Experimental confessionalism : the personal turn in American post-conceptual poetry

Language poetry and conceptual poetry have both been enormously important movements in the development of contemporary experimental American poetry. They continue to be influential, however they are now both historical moments. This has led to some contemporary poets positioning themselves as post-language or post-conceptual. Here I want to focus on a particular aspect of post-conceptual poetry: the return to the personal and the embrace of a new kind of confessionalism. This seems a particularly teasing development because contemporary experimental poetry has so often been couched in terms of a rejection of the direct personal expression that characterised the lyric. However, this new confessionalism is not a return to the style of Plath, Berryman, Sexton and Lowell, though it inevitably shows some continuity with it. It is an experimental confessionalism: one that embraces but also transfigures the genre's previous incarnations. It adopts the confessional as a mode but at the same time questions its claims to authenticity.