shining and useful things.
--Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures