Return to RobinFrederick.com

* - * - * - * - * - * - * - * - *

STRATEGY FOR THE DAY: Be a shooting star

I'm reading the biography of poet Anne Sexton and, as I get deeper into it, a few thoughts about Nick Drake's lyrics have occurred to me. I once said to Iain Cameron that I thought Nick was a "confessional" writer but I wasn't clear at the time just what that meant, only that he struck me that way. In reading about Anne Sexton, I've learned much more about this specific style of writing. According to Sexton's biographer: Confessional poetry takes an emotionally direct approach to autobiographical material that the writer urgently needs to express.

The first poem of this genre was "Heart's Needle" by W.D. Snodgrass - a work in which he describes his relationship with his three-year-old daughter after he and his wife divorce. He takes her to the zoo, they plant a garden, he learns to cook so he can fix her supper. The situations are simple, domestic and were considered at the time to be "unpoetic" themes. But the poem is riveting because it is so revealing and honest. We feel what the writer is feeling and we become aware of those feelings in ourselves - feelings of loss, of being exiled from love, and the desperate need to feel connected once again. There is no attempt to hide behind a mask; the poem - and the poet - are utterly frank and open. It is a tremendously vulnerable stance because not only does the poet present his poem for judgement, but his emotional self as well.

"Heart's Needle" had a profound impact on Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton and, by extension, Sylvia Plath. These are the three pioneers of confessional poetry. In the wrong hands this kind of thing often fails because it is simply too personal to be of interest to anyone else. But these three writers, and others since, used their own lives to illuminate the dark corners in all of ours.

In her poetry, Sexton describes her bouts with depression, her troubled relationship with her mother, and her feelings about her own children and motherhood but she does it with stunning language, images that shake your shoulders, metaphors that get behind your eyelids.

I have gone out, a possessed witch
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind

When I look at some of Nick Drake's lyrics, particularly on the Pink Moon album, I seem to hear echoes of the confessional poets. Nick studied literature including, I would guess, contemporary poets, although I don't know if he read these writers in particular or if he was influenced by them.

Pink Moon is certainly the most personal and direct of his albums, although there are individual songs, like FLY, that prefigure the Pink Moon album. One of the strongest examples of a confessional lyric is PARASITE. In fact, I chose the Anne Sexton quote above (from HER KIND, one of Sexton's best known poems) because PARASITE parallels it so closely.

Lifting the mask from a local clown
Feeling down like him
Seeing the light in the station bar
And travelling far in sin...

And take a look you may see me on the ground
For I am the parasite of this town
And take a look you may see me in the dirt
For I am the parasite who hangs from your skirt.

The images of the mythical outsider, despised and deformed, are common to both. The confession of weakness and vulnerability ("For I am the parasite who hangs from your skirt.") is echoed in many of Sexton's poems in which she confesses to feeling inadequate as both a mother and a daughter.

I think PARASITE comes closer than any other song to describing how Nick saw himself. It is a piece of self-analysis in which he is, quite literally, "lifting the mask".

Continued... Nick Drake & The Confessional Poets: Part II

Copyright 2002 Robin Frederick. All rights reserved.