Over at Jacket, Jason Morris discusses some of my favorite contemporary poets. Joe Massey, one of them, weighs in. Here's a nugget of the article:
A lot of the best poetry in which there seems to be a drive toward a kind of sincerity also seems intelligently aware it is always already arriving too late. It is a kind of sincerity putting on its hat as it runs out the door: an “impotential” sincerity — a sincerity cognizant of its own “teleological ineffectiveness” — a modal sincerity — a sincerity “too late” to have effected (itself). Like a deer in the headlights, it stands dumbstruck at the onrush of these threats, even while casting an honest glance into the rearview mirror, looking back to see whether or not the inevitable crash has already occurred.
January 20, 2008
The New Sincerity: Not the same as the old boss.
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3 comments:
i've always said: nowadays it is impossible not to be both ironic & sincere simultaneously all the time.
I think people are too self-conscious about the sincerity/irony issue. A great poem will remain great, despite its overriding tone. It is, perhaps, more difficult to write a great sincere poem (though that's becoming debatable, with the sheer amount of lazy irony out there). Still, I think people should worry less about popular trends and write the poems they're meant to write.
There's definitely truth in what Morris says, because any combination of sincerity and irony in a poem will play off the inherent tensions between the two ideas. You could insert any two competing impulses, though, and achieve the same tonal matrix. It's less a necessity than a natural effect, and maybe another formula for easy complexity that will soon wear as thin as any other such formulas.
New sincerity isn't (sincere, that is, or new). Reactions to the first-person confessional lyric (f.p.c.l.) will either fade away as a momentary blip, or serve as a kind of antithesis whose ultimate value is only realized in an emergent synthesis. All poetry is a kind of writing that is keenly aware of itself, as if listening from line to line -- whether that is cognizant of ineffectiveness or something else, it remains a kind of fundamental definition from which poetry is unlikely to ever diverge.
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