Wednesday, May 30, 2012

post-Sincerity poetics found here

I have resisted making this a poetry blog mainly because nobody reads poetry blogs anymore.  They are like PDAs and pagers and 64 oz. bottles of malt liquor.

A dodo bird with a pager and half-gallon of Olde English?   Priceless.

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But, I had this to say about this thing I saw:

In this paper, Jennifer Ashton, Professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, makes the common error of characterizing the New Sincerity (the short-lived "movement"--you decide if it's "fake" or not) as a reaction against Language PoetryOf course it's nothing of the sort and a little research would have corrected this. It also would have complicated it, I suppose.

Thanks to Adam D. Adam D Jameson for directing me to this.

You know, they say the proof is in the pudding or something, and one thing I've noticed is that in the many papers that have been written about or that include the New Sincerity, the actual poetry of the originators is rarely invoked. Instead, the poet-critic invariably focuses on the work of what I'll term here (for the first time, I believe) Second Wave Sincerists. While the critic is free to do as he or she pleases, it seems that any serious study would want to examine all the documents available to them rather than cherry pick a few blog posts as an intro to talk about something else...




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