Jacket 35 - Early 2008 - Jason Morris: The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a “New Sincerity”

http://jacketmagazine.com/35/morris-sincerity.shtml

The Time Between Time:

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“I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity”

Artists in a variety of media have been talking about a “New Sincerity.” In poetry, Andrew Mister, Joseph Massey, and Anthony Robinson have written manifestos. Drawing is the new old thing in visual art; in their use of the long take, among other stylistic devices, Wes Anderson and a few other young filmmakers (maybe quoting Dogme, Expressionism or Neo-Realism), nod toward the medium’s first promise — to be an “honest” representation of reality. In pop music, folk is making a resurgence. Performers like Will Oldham, Cat Power, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom play with a kind of lo-fi, scaled-back immediacy which has been widely welcomed by audiences and critics alike. The Believer (whose name itself denotes a wide-eyed credulity) is among America’s best and most widely circulated literary magazines; its credo in large part defines it as against the ironic, the cynical, etc. (The Doubter?). And yet all of these seem to be immanent critiques of irony: if irony is the black, rich bed of dirt out of which these movements blossom, to what degree does the sincerity they anticipate remain within its magnetic poles? To what extent are these artists anticipating a telos of irony, even while operating within its present field of influence and drawing on its (bottomless) history? [1]

Many of the contemporary poets to whose work I might initially turn in trying to locate the possibility of a “New Sincerity” would most likely shudder at that or any such appellation. Along with Andrew Mister, Joseph Massey and Anthony Robinson, I’m drawn to a group of poets as diverse as Dave Berman, Catherine Wagner, Dean Young, Matt Hart, Tao Lin, Frederick Seidel, and Arielle Greenberg, to name just a few. What characteristics could the poems of this extremely varied crowd share? In Tao Lin’s poems, as in Catherine Wagner’s, there’s a level of directness that’s like a punch in the gut; I find this (albeit at a more subdued register) in Seidel’s poems as well as Dave Berman’s. Matt Hart and Dean Young often share a Romantic exuberance, a slow, child-like wonder at the world that makes it no surprise they consider poets like Gregory Corso and Kenneth Koch big influences. Revealing their mutual debts to the work of poets like Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan (among many, many others), in the work of almost all of the poets on this provisional list, the distinction between “poetic” concerns on the one hand, and the jetsam of pop culture and the everyday details of life on the other, has long since vanished.

When I first read Greg Fuchs’ poem “Charles” in CyPress magazine, I was struck by how generously it seemed to accommodate all of the various characteristics I’ve provisionally listed above as possible parts of a “New Sincerity” within a radically artless tone of voice. It’s probably worth pointing out that this effect is pretty natural: apparently, Fuchs collaged the piece together out of journal scraps left behind by his friend, Charles. The poem surges feverishly across 3 or 4 pages, mutating to different line-lengths and rarely pausing to catch its breath in a rush to convey any and all of the details of its surroundings:

I talk a lot when I’m nervous. The six-foot stocky weird guy. Why don’t I care about the sick guy? I came for your urgency. Your life was one long emergency. Plucked and pencilled eyebrows. Barbie pink eye-shadow. Liquid eyeliner. Public high spirits in the night. The hot wind blows by the door solidly solitary. Hacienda hotel at LAX. Here are all the hookers. Wanting a cowboy hat reading Low Life. The cripple on the corner cries out nickels for your pity. Eng 30 Amer Lit. What is your expected family contribution. Nick E. 668-9141. In Hoboken to hear Urge Overkill. Feel real weird.

A surfeit of detail — from the totally mundane (“wanting a cowboy hat”), to the merely practical (phone numbers), to the nightmarish (hookers, cripples) — exists in simultaneity, flattened. The sincerity the poem offers is emphatic, democratic, collapsed. There is a sense of urgency in wanting to convey as much information as possible, with as little artifice — as much “sincerity” — as possible, regardless of whether or not the information conveyed “matters.” Lyrically formulated, “poetic” concerns (“solidly solitary,” “urgency” / “emergency”) bump elbows with administrative language (“expected family contribution”), which gives way to pop-culture references (“Urge Overkill”).

I was similarly awe-struck when I opened an issue of Canary and read Matt Hart’s poem “I was Dumb with Pearls, I was Dumb.”

What was funny stayed funny, because nothing was funny anymore. I was your man, and we were awfully sad. I was boiling peanuts and bluebirds for the big game

on Sunday. I was a mess of bright lights and redecorated walls. Physical prowess had never been one of my strengths, and now it would have to wait until spring everlasting. I was famished. I was taking the enemy blue cheese in a bag, wanting a friend more than anything else.

The jacket copy for the book in which the poem later appeared, Who’s Who Vivid, reads, “Matt Hart brings the so-called ‘New Sincerity’ to the forefront of American poetry with his stunningly kinetic debut collection. Stripped of the pretense, hyper-irony and posturing of much of the writing of his peers, Hart’s is a heartfelt poetry that alternately celebrates and berates human existence.” Matt Hart’s excellent essay, “An Accidental Appreciation: A Few Pieces on Gregory Corso with a Nod Toward a New Sincerity,” was one of the first to name a “New Sincerity” as such. What might make a poem like “I was Dumb with Pearls, I was Dumb” sincere, or part of a “New Sincerity”? Like Fuchs’ poem, there is a sense of urgency to the way the poem moves along; also, there is a candor that seems un-self-conscious it might be veering toward sentimentality (“wanting a friend more than anything else”).

Jon Woodward’s excellent book-length poem (or collection of very short poems) Rain seems to epitomize a lot of these characteristics of a “New Sincerity.” Its opening lines signal a willingness on the part of the poet to give equal airtime to both the heavy problems of the heart as well as the most everyday concerns of living in twenty-first century America. The book opens,

in spite of which it’s hard to imagine it all going to shit the pinkflowering dogwood for example is my newest favorite tree the decay

of what world we’ve got’s not exactly what I’m afraid of not now the woman brings the cheeseburger I ordered here come the selections the