[Poetry]

A friend here at Iowa strongly advised me to read an essay by Jason Morris in the current issue of Jacket entitled "The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a 'New Sincerity.'"

I'll admit that, once my initial enthusiasm for the idea of the essay died down, I began to feel, actually, a little hesitant about reading it--largely because, in the past, The New Sincerity has seemed to hold as one of its (unacknowledged but routinely-employed) fundamental principles the dramatic re-definition of that very word, sincerity. As one who loves language and used to employ it confrontationally as a full-time job, I see New Sincerity's re-envisioning of sincerity as a foundational paradox in the aesthetic, in truth a (perhaps inadvertent) linguistic sleight-of-hand: if one has to re-define terms in order to crowbar them into an aesthetic, it seems to me as though the notion of "sincerity" has already been sacrificed from the start. And sincerity, once lost, is irretrievable, one of the reasons it's such a powerful force in American life (and a rare one), and one of the reasons so many poets would so dearly love to appropriate it.

Reading the essay became, in many respects, exactly the sort of experience I'd feared: a disappointing one. As a fan of Wes Anderson's films, I'd be the last to say, as Morris does, that they aim at "an honest representation of reality," as in fact Anderson's aim is to elongate reality--time, space, discourse--to find, within that stylistic exaggeration, within its resultant dream-like texture and absent tonality, a plane from which one can look back upon reality. In many respects it's the same project, albeit differently pursued, as that of satire, irony, and parody. It is, by definition, an explicit removal from the real. That Morris would count Anderson's project as evidence of a burgeoning interest in sincerity--in the arts, at least--was a red flag I found impossible to ignore.

The essay continues in this vein, innocently enough re-defining all its terms, such that the whole rhetorical artifice remains "true" in the same sense we could say that every cat is gray if we also presumed, first, that every cat was made of storm-clouds. I mean, I'm a fan of Matt Hart and of his poetry, but I have to believe even he would balk at calling "heartfelt," rather than "hyper-ironic," his line (from "I Was Dumb With Pearls, I Was Dumb"), "I was boiling peanuts and bluebirds for the big game / on Sunday." Because, of course, he wasn't doing anything of the kind, had no intention of doing anything of the kind, and is not trying to communicate any first-order reality with that line. It is, instead, a sort of "directed" reality--like Anderson's--which is purposefully communicative only in the sense that it privileges its departures from reality rather than its conjunctions, and hopes, with those departures (and the sort of side-by-side comparison such departures enact), to pull the sheet off things otherwise hidden. Sincerity is what's under the sheet; it is not the string that pulls the sheet away, and neither is it the place to which the sheet is pulled.

Morris seems to equate sincerity with "artless[ness]" (specifically with respect to Greg Fuchs's poem "Charles"), which in itself would be sensible if he were referring to "artlessness" (in the lay sense) rather than Artlessness (in the aesthetic sense). For indeed Fuchs's decision to compose a poem solely using lines from his friend Charles's journal may well be "democratic" in its presentation of information, and in this sense an attempt to use "as little artifice [as possible]," but as sincerity is an emotional state--or, rather, a relational state of being between things that must necessarily be emotional moreso than conceptual--Fuchs's very lack of artifice is (to use this term non-pejoratively) insincere. In human interactions, discourse is organized, actually, around rules--not because rules are necessarily fun, but because sincerity is a function of symmetry (symmetry in the ability to speak, listen, understand, respond, learn, and organize) and therefore rules are a necessity. A sincere conversation between friends would not, in fact, be lacking in any organizational structure ("democratic" in its selection of meaning-packets, in Morris's conception), nor would it be free of "artifice" in the sense Morris seems to understand that term (that is, as being roughly equivalent to the notion of "conscious ordering").

Where Morris's notion of sincerity and mine dovetail is in his focus on urgency, which I do think is an important yet oft-overlooked aspect of the sincere. A poetry which aims at sincerity--or, to puff it up a bit, a New Sincerity--should have a relation of necessity to the poet/speaker. That is, the poem must in some way be a necessary object in the view of its creator, for sincerity is most closely aligned with revelation rather than election. If I have to choose whether to tell you A or B, rather than simply telling you A and B, it does suggest that something about the one subtracts from the other, and thus one of the two must be obscured--hardly a recipe for "sincerity," however it is conceived. At the same time, one does not relate both A and B merely because one can; one does it, if one does it sincerely, because one must. Yet Fuchs's poem "Charles" (like Hart's poem) fails this test as well (which is not to say the poets themselves were seeking to writing New Sincerist poetry). Morris himself observes that Fuchs's poem constitutes a "surfeit of detail," not all of which is created equal (the selections from the journal have been made, Morris notes, "regardless of whether or not the information conveyed 'matters'"). Which of course is precisely the problem with calling either poet's work an exemplar of The New Sincerity. A sincere confrontation with Charles's personal journal would be one, in fact, which did what all sincere conversations (confrontations) do, which is to distill truth--"what matters"--from noise. Unless it can be said that Charles's listing of a random phone number (for a man whose surname he appears not to have known) was equally a confrontation with the self as his self-diagnosis that he "talk[s] a lot when []nervous," Fuchs's election of both data-points, without privileging one over another, is insincere. It is, as Morris notes (though apparently not self-critically), a "collapse" of reality rather than reality itself.

