This Sunday night’s poet, Frank Bidart, grew up as a gay teen in the 1950s in Bakersfield, California; he didn’t come out until after his parents died. His poems are unusual, eschewing conventional verse, and even free verse, in favor of a prose-like style that depends on italics, CAPITALIZATION, and — like Emily Dickinson — idiosyncratic punctuation for its effect. His frequent topics are guilt and suffering, his poems are often written from a first-person perspective, his subjects range from the dancer Vaslav Nijinksy and the child-killer Herbert White to Heath Ledger’s Joker and the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini.
He had a tangled and fraught relationship with his mother, who divorced his father when Bidart was five. One of his best poems, “Confessional,” is based on his memories of her. Here’s the beginning of it (CW: (fictional) cruelty to animals):