Sincerity Run Amok

On Ocean Vuong, Kaveh Akbar, and the Misguided War on Cynicism

Ocean Vuong in New York City, 2019, Photograph, Getty Images

It’s perhaps not surprising that American poetry’s A-listers have come, of late, to espouse sincerity as both writing practice and a way of discoursing about writing. Plenty of developments seemed to clear a path for this new wave of earnestness. There was Marc Kelly Smith, arguably the first “slam” poet; the proliferation of spoken word, or “performance” poetry; and the subsequent transformation of the open mic into the gestic, roaring soapbox that it is today. There was, beginning in 1996, National Poetry Month, which drew inspiration from Black History Month and Women’s History Month. And now, in a nod to all three, there is Amanda Gorman. There was always good and bad poetry, of course. But the tradition of making such judgments jarred somewhat with the new rationales. Out to tweak the dusty old guard sensibilities, some gestured at a kind of democratic protest: that poems of the day should serve a “shared social struggle” toward some abstractly better world, as in the 95¢ Skool. Others brought sharpened, thesis-ified manifestos and a litany of demands: that poems should register identity solidarities, resist oppression, tyranny, and the “delusions of whiteness,” as Cathy Park Hong once argued in the journal Lana Turner.

But the long arc of American sentimentality claims an altogether different purpose for poetry: clicks, snaps, growth markets, a little “Gin & Juice,” big feelings and even grander statements. Consider that poems, which are perhaps better suited to the attention economy than any other piece of written art, have become yet more fanciful gizmos of therapeutic earnestness — that everywhere radiating force which could be said to include things like self-help, spirituality, health and wellness, diversity, social justice, good vibes — a way to spiritedly sell that most time-honored of American brands: authenticity. Our true selves.

The point here isn’t to rehash that old debate between, on the one hand, a crusty, fizzled-out po-mo irony, and on the other, an ascendant clarion earnestness of feeling. One problem is apparent by that very sentence: the whole conversation has become so muddled that nobody knows what anybody’s talking about anymore. Just listen to Ocean Vuong, one of poetry’s darlings-turned-Late-Night-stars, whose public waxing about language, assimilation, and authorial rectitude during a recent book tour reveals his thinking about sincerity. In one recent interview, he describes the kind of writing he claims his students are up to, and the impediments they face:

They are absolutely scared of judgment. And so . . . they perform cynicism, because cynicism can be misread, as it often is, as intelligence. You’re disaffected, you’re too cool, you’ve seen it all. And so they pull back; but in fact, they are deeply hungry for sincere, earnest effort. They often do it privately; they don’t want to admit to each other that they’re actually trying really hard to do what they want to do.

Vuong goes on to say his students are afraid of “trying” — the thing he means by sincerity — because of an epidemic of “cringe,” apparently fueled by online trolls, critics, and other passers-through. It is then the teacher’s job, he says, to instruct the students essentially to be themselves, and not to judge the results. Let’s zoom in on this. It is true that every person who assumes the mantle of expert — who has something to teach — finds themselves offering moral support on occasion, even posturing about it. But if the very pressing issue at hand is about merely “trying,” and about liberation from others’ embarrassment, that whole line of thought trivializes what the students are there to do. What’s more, there’s something tangled up about it. They’re in the room, aren’t they? What’s insincere about that? And it would be odd to suggest that what Vuong calls “cynicism” and gestures thereof are any less sincere than what he imagines “underneath.” How does he know, exactly? It’s not clear from this snippet. But it makes you wonder. Has the elite workshop become one elaborate polygraph test, designed to sort fact from fiction, the truth about ourselves from elaborate projection? Taken at face value, all Vuong really manages to communicate here is the circular idea that writing craft needs to somehow reflect a writer’s naked grit and fanatical interest in being a writer. Whatever the stated goals of creative writing programs in the production of literary art, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to take his comments as further evidence of some perversion of purpose, for better or worse. They at least warrant further investigation.

