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.

On Verisimilitude in Poetry

A derivative consideration of several points I have made before is the question of how representative or true to life an art poetry should be. I consider this a slightly different issue than the very vexed question I have tussled with before of how much poetry should indulge in fiction or transparently represent some form of truth, because this issue is less one of veracity and more one of verisimilitude. In short, how believable should poetry be? How realistic, rather than how real? Should we paint word pictures of that which is, was, and yet may be, or jet off into the realm of the strictly counterfactual, in the sense of that which cannot be true? And as a subset of this question, or a related one, how much should poetry mirror life even as it necessarily distorts it to some degree through artistic license?

Obviously there is a space for the counterfactual, fictive, even fantastic in poetry. As with any other art form, it is in a sense ridiculous to claim to restrict what poetry can or cannot be used, or attempt to be used, to show, represent, or engage with. So this question is not simply whether poetry can be fictional, but occupies a part of that troublesome space which overlaps the questions "should it?" and "how should it engage with reality even after it has passed into fiction?"

I do not expect to find or relate a full answer here, but merely to attempt to move towards one. I believe that poetry ought to engage with the real and remain with the realistic as far as it can while still moving towards its artistic goal; that is, I believe that poetry draws serious force from its connection to the depiction of that which seems to be plausible, realistic, or otherwise connected to reality or truth, and that abandoning that connection should only be done with great care, under conditions of deliberate artistic contemplation, and subject to an awareness of how severing that connection affects the poem and its effects.

This does not mean no fiction, only a retention of the link back to an imaginatively plausible reality behind the fiction. The situation and expression should, as far as possible within artistic limits, be and remain within the limits of what can be translated by a receiving mind as part of a potential truth, whether or not they are so, since this will I believe produce superior - as in more powerful, more moving, more affective and effective - effects. Absurdism and surrealism do have an artistic place, of course, but I believe the points where such a place is warranted and located are few and must be carefully chosen. As a general rule, poetry should attempt to maintain the appearance of a possible link to reality, or to plausibility within a given set of circumstances.

It is this latter condition which for me incorporates fantasies like, to step outside of sonnets alone, John Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." This is implausible in a strict sense, but within the world conditions set up in the poem, merely weird, not surreal. It establishes a world, and is internally consistent within that world; what is more, one can see how people are still people in that world. The plausibility arises from the thought that in those - admittedly fantastic - circumstances, one could conceive of a normal actor acting in those ways. The setting is fantastic, but within it the action is not.

The issue of how exactly to walk this tightrope of imagined plausibility is one for another time, but the issue of whether to do so is the one I wished to raise here. I believe poetry is most often more empowered to affect the reader where plausibility within circumstances is maintained. Further, I believe that maintaining that link to plausible reality ought to be the default, with deviations from it justified by careful thought, rather than the other way around.

On Emotion in Poetry

So one obvious question that arises when I declare that I am interested in the process of crystallizing experience into poems is whether the poems that I write honestly reflect the emotions I experience; a related question is whether they are topical, that is to say tied to a single emotional moment. I have dealt with the former question to some degree previously. I will now endeavor to discuss the latter - with a touch of the former - in a bit more depth.

I certainly used to write completely topical poetry. I began writing sonnets because I was writing them to my then-girlfriend. They were about her. They were unabashedly about her (well, after my initial abashedness at writing them in general had faded, at any rate). They were clearly topical.

Since then, I will not claim to have completely abandoned topical poetry. It has its place; usually the poems I write in this way are exhortations of some kind, to help my friends or myself get through something. Sometimes they are observational, like about the weather or otherwise about nature. It is much more, I might say vanishingly, rare that they are about my personal emotions.

The reason for this is that I have come to what I think is a better place as regards writing the poetry of emotion. I used to, and to a certain extent I still do, believe that William Wordsworth's famous claim in the preface to Lyric Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" was false, or at least strongly overblown. However, I have come much closer than I ever would have expected to this position. I believe that poetry is best as a synthesis between remembered, felt, and imagined emotion.

