A few more thoughts in response to AD Jameson's latest inquiry into sincerity.

I am again having trouble posting comments on HTML Giant, so I'm posting them here where nobody will read them.

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Some Bits

1) I'll buy the Steve Roggenbuck connection, but I don't think Massey would buy it. You'll have to ask him.

2) If you examine the texts produced by Massey/Mister/Robinson as well as the Second Wave NS practitioners (Hart, Pritts, Lasky, et al), one thing becomes apparent. Massey's work seems the square peg here. That is, the tradition he is working in is decidedly different from where Andy and I situated ourselves. And even though I've made an effort to distance myself from the 2nd Wave, I'll admit that Andy and my work has more in common with these than Massey's even. Curiously, when talk of NS comes up, Massey is usually quoted--both his manifesto and his poetry. Joe is a good friend, and I say this not to cast aspersions but to point out the rather strange impression this gives of the poetry and the general thinking of the NS '05 as a whole.

3) Joe and I (and I'm guessing Andy) were weaned on Donald Allen's "New American Poetry" of 1960, and Paul Hoover's 1990 Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry. Far from rejecting Language or other "experimental" modes, I'd say we absorbed them, used them, learned from them. The objections we had toward the poetry zeitgeist of the mid-2000s was not simply the emphasis on artifice or experiment or text-as-text. It was against something harder to pin down--what we felt was a lack of feeling, of soul, behind the text.

4) I find the aleatory stylings of John Cage much more soulful than (insert name of mid-career 30-40something poet here). It's not the tools or the materials. It's the animating force behind them.

5) It's hard to quantify, to pin down "feeling" in a text. This poses a problem for the academic, who, trapped in a post-new criticism hangover that will not go away, focuses on the text itself to the exclusion of the context in which it exists or existed.

Response to Adam Jameson and commenters.

Over at HTML Giant, A D Jameson continues his discussion of the old New Sincerity.  Or, more properly, his discussion of 2nd Wave "New Sincerity" as exemplified by Tao Lin, Matt Hart, etc.

I tried to post a comment to the thread, but my internet is hamster wheel-powered so sometimes things don't work.  So I'll try posting it here.  To read the original piece, go to HTML Giant.

Andy, Joe, and I didn't invent the term. Its origins are in music, architecture, and some other shit I don't remember.  And it wasn't leading anything--I think when Andy first suggested the term (to me, over beers, and not in any prescriptive way) he was talking about Joshua Beckman's book, the one with the poem "Block Island."  

Here's what happened.  In the summer of 2005, I was complaining on my blog about the poetic Latino Mafia that wanted me to write more poems about tortillas. I was also involved in a cross-blog conversation with Jonathan Mayhew concerning "period styles" of contemporary poetry. In a dashed-off post one afternoon I briefly talked about a few period styles, and joked that I should start or become part of The Tortilla School.   Then, as an afterthought I mentioned that Andy used the term "New Sincerity" to describe the sort of poetry we thought we were writing or that we admired in others.  

(He and I had just begun work on a series of poems that would be published as a chapbook by Boku Books in late 2005, called finally, "Here's To You" but at that point had the working title "Don't Get Me Started."  It no longer exists, as far as I know--I guess poems there could be seen as early examples of this particular strain of "New Sincerity."  We were clearly guided by Ted Berrigan, as the poems state.  And I have the pills and Pepsi to prove it.)

Part of what I was interested in at the time was using the "innovations" of the past generation(s) to write poetry that was more than irony or distrust of language.  There was of course, more to it, but that was where I had staked my little plot of ground.

A few posts followed my initial posts (mostly as responses to comment box comments).  Then in early July, Joe emailed me his Manifesto (which I believe he also posted on his Livejournal at the time).  We had a good laugh and thought that was it.   

I continued to blog about the newly minted "New Sincerity" throughout the summer, and Joe did the same from time to time in his live journal.  Andy didn't have a blog at the time. But he was still writing poems then--we all were. 

Here's an important point.  The main reason the NS became anything at all is that in 2005, poets read blogs.  Blogging was the main source of online poetry community.  Facebook, I think, really killed all that.  Without the blogging culture of the time, this wouldn't be an issue.

Finally, as I ramble, I'd like to refer back to the last sentence of the paragraph before the paragraph before this one.  The manifestos, the blog posts, all of that were, as you've noted, pretty ephemeral.  I'd like to think that if folks want to talk about the "NS" they'd look to the poems at the center of all the talk.  So far, that's not been done much--or, in my opinion, at least not enough.

Tony Robinson

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Update @ 7:00 pm PDT:    Aaron Belz tweets:

@bluecanaryruth It does too still exist. Nice piece, Tony. twitter.com/aaronbelz/stat…

— aaron belz (@aaronbelz) June 5, 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 Poetry. Of 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...