It's been cathartic for me to explore poetry's decline, and I think posting and reading responses about it has definitely given me food for thought as a teacher and as a writer. Naturally, my inquiry has to evolve, and lately I've been thinking less about poetry in general and more about my own writing process and motivations.
For the past few weeks, I have been questioning the affectiveness of my own poetry. I purposely use "affective" instead of "effective" because I want to think that poetry can be transformative. But I started to wonder -- is my poetry really working on that level? Can it actually reveal truth and beauty in a way that works on readers' souls? If I am writing in the tradition of the Bards, can I truly take on that mantle and claim that my own poems will do this? I think it takes a healthy ego to boldly claim this goal for one's poems.
But then, I realized that most of what I find frustrating about poetry is that it's really given over to irony. I found my own voice drying up lately, and I realized this was because I was beginning to be afraid of being "too sincere" in my poems. Sincerity often gets mocked. It's much easier to put on a hipster-posturing face and play it cool. As if, somehow, my poems could be "deep" and people would sit back and say, "Yeah, man, yeah. That's real." That type of response actually just makes me angry! I want my poetry to be more than a momentary response of interest, brought about by posturing through irony.
I decided that if I'm going to write at all, I have to write with uncomfortable sincerity. The discomfort will be on both sides. It will be so for me because I realize that irony is an understood, accepted, and even preferred mode of communication, and I will be breaking this established convention. And it will be so for my readers because irony creates a safe distance for them, from which they can stand back and assess emotions and experiences without having to totally commit to the situation. Uncomfortable sincerity asks for vulnerability, both of the writer and the reader. This is my goal now, unashamedly. I hope my poems will shake people and break down ironic distance. I want my poems to pierce this barrier and hit the soul.
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3 comments:
It's funny, I battle with the same thing when it comes to writing literary criticism, only it's not irony that I find it easy to succumb to, but falling, unthinkingly, into well-worn paradigms, which stems from an even deeper anxiety about *sounding* clever...
One very elderly scholar I met once said that, too often, modern scholars don't have any respect for the work they study, a respect which is, I suppose, analogous to your 'uncomfortable sincerity'.
Can you get your hands on copies of John Burnside's The Light Trap or Alice Oswald's Dart? I don't read much contemporary poetry but, for me, these two have sincerity in bucketloads.
Meanwhile, are you ever going to post your own poems? :-)awgir
I completely sympathize on the research front as well. I feel like I'm still trying to grasp an appropriate academic voice while still maintaining my own "personality." It's a fine line. I will look for the poets you suggested. I would be happy to have some contemporary role models! Thanks.
i recently wrote a casual review (on "good reads") of luci shaw's poetry. i usually like less than half of what she publishes, but the reason for it is good-- because she's sincere, and sometimes that's a little embarrassing. when it hits, then, it hits deeper than a cool poem might.
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