One encounters this kind of doughy talk in myriad other places. Poet Kaveh Akbar, whose 2024 debut novel Martyr! won him acclaim comparable to Vuong’s, was asked in The Believer about why he thinks “spiritual and religious writing” — which, the interviewer couches, “offers some of the deepest considerations of the ineffable” — is “taboo” in our current secular moment. To which Akbar replies:

It’s out of style, certainly. The standard belief is that if you’re smart, you have to be cynical. There’s an equivalency of skepticism with intelligence, and of belief with naivete, which is the height of hubris to me — as if we have suddenly landed upon an intelligence heretofore unavailable to Milton or Rabi’ah.

Even as they attempt to dispense with “conventional wisdom,” both poets end up reconstructing the binary opposition between the skeptic or cynic, represented by a fancy intellect and aversion to feelings, and the earnest truth-teller who “speaks his passions.” Old foes, Akbar would appear to suggest, engaged in centuries of pitched battle. Faced with a Matrix-style choice, today’s young writers need only turn to the light. Sure, you want to make space for reverence, for a little bit more raw feeling — an understandable effort. But don’t throw out the proverbial baby, then say it’s the rest of us with the blood on our hands.

Elsewhere, writing about so-called “sacred poetry,” Akbar invokes sincerity so directly as to be bowled over by it: “What matters is the making of music and the sincerity of the making.” Whereas a rhetoric of sincerity serves, in Vuong’s case, as a way to safely mark his own classroom authority among vetted friends, it is, in Akbar’s estimation, a means of accessing the spiritual beyond. The irony with Akbar, of course, is that his own sincerity-speak pitches quickly into a parallel ether of mushy nonsense. He concludes the 2025 Blaney Lecture on Poetry and Spirituality, an annual series, with this bit of finery: “Embrace the mystery of earnest, mellifluous language. Embrace its infinite potential to thin the partition between us and the world we seek.”

To my mind, these mellifluous campaigns can be traced to the full-scale invasion of internet performance poetry, which happily marries Cathy Park Hong’s poetics of “social engagement” to an attention-content era’s fondness for quick-hit schmaltz and run-of-the-mill vanity. These poems are everywhere identifiable for that particular shine. And with all these literary brands running around in the media, the anointed poets increasingly find themselves as dispensers of cheap wisdom, producing, as part of a combined output, poems of fast-acting inspiration, and an accompanying misty side-gloss — the sort of fuzzy public commentaries that tend to pass for poetic insight. If it’s truly all vibes and delivery, per a certain content model, the poet, as part of his media training package, intuits that he is more mystic than littérateur, dishing out plastic profundities in a sugary catharsis of group kumbaya. If this sounds unfair, consider that other critics have noted as much. “Consumers are offered the image of art-making as a subgenre of celebrity,” writes David Schurman Wallace, adding that “the works of art themselves are allowed to remain laudable but forgettable byproducts.”

Vuong is a model of these forces scaled up, someone who’s plenty programmatic as a Hong torchbearer, but equally capable of being honeyed into sweet-sounding incoherence. In a 2017 interview with Literary Hub, he endorses a project of “questioning how the ways we value art can replicate very oppressive legacies we strive to end.” In that same interview, Vuong says he is interested in writing about the “physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being,” a statement so disinfected of irony that it might have been written on a medical intake form. I suspect poets were never this forward; not until this latest crop came to see poetry as stage performance, where gestures, displays of conviction, overt spectacle, and compelled visibility garner the kinds of attention, in our digital culture, that the quieter, less marketable techniques and innovations of the page never quite could. It is perhaps free verse taken to its logical conclusion.

Social media ushered in this sea change in the 2010s, cutting through the now-defunct blog-based subculture that often produced thoughtful discourse about the fragmented direction of American poetry. While academic schools and aesthetic traditions jockeyed for command over a slightly torpid avant-garde, “the various institutions that glued American poetry together were soaked in the solvent fluids of emergent social media,” writes Jasper Bernes. Displays of earnest self-disclosure and performative sincerity found their way into poetic modes popularized through the genre’s first real viral moment: the televisual spectacle of Button Poetry, “an independent publisher of performance poetry” that cultivated a less specialized audience with the stated corporate mission to build “new and powerful markets” for poetry. In this rapidly expanding digital pageant wagon, “performance” poets could be regularly seen on the tube, standing upright, yawping and kvetching, breaking down and fuming out and nailing oppressors to their cloying word-portraits. Responding to clear market signals, literary publishers, grant-making foundations, and prize committees quickly moved in to grab a piece of the action.