Morris has a little more luck in discussing Jon Woodward, but that's because he's changed his terms without acknowledging the shift; whereas Fuchs's "sincerity" was lauded for giving equal weight to disconnected bits of meaning and connected wholes, Woodward is observed to have given, in his book Rain, "equal airtime to both the heavy problems of the heart as well as the most everyday concerns of living in twenty-first century America." In other words, sincerity can be found where the ego boldly outlays both internalized and externalized conflicts--a reasonable premise. Just so, here's Woodward:

in spite of which it's
hard to imagine it all
going to shit the pinkflowering
dogwood for example is my
newest favorite tree the decay

of what world we've got's
not exactly what I'm afraid
of not now the woman
brings the cheeseburger I ordered
here come the selections the

jukebox converted five of my
quarters into in the correct
order what questions then to
ask for what if anything
about this coffee these fries

Whether or not you think the poem is meshing its devices and its aims well (I'm not wholly convinced, myself), Woodward can certainly be credited for returning to Charles Olsen's emphasis on perception over feeling, which (while by now old hat, really, and hardly the basis for a "new" movement) certainly encapsulates--as Olsen himself had hoped--a sort of sincerity, inasmuch as it privileges reality-as-it-is over reality reflected upon. Indeed, there's some question as to whether the ideal form of The New Sincerity would simply be a rehash of projective verse, in which the speaker's relation to the object is primal, and the reader's relation to the object is thus (or so the theory goes) primarily if not singularly a matter of the reader's own ego. The idea being, I guess, sincerity in, sincerity out.

Still, though, for Morris the magic of Woodward is in the work's (hardly realistic) democracy of attention, and not (as I think it must be, for sincerity to be the end-product) in the use of actual (as opposed to theoretical) attention as the only currency of the soul. Like Morris, I like the sense that "the narrator of these poems could be writing them on a napkin, quickly," yet I disagree that that act is made more rather than less sincere if we imagine, too, the napkin-scribbling narrator "giving as much weight to whether or not the jukebox will convert his quarters into songs in the right order as to how easy or hard it would be to 'imagine it all going to shit.'" As those two things are not, in fact, equal in importance--and as the narrator could hardly think otherwise--it is only in the urgency of the observations, and not in the obvious lack of cohesion between or ordering among the observations, that sincerity can be located.

The rest of Morris's essay continues, I feel, in the same vein: re-interpreting reality in the interest of re-interpreting the methods one might use to sincerely capture reality's pacing and structure. Thus Morris denotes as "sincere" poems' depictions of the "disjointedness of temporality" and "paradoxical portrayal[s] of time." The problem, of course, is that while it's true that (as indicated above) a sincere voice allows for both A and B, it also does so only if both A and B are emotionally true. When Morris says, of Woodward's "Rain, Ocean," "in a world in which it's possible to imagine everything going to shit, it's equally possible to imagine everything already has," he seems to forget that it is only in the realm of aesthetics that "possibilities" are ascendant over facts; in a life sincerely recited and illustrated, possibilities may linger constantly behind the immediate, but they neither replace nor are co-equal with them.

Which of course takes us back to the old argument about "imminent meaning" versus "transcendent meaning," with the usual sides being taken: the reactionaries (here, the New Sincerists) align themselves with whatever is currently out-of-fashion. Thus the Imagists, Objectivists, Vorticists, Language Poets, and their philosophical relations (e.g., projective verse) once sided with imminent meaning after decades upon decades of the Romantic transcendent, and New Sincerists perhaps worn out by such word-machine "keep the reader on the page" experiments are now longing once more for the transcendent over the imminent.

And by all means, they can have it if they like, and perhaps will do much with it, as much was done with it every other time it was ascendant in Western aesthetics. But they ought not believe that "sincerity" lies either in the one or the other--in either the imminent or the transcendent--as of course it draws upon elements of both, and is fundamentally, as already noted, an emotional state rather than a conceptual one. What is True must, by all means, be distilled and then reassembled; what is reassembled must also, however, be True. As this requires both an escape from artifice as well as an embrace of it, Morris's dialogic approach to his primary binaries--artifice and the lack of it, linear temporality and the lack of it, "democratic" perception and the lack of it--is ultimately what dooms his analysis, I think, to error.