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Cover up the blank spots, hit me on the head.
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Cover up the blank spots, hit me on the head.
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7 comments:
Hey Tony,
I'm packing and listening to "Pet Sounds." It is all about "Pet Sounds." Talk to you soon.
Yr pal,
Josh
I was referred here, and found myself lingering for a time...fascinating reads.
I would be pleased if you would visit my blog; I'm a poet and would enjoy your take on my work.
Thank you,
Blue
Walter, I don't think there's anything at all anti-complex or anti-intellectual about sincerity. Quite the opposite. In everyday life, being sincere often involves pushing past one's initial reactions in order to better understand one's emotions, thought processes, and behaviors. A person who lies to himself in order to avoid the digging deeper is not being sincere.
Nor is it about mistrusting the intellect (without which we never could have made the evolutionary leap from apehood), but about understanding that the intellect does not exist in a vacuum apart from emotions. Even pure intellectual activity, such as scientific research, is driven by curiosity, which is emotional.
I think the equation of intelligence with dishonesty by a segment of the voting public is extremely unfortunate, but I see no reason to meet that misfortune with a reactionary mistrust of emotion.
You're right, sincerity cannot cure the world of bad poems any more than it can cure the world of bad people. But so what? Identifying a common problem in contemporary poetry—in this case a lack of sincerity—does not imply discovery of the poetic equivalent of the philosopher’s stone. It simply means that a group of like-minded poets are saying, “Here’s what we’d like to see more of in poems.”
Best,
Ginger
Walter and Ginger--
Interesting and useful comments. Ginger, you already said a lot of what I was going to say to Walter, so I'll just add a couple of things.
Walter writes:
"But my initial reaction has been to interpret it as fitting right in with the anti-ironical, anti-complex, and anti-intellectual currents so prevalent today,"
a statement that I initially read to be his appraisal of currents in the poetry/artistic world, but he seems to be talking about the pop-culture world. I would agree that yes, the anti-complex, anti-intellectual currents in pop culture are a bit disturbing, and "complex" poetry is probably a reaction to some of this willful ignorance of the average American toward the complexity of the world.
That said, being unafraid of sentiment doesn't necessarily entail a flight from intellect or complexity. These two rough poles are not mutually exclusive (in fact, are not poles at all)--poetry can be intelligent and emotional. Fake emotion is just as bad as dry philosophizing.
Massey notes in a recent blog post that the New Sincerity is not against all irony, but irony with no immediate goal outside of itself. One thing I think New Sincerists agree on is our common rejection of art as a primarily aesthetic experience--art has a social function. I read a lot of "pretty" poetry that doesn't move me because it communicates nothing beyond its own artifice. That said, if a poet can be simply "pretty" and still manage to move me by dint of the beauty in the work, the extra-semantic quality of the words, then I'm all for it! Not many poets manage to do that though. I can think only of Clark Coolidge and G. Stein off the top of my head.
For the most of us, then, poetry we enjoy will have to communicate. This does not mean we eschew "new" poetic modes. We embrace whatever tools we have but put them to use in service of work that moves us.
It occurred to me in reading all the posts on the NS, that the underlying rejection is not intellectualism or academia, but rather of the specific culture of postmodernism and its view of language as game with signifiers without signifieds. I found a fascinating connection as well to the Post-Conceptualism movement/reaction in postmodernist Russian literature which was coincidentally called the "New Sincerity" as well. You can read Mikhail Epstein's article
here
Neil,
You're exactly right. Maybe I should have just said that from the start! I thought I was being clearer than I was, I guess!
Best,
Tony
Josh,
Pet Sounds--there's a record with TONS of artifice, but ultimately, very heartfelt. (I'm almost afraid to use the S word anymore...)
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