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"I’m just not that good at breathing in” - The Confessional Mode and Courtney Barnett

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 gave us some of the most talented writers of the 20th century and today artists like Barnett help carry on this intimate and exciting lyrical mode.