Nothing Fatal, a dissertation by Sarah Perrier, consists of two complementary pieces: a book length collection of poems and a scholarly essay. Both pieces are grounded in my interest in Romantic, feminist, and confessional poetic traditions at the start of the twenty-first century.
The epigraph to this collection, “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous,” is the bargain proposed by Frankenstein’s monster when he asks for a mate. Like the monster, the speaker in these poems hopes to strike a deal that will stave off loneliness, or at least be incentive to virtue. And just as the monster’s courting of his mate would surely be unconventional, the poems in Nothing Fatal also approach courtship unconventionally. These poems strive for the satisfaction that all creative work – including love – can provide. In these poems, conventional romantic roles (lover and beloved) bump up against and resist the roles provided for poets and readers by our literary Romantic legacy. The dissonance provided by these two partially compatible paradigms enables the poems in Nothing Fatal to grapple with questions of lyric sincerity.
Introducing the manuscript is “What Do They Teach You in That School, Anyhow?: Redefining the Confessional Paradigm in Contemporary American Poetry,” an essay that reviews the reception of confessional poetry, and concludes that no balanced critical discussion of it has offered a clear delineation of its constituent parts, its value and role for contemporary writers and readers, or its relationship to other poetic traditions that emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, connotative meanings of “confessional poetry,” which have been mostly pejorative, have dwarfed the denotative ones. This unbalanced treatment of confessional writing has had particular consequences for the work of women poets writing in the wake of second-wave feminism, and so I also suggest that our current discussions of a confessional school of poetry should acknowledge how women writers have tried to write around the narrowest conceptions of confessional poetry. Using the poetry of Lisa Lewis and Lynn Emanuel, I demonstrate two ways that contemporary women writers use, in order to subvert, traditional confessional paradigms.