Specifically, that means that poetry draws on emotions that were felt in the past, and the recollection of not only how they felt then but how they developed (in retrospect) over time; on emotions being felt in the moment of creation and how they feel then, and how they are recognized to have grown in the immediate past; and on emotional intuition regarding how others feel, how the writer may or will feel in the future, and how one might feel about something that is counterfactual. All three of these streams and their subdivisions can and should be sluiced together. A poem that relies too strongly on any one of the three, or particularly any one subset of any of the three, risks weakness and especially risks feeling shallow, insubstantial, or restricted.

The goal of this combination is to produce a poem that speaks as generally as possible while retaining a link back to the initial generative thought - whether that thought was imaginative, immediate, or memorial. If one begins by recalling emotion, one should also search one's current state for links to that emotion, and begin to contemplate imaginatively what that emotion might do or mean; if one begins in the moment, one should recall past experience and also move through the imagination towards a broader understanding of the moment; and if one begins with the imagination, one should always attempt to ground the feeling in something remembered or currently felt. The combination of these processes will lead to a general poem on a specific event, whether, as above, that event is an actual occurrence (recalled or immediately lived) or an imaginative act. The important point is that the poem both connect to the triggering thought and to the wider world or wider range of experience in the world.

So it is for this reason that, although there is a reason for writing every poem, I would no longer say that my poems, especially my poems about emotion, are truly topical or occasional. They are related to some triggering event, yes, but they partake much more generally in my experience and my imagination. They are general poems, even as they have a topic.

On Aesthetics and Fictional Poetry

I have mentioned before the difficulty in writing fictional sonnets. At that time I suggested that aesthetics might present an acceptable reason and model for deviating from reality. I will now expound on this subject at slightly greater length.

A sonnet - or any poem - can be understood on more levels than I wish to engage with at the moment. But for the present discussion it is important to pay attention to two of these ways: aesthetically and narratively. Both of these ways affect the ultimate goal of our understanding here, namely the emotional pull of the poem on the reader.

To understand a poem narratively is to enter into it through the path presented, unsurprisingly, by its narrative: what does the poem say, what does it say happened, how does it feel about what happened? The poem is interpreted through these questions, and the emotional impact of the poem relies on the interaction between the narrator, the narrative, and the reader. A sad tale will (hopefully) produce sadness in the reader, a happy one happiness, an eerie one a sense of eeriness; and the poem is sad, happy, or eerie depending on how the narrator presents the narrative to the reader. This is a useful, valuable, and important method of interpretation, and, in a broad sense, my own primary one. Under this method, a fictional poem can easily fall flat because the poet has difficulty negotiating the narrator/narrative interaction due to the distance set up between the poet and the narrator. This will not necessarily happen, and most of the other methods of writing fictional poetry mentioned earlier attempt to finesse this difficulty.

But an aesthetic understanding of the poem can avoid this difficulty entirely. Aesthetic interpretation enters the poem not through the narrative, but through the feel, sound, and appearance of the words. This does not mean that aesthetic poetry ignores the creation of a narrative any more than a narrative interpretation requires the abandonment of good aesthetics. But, aesthetically understood, poetry cares not about how the poet negotiates his relationship with the narrator or narrative, only about how the music, the taste, and the beauty of the words come across; effects that may even be made easier by the use of invention, as the possible ideal of accuracy is no longer present as a bar to aesthetic word choice.

I think it is clear from the foregoing that understanding poetry through aesthetics removes, or at least lowers, a potential barrier to the creation of fictional poetry. A poet may easily range beyond his or her own experience and emotions when the focus is on the beauty of the poem rather than the relatability of the narrative. Poetry understood as fine art in the sense of music or the visual arts rather than drama is substantially freer from the chains of reality - and such an understanding can lead to delightful, beautiful poetry.

The Browning Option

A while back I promised to speak more about different modes of fiction within poetry. I will now begin slowly to redeem that promise, beginning with my own personal favorite method of writing fictional poetry, what I have called the Browning option.

