Jeannine mentions a lecture given by Paisley Rekdal. I'll excerpt here:

Speaking of women poets, one of the lectures from the conference that has stuck in my mind was Paisley Redkal’s rather academic but fascinating delivery of a paper on the lyric I, anger as the “unacceptable” emotion in poems, how the recent rejection of emotion in poetry is actually a rejection of the feminine, how the reaction against “confession” in poems was likewise a reaction against poems about women’s lives, despite the fact that the first major confessional poets (Snodgrass, Lowell) were men. “You can write a poem about anything nowadays, except emotion” she said. “It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s all about wordplay and disguise, it highlights the intellect, it rejects those messy female “feelings.”

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My response:

Methinks Paisley doth protest too much. But not really. That is, her cheeky statement both resonates and points to the wider range of aesthetic and thematic possibility in poetry, poetries, that is already there. It’s a statement that seems pointed, but is actually diffuse. As soon as you say something like “emotion is not allowed in poetry” you can’t help but think of all the “emotional” poetry out there. We are swimming in it. Paddle, paddle.

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The New Sincerity is a reaction against the sort of bloodless, soulless writing that seems to dominate the post-avant or non-SOQ po-land. Notice that I say “seems.” In this, it (the NS) continues to be tongue-in-cheek. What we really want is to maintain our indie hipster status and write poems that we like. We want Silliman to notice us, but we also want a wide readership. We want people to throw away their books by Jewel, and oh, say, Bruce Andrews, and instead read Andrew Mister, Joe Massey, Reb Livingston. And Wallace Stevens. We are aggressive self-promoters. But at least we're honest about it. And most of us did not accomplish what we wanted to in our twenties. We don't wish to have our manuscripts tossed in the wastebasket by those younger than us when we reach forty. The oldest of us are nearly 33.

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The trouble with a lot of post-avant writing is that its practitioners seem to have forgotten that process is a means to an end. Too many seem too interested in the process. The end product in negligible, or if not negligible, so weighted with its own cleverness that any emotion remains latent or buried under big words, lofty ideas (that aren’t all that lofty), and so forth.


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There's plenty of poetry in the so-called SOQ that is full of emotion, that is about emotion. So Rekdal seems to want to escape the SOQ, while rejecting what seems to be the dominant period style of those in the post-avant lineage.

I'd say it's not the dominant period style, however. It appears dominant at times because certain high profile bloggers make it seem so (Silliman, Tost). I know, for one, that I'm probably not going to be interested in Fascicle, for example, no matter how "good" it is at doing what it does because the sort of focus on poetics and theory and poetry that eschews emotion in favor of "intellect" and "experimentation" is a focus that doesn't excite me. It appealed to me more when I was a younger man, but as I get older and crankier, not so much. I don't know how Silliman does it!

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Plenty of us "other" "younger" poets writing about emotion, plenty of us unwilling to ironize ourselves out of feeling. Missing a verb in that sentence.

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To posit that "emotion"="feminine" is almost as ridiculous as suggesting that "Mexican-American"="tortilla-eatin' beaner."

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The fact is, one CAN write a poem about whatever one wants.