Even if we don’t aim for poems to “mean” they still will reflect or represent something, will be something collected and curated or created. Their subtext will agree with something out there or refute something. Add to a pile of sad-sod poems likely. But if one is lucky, one is productive throughout one’s life and a phrase or effect on another might outlast us.
We can we real or give an impressive fictional show. It doesn’t matter which in the end since we all meet the same ultimate end and may do good or bad outcomes from either choice. Either may be done well or poorly or be a wash.
Yet there’s a buzz that comes from being close to one’s own power generator, navigating with the gut to somewhere unknown that draws, from being lit up from what gives a sense of mattering if only for a while before it fades back to indistinguishable nattering.
Sincerity doesn’t mean clarity nor rawness. Negative capability isn’t an excuse to blather a blurt and pin it with a gold star of rarified first thought holy. Even self-consciousness and blocking is a kind of sincerity. What is more sincere than genuine threat expressed. Sincerity isn’t the golden rule. Holding self open is almost a meditation by another label. Both sincerity and negative capability relate somehow to integrity yet earnestness and intention or lack of intention aren’t the only ticket counters.
Poetry that refuses the conventional lyric route, that refuses thesis and summative couplet is a route that tires just as any pattern. Our brain screens out constant patterns. It also needs constant patterns so it isn’t on overdrive of challenge all the time.
What is sincere? History out there, autobiography, direct observation and collecting real language in the wild.
What allows room in it for the reader? People can feel excluded by various techniques and subjects depending on their bias. Confessional and its potential for the author to make an “indecent invasion of his own privacy” (As Maxwell Perkins accused Fitzgerald of doing) can draw in some readers while squicking out others.
Fitzgerald was a pretty messed up person from all I can tell but he considered TMI, unsavory. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” he famously says, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
Walking the line is without believing in the line or things on either side entirely is a postmodern civilized circus. Too much brain, too much baudy, too much untippable balance, too taciturn, too much verbiage, too much order, too much chaos. The sweet spots are hard to hit. Moderation in all, including moderation, proves that it is a choice not a inner nature.
Amick Boone lives in San Francisco where she’s been writing her way in a Negative Capability Project on and off since last summer. Lately she was been thinking about New Sincerity which is,
emotion and the assigning of meaning – all of which were condemned as too direct and over-sentimental for postmodernism, when we were all questioning how anything could mean anything at all. New Sincerity in poetry is a reclaiming of what postmodernists found too ordinary in subject matter (like O’Hara’s “I do this I do that”) and a reclaiming of subjective emotion we threw out when we tired of confessional poetry. New Sincerity in poetry is coming back to acknowledge that things do mean.
The act of editing tries to take a poem back to its start, but purify it to something elemental. Or, sampling takes a core sample just as it is and hopes it is representative or meaningful.
Postmodernism is in the water like fluoride. Some opt out and change their gaze to different points, 1800s verse, script-disturbers, new formalism, etc. Whatever we do as poets, culturally as citizens we are used to information overload, fragmentary information, have bowed to the idea that no one gets an exclusive on the one true reality. There are a few holding out on that but still, more voices as valid, parallel religions, parallel philosophies, each with benefits and pitfalls are givens, largely.
We, nationally, temporarily, might be losing ground on critical thinking and questioning the source and motivation of information but we still have an ironic distance of postmodern’s legacy of savvy, spun, processed thought, embedded and accessible as an option for our vision. As Danielle Pafunda said “an existence more symptomatically than strategically postmodern.” Boone adds, “She’s no postmodernist, just the girl postmodernism makes.”
At some point we become so read that we tire of avoiding sentiment and of avoiding the avoiding of sentiment, sidestepping intellectualization and common man shtick, and the rules of what is beautiful and ugly, cooked or raw or banal, and return to “natural” and “unaffected” or at least to not trying too hard.
She points to a 2008 Jacket Magazine article on New Sincerity.
Where does the bubble in the level end up? What ratio of direct to oblique? What itch is trying to be scratched and how to get at it best? The best judge is first audience which is self. Like haiku and meditation and private writings, others can benefit at a later stage when the product of perception and language goes outwards where others may find use.