The irony of having named this method after Robert Browning in a blog about sonnets, given that his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was by far the more famous sonnet-writer in the family, is not lost on me. However, even if Robert Browning did not write (or at any rate publish) as many sonnets as his wife - or even many sonnets at all - the method I am about to discuss is highly associated with him, and may certainly be applied to sonnets as well as other forms of poetry. Robert Browning wrote dramatic monologues in verse; he created characters who spoke his poems for him. Browning never had a duchess, much less a "My Last Duchess" painted on a wall; nor did he ever have need to utter a "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister;" nor was he named "Andrea del Sarto." But he wrote all three poems from the perspective of others, named or unnamed, purely fictional or real but with invented words. These monologues are characteristic of Browning - not that he did not write anything else - and to emulate their style is a distinct option when attempting to write sonnets divorced from one's own perspective and feelings. Here I will discourse a little more generally on this style; due to the substantial different in length between a typical Browning dramatic monologue and a sonnet, I will not present any of Browning's poetry in full, but rather by reference. I strongly recommend his work, which is easily accessible (being out of copyright), but it lies a little beyond the scope of this specific blog.

Browning's monologues are, as one would expect from the name, poems that seem ready to be delivered by a speaker - who is not the poet. That means that they are usually in the first person, always with a clearly defined speaker, rather than impersonal or in the omniscient third person. They speak directly to whatever that speaker wishes to say, so you will not see any strains of "To Autumn" or "Ode to a Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning." The priority is on establishing personality - the insanity of "Porphyria's Lover," or the detachment of the duke in "My Last Duchess" - and telling a little slice of that personality's experience of the world. This can be very hard to discern in the fourteen-line space of a sonnet: this is part of why it was difficult to find an example from Browning's work that was clearly a dramatic monologue but also of such short length. This emphatically does not mean that such a poem could not exist, nor indeed that Browning did not write one; rather, it means that length permits much more certainty about the fictional nature of a poem.

One of the crucial ways in which Browning creates his characters is by the use of asides, parentheticals, and self-interruption to simulate speech patterns. Most poems present an uninterrupted whole without these effects, and the introduction of them causes the reader to think about the personality behind them. A similar effect can be created by the strong "I" of the poem that Browning uses; although a monologue need not be self-centered, many of Browning's best are, and the repeated assertion of the ego of the narrator is highly effective. This is the crucial effect; the introduction of the narrator as a character is central to the dramatic monologue, and any useful tool should be employed.

Another aspect of Browning's monologues that would indeed suit them for the sonnet form is the existence of a little change at the end. The revelations in "Porphyria's Lover" and "My Last Duchess" are reserved for late moments of the poems, perfectly suited for the turn of a sonnet. Although there is substantial compression of space in a sonnet, the pattern of establishing a character at the start of the poem and then using that established character in an unexpected way at the end is perfectly suited to the form.

In summary, although the small size of a sonnet can be a hindrance, the dramatic monologue form typified by Robert Browning allows a substantial amount of freedom in the creation of fictional poetry. By establishing a narrative personality and then modulating that personality for effect, the poet can distance himself or herself from the poem itself while still providing a microcosm of a personality for the reader to interact with. If the effect can be navigated within the space of fourteen lines, the final twist characteristic of Browning's dramatic monologues is perfectly suited to the turn at the end of the sonnet form.

On Fictional Poetry

One of the concepts I struggle with the most in writing poetry is the role of fiction in the process. I have touched briefly on this issue in a previous post; I will dilate slightly more fully here. The issue, for me, is one of emotional clarity as well as of sincerity. Because I write poetry to capture moments, thoughts, and feelings, there is a strong pull towards nonfiction, both because I can only truly claim to have any understanding of my own emotions, thoughts, moments (etc) if even those, and because I can hardly expect to be able to successfully convey what I cannot validate in myself. These are closely entwined arguments that. together, I think portray what I mean by emotional clarity: I cannot achieve the true expression of feeling with feelings I have not felt. To this is added sincerity: how honest can the poetry be if I make it all up, not just words but basic thoughts, out of whole cloth?

I will here discuss a few possibilities for dealing with this issue: the intercommunicability problem, the imaginative principle, the Browning option, the aesthetic theory, and the denial of the question. I will only sketch these out; I intend to treat each at further detail in future posts. I hope, however, that they will serve as the beginning of a process of working out this issue.

