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The Genius of the Medium: Identity and Alterity in Poetic Practice | 32 Poems Magazine

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by Bruce Bond When I was an undergraduate at Pomona College in the mid-seventies, the question of the authority of personal narrative in poetry versus a less “I-centered” approach was still a matter of some controversy. On the one hand, Sylvia Plath was hugely popular, as was Allen Ginsberg, and on the other hand, the label “confessional” began to be deployed as pejorative, as if to suggest some mode of self-indulgence that the newly sophisticated might dismiss as hackneyed and adolescent. The objectivists still had a small following, as did those of a later day modernist sentiment who longed to “escape the personality” in their work in ways advocated by T.S. Eliot. For many, Eliot became the epitome of a repressed individual with stodgy views about traditional values, and it took me years to figure out that the gist of Eliot’s argument in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was hardly controversial—it seems obvious to me now that there is a difference between emotion as mediated t

by Bruce Bond When I was an undergraduate at Pomona College in the mid-seventies, the question of the authority of personal narrative in poetry versus a less “I-centered” approach was still a matter of some controversy. On the one hand, Sylvia Plath was hugely popular, as was Allen Ginsberg, and on the other hand, the label “confessional” began to be deployed as pejorative, as if to suggest some mode of self-indulgence that the newly sophisticated might dismiss as hackneyed and adolescent. The objectivists still had a small following, as did those of a later day modernist sentiment who longed

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