On Sincerity in the Ironic Age

I have done a lot of thinking this past couple of years about sincerity and its role in poetry. Some of this has made it onto the blog in the past. But recently I have had newer thoughts, and I think it worthwhile to put fingers to keys again to try and define it a little.

Poetry must be sincere. That is not to say it must be factual; poems of the fantastic, the imagined, and the unreal have a place, and as I have suggested before, I believe that often the best poetry even about factual things has an element of imagination to it that makes it not entirely factual in the most prosaic sense. But poetry must be sincere; that is, it must engage seriously with its topic, it must care about what it has to say, and it must attempt to do justice to those things.

But wait. I should back up. Poetry should have a topic!

For me, poetry is a paradox. It is the intentional use of (frequent) complexity, (often) difficult language, and (always) stylized form to achieve clarity. That sounds more complex than I mean it, so I will try again: poetry uses complex means to make things simple. I have no love for "poetry" that seeks to be intentionally confusing, obfuscating, or simply amorphous. Poetry, at its best, has something to say, or at least something to talk about, and uses its nature as poetry to make that thing clearer, or at least better understood.

So yes, poetry should have a topic. Poetry should have a point - not a point as in a political message, necessarily, but a point, a reason for existing beyond its own mere narcissism. Ars gratia artis indeed, but art for the sake of what the art is, not art for the sake of merely making art. The point need not be anything major; I write poems to describe the weather, for goodness' sake, and you cannot get much more stereotypically minor. I write poems about writing poems! But there must be a there there.

In turn, I believe this means poetry must take a turn - an intentional, definite turn - towards sincerity and away from the ironic, meta, and post-meta ways of the world we live in. Poetry is (usually) shit when it tries to conform to that sort of thought process; poetry that tries to be post-post-post ends up childlike and silly, in the worst senses. Poetry should strive to be sincere, not necessarily in a stereotyped, "Victorian" sense of pathos, or a self-consciously post-ironic sense of "sincere," but simply sincere, honest, forthright. It is important to care, to be interested in the poem and in its subject, and to strive to put these things together in a meaningful way.