Publication details
Snodgrass’ (In-)conveniently selected memories : Reclaiming parental identity in “Heart’s Needle”
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | The Explicator |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | Odkaz na stránku článku na platformě Taylor & Francis |
| Doi | https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2025.2533499 |
| Keywords | Confessional poetry; W. D. Snodgrass; Heart's Needle; autobiographical writing; memory |
| Description | The late 50s and early 60s in the United States witnessed the emergence of an unprecedentedly emotive and visceral style of poetry which enabled its practitioners, however discontented with the label “confessional,” to articulate their most personal experiences, addressing topics ranging from divorce family separation and sexuality to mental health, 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 Cynthia, whose divorce-inflicted loss is anatomized in the work. With the ten-section titular poem “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, highlighting the “re-pairing” feature of the lyric as well as tracing the poetic narrative and its crafting to argue that and demonstrate how Snodgrass, as a poet, reconstructs and reasserts himself as a father. |
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