Postcards from the Imagination

Talk about the New Sincerity is all the rage in blogland these days. Small wonder then that Seth and I found ourselves discussing the matter over brunch this morning--or that now we've retreated to our separate computers to parse our thoughts in--what else?--writing.

I can't speak to the burgeoning(?) quasi-(?) destined to fail/succeed(?) movement as a whole, because I haven't kept on top of all the conversations. The mega-doses of irony in Joe Massey's manifestos, for instance, make my eyes glaze over and my head spin. I can, however, speak to what sincerity as a concept means to me, and why I am a fan.

First, some bullet-points on what sincerity, in my view, is and is not:

• Sincerity is always emotionally honest, though it may play fast-and-loose with every other kind of truth.

• Sincerity is full of personality. That is, the human quotient always makes itself more palpably felt than the theoretical one. Even in poems whose primary subject is an Idea, one feels there is a flesh-and-blood consciousness at its core. Sincerity shuns sterility, and insofar as it is authentic, it cannot help but reveal the individual personality of its persona(s), character(s), and/or writer.

• Sincerity is not a catalog of suffering, written in the confessional style. No one wholly suffers, or if they do they owe it to themselves to seek help and try to heal. Life is as much about joy as it is about pain, and any poetics which deliberately excises the finer half of the human experience for the sake of art cannot properly be termed sincere.

• Sincerity understands the difference between joy and happiness and contentment and does not try to amplify cooler emotions for the sake of turning them into art. In other words, there are a very few things which actually make the heart leap, and the sincere writer will avoid turning mild gladness into an instance of the sublime.

• (Though this one may spark WWIII here at home) Sincerity does not employ myth unless Myth is itself the subject of the poem. Put another way, a sincere writer does not substitute heroes, gods, saints, or other archetypes in order to avoid looking directly at the people, emotions, or ideas they represent.

• Sincerity risks awkwardness rather than covering its ass with "I was only joking."

Aside from the fact that my ribs are little sore from all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge, sincerity appeals to me because there is a glut of insincerity in the general culture. Politicians abuse language every day through the use of irony in its purest, dictionary sense--i.e. "The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning." Hollywood produces a celluloid world which bears little resemblance to real one. Television producers fabricate extraordinary environments, hand-select participants, then splice together dramatic moments, and call it "Reality TV." Magazines--even and especially women's magazines--proffer an idea of sex which is based on the fantasies of heterosexual, fourteen year-old boys. Advertisers...well, you get the point. All of which leaves me craving a little unguarded sincerity.

I may add to this list as new definitions occur to me, or I may not. Either way, I do think something in the notion of a New Sincerity, even if it began as a joke between friends, expresses a feeling in the air that irony, as a dominant feature of anything, may be long overdue for a hiatus.