A few notes from a New Sincerist

The New Sincerity has built-in irony. There’s nothing “new” about sincerity.

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New Sincerity does not mean “total honesty” or “complete fidelity to lived/actual experience.”

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The “movement,” as it were, started as a joke. See above. But it’s an ironic joke because it’s NOT really a joke. We mean what we say. We are living it, as Joe Massey recently noted on his blog. Is it a joke? Yes. But it’s totally serious. Like the poems of Kenneth Koch, for example.

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Joseph Ceravolo might just be the most sincere poet ever.

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We believe Wilde’s pronouncement that “All bad art is sincere.” This makes New Sincerity dangerous, but necessary, work.

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In simplest terms, the New Sincerist poets try to write and promote poetry that is more than just jokes, or just post-modern, post-language, post-avant, post-lacan, or post-whatever. Poetry that is about theory, or that is overwhelmed by theory is not interesting to us. Neither is poetry that keeps winking at us, winking at itself without really talking. Moving its lips.

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The Laurel Synder poem in The Canary #4 is ironic in the sense that the speaker of the poem probably doesn’t literally mean the things she claims, and in fact probably means something closer to the opposite of what she claims. But the poem isn’t just funny, but it’s also warm and human. One gets a pretty good idea of what kind of person Laurel Snyder is by reading that poem. Not that that’s necessary, but it helps explain what I’m talking about.

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We don’t know what literary irony is. Really. I mean is it ironic to cut off one’s hair to buy a gift for one’s spouse only to learn that spouse bought one a set of curlers? Maybe. Or it’s just bad luck. Or good luck. I’m not sure a set of curlers is a very good gift. A comb, maybe. A bejeweled comb. Bejeweled bobby pins.

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I propose that we stop using the term “irony.” It confuses me. Its usual application goes far beyond its dictionary definition. What's that about a word repeated too often...

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In that case, both "new" and "sincerity" will be bankrupt terms by the time school starts.

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People always tell me my poems are funny, but they’re not jokey. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t try to make them funny though. They’re just born like that. I have never told a successful joke in my life. I'm terrible at telling jokes.

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Andrew Mister’s book Let Me Know, and the staggeringly gorgeous Liner Notes are not funny. They are sad. Andrew Mister, the human being, is fucking hilarious—one of the funniest people I know. And nearly as immature as me, which is saying something about one of us since I’m seven years his senior. The poems Andy and I wrote for “Here’s to you,” are both funny and sad. In the same poem. Every poem.

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Julia Covert actually “wrote” one of the poems in “Here’s to you,” in that she provided the source text. All we did was remove most of the words.