Blog

I’m just not that good at breathing in” - The Confessional Mode in Contemporary Art

I’ve always been fascinated by confessional poetry, with its raw and honest approach that celebrates deep explorations and questions about the self. Courtney Barnett is a songwriter who similarly places honesty at the forefront of her writing process. Her lyrics are deadpan, while the speakers in her songs feel close to the realities of her experiences. On her bandcamp, still accessible through the wayback machine, she describes her own writings as “startlingly honest slacker garage pop” and that’s a vein she continued to explore with a documentary featuring her audio diaries and an unprecedented honest look at the life of an artist. Her biography on that site touches on one element of confessional writing that pops up again and again: “In the hands of Courtney Barnett, fragments of everyday life become rich and riveting.”

This is something that almost defines confessional writing. One of the other modern titans of the confessional is Karl Ove Kneussgard, and his work does exactly the same thing. The first book in the My Struggle series, A Death in the Family, explores in great detail the travails that came from clearing his grandmother's house of the mess created by his alcoholic father, who recently died there. His writing style takes a fine tooth comb to every scene, animating the fragments of everyday life to create a thick and imagistic tapestry that really conveys the agony of the situation.

Robert Lowell is another expert at using a frank and detailed honesty to construct such images. One of the first poems of his I analysed, ‘Skunk Hour', still contains some of the starkest writing I’ve ever encountered:

One dark night
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
'Love, O careless Love....' I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here-

There’s something pretty scary about the way these images are rendered, with bodily metaphors running through the stanzas. “Hill’s skull” and “hull to hull” give these inanimate objects a sense of embodiment, free to participate in society, unlike the speaker who cannot connect with either thing or person. “Nobody’s here”.

Confessional poetry is some of the most powerful writing, both in the 20th Century and today, and artists like Barnett are expressing this style of literature in song.

Earliest Musical Memories -17/09/24

Recently my encyclopaedic spotify playlist reached ten years old and it got me thinking about the variety of musical influences that led me to this strange and novel research avenue. The first song I remember really being struck by was ‘Windmills of Your Mind’, written by Marilyn and Alan Bergman in the 60s and most famously performed by Noel Harrison. We would sing this song in singing class at my primary school, with Mrs. Marr on piano and all of us rendering in naive falsetto these strange, twisting, psychedelic lyrics. The song to me at the time seemed almost occult, not that I had that word for it, full of secret knowledge and a real sense of metaphysical grasping. In this song the line between imagination and reality is basically obliterated and the speaker falls into spiralling internal exploration, surfacing briefly to ask questions like “Is the sound of distant drumming/Just the fingers of your hand”. To this day I’ve not found my particular brand of neurodivergent daydream described so deftly and this song still hits different.

Then I remember the albums my dad had in his car, primarily The Marshall Mathers LP, Get Rich or Die Tryin, and Appetite for Destruction. I found the way Eminem made clear the difference between his musical persona and his real life embodiment interesting, and Guns n’ Roses made accessible some of the metal and rock I explored in my teenage years. Linkin Park and Marilyn Manson spoke to a fairly unpopular young teenager, before I moved onto the second wave of Grime popularity. The lyricism of Grime artists definitely defined my later teenage years, if you check out the playlist you’ll find a fairly large grime section for a good few years. I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by an eclectic range of music, with more retro stuff from my mum and a few friends. I found the Grateful Dead mostly on my own.

A few of their tracks must have come into my rotation around the time I was starting my undergraduate degree in 2014. They are some of the first tracks on the playlist, though few and far between, at the time I was exploring Shoegaze and I’d just discovered the deeply confessional lyrics of Elliot Smith. You’ll find a lot in my musical past, but it is mostly lyrical, I have a hard time connecting with strictly instrumental music. Hopefully what you’ll find is something new.