Confession, Protest, and Apocalypse

Abstract

Abstract Ruth Witt-Diamant’s San Francisco Poetry Center fostered two often-opposed forms of the 1960s reading, the confessional and the anti-war protest, both suffused with a sense of imminent apocalypse. Allen Ginsberg first performed ‘Howl’ as naked self-revelation, but in performances at the Center it became a means to shame his audience for listening to him—a manoeuvre of reverse humiliation adopted from Robert Duncan’s Faust Foutu. Hearing Ginsberg while preparing his own reading at the Poetry Center in 1957, Robert Lowell recognized in the sharing of shame a new possibility for his readings, and the theatre of discomfort called ‘confessional poetry’ was born. But while Duncan and Denise Levertov scorned the emotiveness of confessional, they shared its apocalyptic sense of imminent judgement. Like Ginsberg’s early mentor Kenneth Rexroth, an advisor to the Poetry Center, Levertov could not resist using confessional’s shame-transferring techniques to expose the workings of the American war machine at every level, including herself reading.