“What must not be seized”: Snodgrass’ (In)Conveniently Selected Memories and Unapologetic Self in “Heart’s Needle”
| Autoři | |
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| Rok publikování | 2025 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | The late 50s and early 60s in the United States witnessed the emergence of an unprecedentedly emotive and visceral style of poetry that would not only “make it new” in Ezra Pound’s ever-pertinent words, but at last allow its practitioners, however discontented with the label “confessional,” to articulate their most personal experiences, addressing the topics ranging from divorce and family separation, sexuality to mental health as well as suicide and alcoholism. W.D. Snodgrass’ 1959 poetry collection Heart’s Needle is often credited as signaling the origins of the “tradition,” with its titular poem being dedicated to his daughter whose divorce-inflicted loss is anatomized in the work. With the ten-section “Heart’s Needle” under scrutiny and Jerome Bruner’s ideas of “self-making narratives” and the process of “public self-telling” serving as a backbone of the analysis, this paper focuses on the autobiographical elements as well as specific memories in the poem and aims to demonstrate that it is not a result of a mere “exploitation” of traumatic experience for the literary output or poetic content, but is indeed a carefully crafted narrative through which Snodgrass, as a poet, reconstructs and reasserts himself as a father. |
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