I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a loose lasso, one which may rope certain poems by one poet and not others.

People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?"

In my own writing, I've mostly abandoned end-rhyme, but wordplay is still a huge part of my process.

Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.

We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.

If I begin a poem, "I am a donkey," reason kicks in and says, "She is taking on the persona of a donkey." But if I write, "I have taken so many drugs I can't see my feet," the tendency is to take that as a confession on the part of the poet. Maybe that doesn't matter. I'd almost prefer for it to be the other way round.

I don't think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans.