by Writing Workshops Staff
A week ago
In a cramped therapy office in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1956, a young housewife named Anne Sexton sat across from her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, struggling to articulate the darkness that had nearly consumed her. "Write about it," he suggested, perhaps not knowing he was midwifing a literary revolution. Within a decade, Sexton, alongside Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and W.D. Snodgrass, would shatter poetry's polite veneer, transforming the most private anguish into public art. They called it confessional poetry, though the label hardly captured the meticulous craft required to alchemize raw pain into something transcendent.
Today, in an era when personal revelation has been commodified into bite-sized social media confessions, the distinction between authentic artistic vulnerability and mere exhibitionism has never been more crucial. Lauren Davis, author of the forthcoming collection The Nothing and a graduate of Bennington's prestigious MFA program, has spent years studying this delicate balance.
"Everyone has a story to tell," Davis observes, "but craft is the thing that carries that story to a wider audience." It's this fusion of raw truth and deliberate artistry that forms the heart of her upcoming confessional poetry workshop, where participants will create first drafts of at least six poems while exploring the editing techniques that elevated personal trauma into enduring literature.
The confessional poets made mistakes—some devastating—so that contemporary writers wouldn't have to. Davis has learned from both their triumphs and their failures, creating a methodology that honors the movement's revolutionary spirit while providing the structural safety nets its founders often lacked. In her workshop, the goal isn't therapy but transformation: taking the messiest, most uncomfortable truths and building around them what she calls "a door in which other people can walk into the poem."
An Interview with Lauren Davis
Lauren Davis is the author of the forthcoming short story collection The Nothing (YesYes Books), the poetry collection Home Beneath the Church (Fernwood Press), and several acclaimed chapbooks. A graduate of Bennington College's MFA program, she teaches confessional poetry workshops that students consistently describe as psychologically safe spaces for exploring difficult truths. We spoke with her about the delicate balance between vulnerability and craft, and what the confessional movement can teach contemporary writers.
Writing Workshops: The confessional movement was born from controversy in the 1950s and 60s, yet your former students describe feeling open, tender, gentle, and supported in your workshops. How do you create psychological safety while simultaneously encouraging writers to explore the kinds of raw, uncomfortable truths that made readers uncomfortable sixty years ago? What's the difference between confession and exhibitionism in poetry?
Lauren Davis: I feel very grateful to hear that feedback. I strive to create a safe space for writers in my workshops, with the understanding that there is always room for me to grow in this area, and that sometimes I cannot control things, I can only respond. My policies differ a little whether a workshop is generative or feedback based. I use a slightly altered version of The Amherst Writers and Artists Method, which is a method that was developed with the idea that everyone is a writer, and everyone deserves a safe environment in which to experiment.
One of the policies that I never waver on, no matter what the format of the workshop is, is that I never pressure someone to share their work, and I ask others not to pressure each other, too. Participants will never be asked directly by me to read what they've written. Everyone is completely welcome to sit silently in the workshop and not share one word of their work.
We also respond to each other's work as if it is fiction, which will admittedly be a hard policy to get across in a confessional poetry workshop, so that will be more of an aim. We'll explore emotional truth versus factual truth, as well as the difference between the speaker and the poet.
Additionally, we keep each other's work confidential. Anything shared in the workshop is meant to stay in the workshop. The workshop is recorded for those who may miss it or want to review it, but the recording eventually expires, and it cannot be downloaded.
The original founders of the confessional movement made mistakes, and they certainly were not without faults. There is no doubt about that. Robert Lowell devastated some people with his writing. Snodgrass allowed success to become a block, then he nearly ruined his career by writing a book in the voice of Nazis. Plath took poems out of the American edition of her first poetry book (which had first been published in the UK) because they flirted with plagiarism. In many ways, these poets lived at the extreme ends of personality. The line between confessionalism and exhibitionism was blurred from the very start, both in these poets' lives and their art. They were creating something new, and when we are creating something new, we often take it to its very edge, and then a little further still. But they made mistakes so that we don't have to. We can learn from what they did. They were all geniuses, and they were all flawed.
Anne Sexton, on the other hand, lived a very destructive life, destructive to herself and to others. To call her actions "mistakes" would be an injustice to those she hurt. But I think her life does show that sometimes the poetry has to be separated from the biography of the poet. Sexton is the poet who showed me, when I was a teenager, what contemporary poetry could be. When I read her for the first time, I realized that confessional poetry was what I had been looking for. As a child, I had an intuition that it was out there, and I had finally found it.
Writing Workshops: Anne Sexton famously said her poetry was "a form of therapy," yet she also crafted it with meticulous attention to form and language. As someone who's both written confessional work and studied at Bennington's MFA program, how do you teach students to balance raw emotional truth with the demands of craft? Where does catharsis end and artistry begin?
Lauren Davis: I am leery of framing poetry as therapy like Sexton did. We have to remember that Sexton committed suicide, despite publishing seven poetry books before her death. There are plenty of peer reviewed studies that say that writing poetry can be healing, but that clearly has limits.
I like to think of craft as if I am building and inhabiting a house. I gather raw materials, and I am deliberate with those materials. I create a foundation. I carefully choose the layout. After the house is built, I am again intentional, but this time about smaller details like the wall color and where to hang the family portrait.
In the same way, I have to be very deliberate when I build a poem. I have the raw materials for the poem—the general story, maybe a first line that came to me, perhaps a very messy first draft. I take those raw materials, and I figure out the foundation and the layout, then I decide on those smaller details with care.
There is, without a doubt, power in writing something that comes straight from the gut. But in order for there to be a door in which other people can walk into the poem, there needs to be deliberate craft choices. The door, in fact, has to be built in the first place.
Writing Workshops: The confessional poets wrote in an era before social media, before our current culture of constant self-revelation and oversharing. What makes confessional poetry still relevant, and still radical, in 2025? What distinguishes the confessional poem from a Twitter thread or Instagram caption about personal trauma?
Lauren Davis: I think it, again, has to do with craft. Every once in a while, a writer will have a poem that seemingly comes to them out of thin air, complete and robust and needing very little revision, if any. Most of the time, though, poets have to sweat and labor to get each word and each line break to work in service of the greater whole.
Everyone, absolutely everyone, has a story to tell. But craft is the thing that carries that story to a wider audience.
What the confessional poets did that was different from what came before, is that they were specific about the personal in their poetry. They didn't just create a poem about a mood, using metaphor to write around it. They looked for the roots of the mood, as well as the particulars of that moment, of the event that gave it birth. They were masters of detail as well as simile. If we can learn anything from them, it is that no matter what our subject matter is, if we write the poem well enough, the poem will live outside of us and beyond us.