The intercommunicability problem begins with the assumption that it is impossible to truly know if we can understand each others inner mental states. As such, it is almost pointless to talk about communicating such mental states to each other, and so poetry must, almost axiomatically, find its meaning in some other criteria than making one's mental state (or past mental state) open to an audience. This theory suggests nothing specific as replacement criteria; almost anything may qualify. The central idea is that there is no point to judging a poem on its communication of mental states.

The imaginative principle seems similar on the surface: the fundamental idea here is that imagination affects mental states, and so there is no "real" mental state for the poem to point the reader to. Either the reader and author undergo a similar effect from the poem, and that creates the tie of sincerity between them, whether the author initially felt the state being communicated or not; or they undergo dissimilar changes, but in related ways that allow the poet to predict in some manner how they will differ. In either case, because imagination and mental state are so closely bound up, it is difficult to call "fiction" dishonest, because honesty is not the same as journalistic fact-finding, it is something deeper.

The Browning option, named for the Victorian poet Robert Browning who was known for his dramatic monologues (poems written in the voice of a narrator who is clearly not the poet), suggests that it is the creation of plausible, possible, believable mentalities for the reader to interact with that is the goal of the poem, not the transmission of the single dominant authorial mentality. So long as the poem engages meaningfully in the interaction of the reader and a narrator of some sort with a distinct point of view, real or imagined, it may be judged a success; there need be no relationship between that point of view and the author's.

The aesthetic theory points to the beauty of the poem, usually in relation to its sounds and rhythms, as the primary point of judgment, rather than to anything having to do with the author. As such, the question should not be "how sincere is this poem," but "how beautiful is it." Sincerity may contribute to beauty, or it may not; it is in any case secondary.

The final suggestion I wish to raise is that it is quite possible to deny the validity of this issue; for whatever reason, to suggest that of course poems can be fictional, and there is no reason to ask this question. As I have suggested, my own view of why I write poetry makes this difficult to accept, but it is a very valid way of looking at the world.

These theories are of course neither the be-all nor the end-all of the question (even the last one), and I am always eager to hear about more suggestions. I intend, as I mentioned, to cover each in more depth in the future. At the moment, however, I hope that they can begin to suggest how one can grapple with the joint issues of fiction and sincerity in poetry.

On Sincerity and Inspiration

I wrote the same poem three time today. Or rather, to my annoyance, I did not write the same poem three times today. The initial poem (whether it is the best I cannot say, but it will serve as an ideal for the rest of the process) was lost in the obscure workings of an inexplicably failed upload; the second iteration, composed immediately after in a vain attempt to recover the first, was lost to a sudden crash of a program; the third, a memorial reconstruction of the first two following closely on their heels, appears for now to have succeeded in that it may perhaps pass on beyond its initial composition in the memory of man as assisted by computer.

It almost goes without saying in the context of this blog that these were sonnets. The rhyme scheme (in this case ABBACDDCEFFEGG) was an undoubted aid to memory, as was the meter (iambic pentameter). Yet I could fundamentally feel the sonnet shifting as I attempted to rewrite it from immediate memory. Some of these changes were no doubt improvements that I should rather have preferred to retain in the poem; most were likely neutral; some few may have impaired it. Yet unquestionably and perhaps unreasonably I was annoyed. I wanted that first sonnet, and I wanted to make any changes deliberately and with due consideration, not by the force of a faulty memory. But most of all I wanted my authentic reaction to the stimuli that produced the sonnet, and so I thought its loss might be an excellent reason to discuss, or at least begin discussion of, two topics I have been looking forward to treating here: sincerity and inspiration.

To treat them in the reverse order just mentioned: the inspiration for a sonnet can, of course, come from anywhere. Anything associated with any of the common themes of poetry - or anything not associated with those themes - can serve as an inspiration for a poem. Young love, the flowers that bloom in the spring (tra-la), and death, but also garbage collection, an odd crack in the sidewalk, and a lightbulb can be inspirations for poetry. But that's not particularly useful to hear is it? It's practically a commonplace. What's more interesting, at least to me, is what to do when inspiration does strike, whatever it happens to be triggered by, and the relationship between that inspiration and the final poem-product (or at least the initial poem-product; editing is an issue for another day).

For the former, I am a great proponent of writing right then as the moment strikes. This may be because I used to try to bottle up the feeling and express it later, and failed; you may find a different process better for you. But I believe that attempting at least some initial expression of poetry as soon as the inspiration comes tends to produce a result that is substantially different from doing so in later repose (whether better or worse is almost beside the point; after all, you can recollect at leisure, well, at your leisure, and having written initially should never stop you from doing so). The quicksilver nature of that instant expression is unretrievable, and therefore, even if only therefore, worth preserving. The immediate turn to poetry also strengthens, in my opinion, the poetical instinct: you are more likely to find inspiration the more you react to the inspiration you already find.

The relationship between the poem and its inspiration is complex, and I will only scratch the surface here. For me, a poem is in some way intended to crystallize the feelings that inspired it, to take a moment, real or imagined, and preserve it for others, not to marvel at, but to experience or re-experience in the reading of the poem. Whether that moment and those feelings come from a grand high sense of purpose or a fleeting glance at something interesting on a wall is hardly material to this process, although not every moment is one I would prefer to reproduce. The key is an attempt to make subjective experience communicable, to take a thought, a feeling, or even an action and translate it into a form someone else can take and retranslate back into their own life. That's a high aim, and a hard one to meet - and it is part of why I value both the instant flash of inspiration as it turns into poetry and the later recollection in repose; without both forms it can be very difficult to properly digest and present one's own subjective experience. It is for this reason that I was so unhappy about failing to find the original words, because I was losing the link to my initial subjective experience even as I was trying to recast the poem out of memory, because my focus was turning on the poem rather than on the moment I was attempting to capture itself.

Sincerity is an even more vexed topic than inspiration. To what extent should poetry truly mirror life? To what extent should it be a faithful record of truly felt emotion or truly experienced experience? To what extent is it fiction? To what extent is it the imaginative extension of the poet into feelings he or she may or may not have experienced in life and filters through a process of invention (ie fiction again)? I myself have wavered back and forth on this. Clearly, what I said above about crystallizing experience has a strong tinge of the belief that poetry should be an honest reflection of genuinely felt emotion. But I also believe it is possible to attempt to solidify and translate emotions one only imagines; harder, but possible. Somewhat easier is the presentation of an emotion that has been genuinely held in circumstances different from the one in which it was held; emotion redirected is still emotion, and partakes of the same register of human experience. Thus the strong association between sincerity and my views on the process of translating inspiration into poetry is not airtight; and I definitely believe that there is a place for what I would hesitate to call "insincerity," and should perhaps rather call invention or fiction. There have most certainly been times in my life when reading my poetry would have directly followed my emotional state as surely as that of the most stereotypical angsty teenager ever; but there have equally been times when I wrote completely from imagination, and everywhere in between on the spectrum. What is crucial regarding sincerity for me is that the poem, in the moment it is created, should feel sincere to the poet - the emotions, thoughts, and experiences being communicated may be altered, or invented, or even in the original, but they should be communicated in such a way as to communicate how they are making the poet feel in the moment of creation of the poem. This I find solves the crisis, because even the altered or invented emotions can only be said to have been actually altered or invented if they are affecting the poet in the moment of creation. For example, I may not feel the sadness I am attempting to convey; but thinking of the sadness should be invoking a sympathetic response of sadness within me that I can then place into the poem. If my imagination is not strong enough to conjure up the feelings within my breast that I am attempting to convey, then the poem will fall flat. Thus sincerity comes not in its relation to how the poet might feel at a moment of not writing poetry - hence fiction is not only acceptable but standard - but in its relation to how the poet feels in the moment of writing, a moment in which even invented feelings should be making their impact via the keen edge of imagination. Again, this is why I wished for the first poem that I tried to write, as the experience it was intended to convey was slipping away due to my focus on the recovery of the poem rather than the primary experience itself.

Poetry relies on a focus outside of the poem itself, both for inspiration and for the sincere expression of emotion and experience. In losing the first poem, I lost those points as well, and it became difficult to recreate the poem on its own terms. That is the cause of annoyance - not only the loss of the first poem, but the loss of its connection to the initially sincere expression of inspiration.