Indeed, it was Button Poetry that first propelled Vuong to prominence as the timidly earnest, always-on-the-verge-of-tears persona you can now find in the literary presses and their publicists’ hands. That’s thanks, in part, to recent appearances on Oprah, the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and in such far-flung organs as Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s program with Sarah Ferguson. In an interview with the New York Times’ David Marchese last year, things got so soppy when describing his experience working on a tobacco farm during his teenage years that Marchese — who ordinarily radiates the podcaster’s coached air of urbane, if slightly eggheaded fascination — asked Vuong if he could give him a hug.

Now, slam aesthetics have so thoroughly mixed with poetry meant for the page that much of what passes through reputable literary journals and magazines is imprinted with stagecraft, transforming literary experience into something akin to watching Broadway on television — or on an iPhone — instead of live. For some years now, the credo of “lived experience” has served as an aesthetic battle cry for conflicts once treated with far more subtlety under the confessionalists, and with a channeled reticence found in the epoch-defining work of John Ashbery on the heels of Elizabeth Bishop. “Ashbery’s natural shyness provided a corrective,” Wallace writes, to the drippy excesses of self-disclosure at the height of confessionalism: “The aesthete’s eye took over, and the collaging and curation of language became an original way of writing.” Charles Bernstein is more on the button in The Kinds of Poetry I Want: “His [Ashbery’s] greatness is connected to his poetics of aversion, deftness, deflection, humor, and above all, privacy.”

It is true that Ashbery famously resisted reading in front of audiences. The whole enterprise of translating page craft into public spectacle required a kind of ironic detachment, not least because Ashbery found his own work so outré. There are more than a couple of ways to think about Ashberian reticence, its origins, and ultimately its literary import. Here is Wallace again:

From one vantage, Ashbery’s indirections are a vestige of a less tolerant society that dissuaded him from more boldly claiming his sexual orientation. But maybe there is more to it than avoidance: there is a realization of the worth of experience not made too easily available for consumption.

Poets of the new digital front have little use for Ashbery’s aesthetics of privacy, just as they have little use for a generationally acclaimed artist who refused to “more boldly claim his sexual orientation.” Ashbery was, indeed, a “registered homosexual,” as John Vincent once put it not so long ago. Yes, let’s not erase the homosexual “content” from his poetry, but let’s also not flatten him so completely into a face you could print on a Pride shirt. Here is Vuong again, in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Harold Bloom praises John Ashbery’s work but in many ways ignores, or at worst rejects, his homosexuality, his queerness. We would know by reading the work that those things are intertwined — how can you separate one part of a writer from his text?” You get the sense that, for Vuong, Ashbery’s queerness has to be undivorceable from “the text.” That any “separation” risks a collision with the strange but sublimely indeterminate quality of Ashbery’s poetry, which, Bernstein notes, “is a kind of politics.” If the poet’s reticence is more a product of his temperament than a cover for queer anxiety, it might scare the britches off someone like Vuong to consider that Ashbery’s poems are about everything and nothing in particular — and that you could find enough pleasure in them without having considered the subtexts.

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Roughing out the long, complicated birth of the New Sincerity is a task best left to those equipped to do so — the Stephanie Burts of the world. I’m thinking of two events in particular from the larger backdrop that I want to discuss. One involves Robert Hass’ oft-cited “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a poem about the way abstraction feeds desire for the real (“one of the poems that can save you,” writes Pimone Triplett.) Hass was notably criticized by Michael Robbins in the pages of Poetry for his grating “preciousness.” (The poem, Robbins contends, “succumbs to [Hass’] fatal need to elevate everything to the phosphorescent plane of longing.”) More than just a precocious dig at the old master, this was a striking example of a much younger poet coming out and saying: “Actually, that made me cringe.”

Preciousness about the business-end of sex has attracted new practitioners, like Richie Hofmann who, following the erotic example of Richard Siken, leans heavily on what one critic describes as a kind of “lavender-scented aesthetics” — a sense of a little halo hovering above every word, with fragrant epiphanies to be found in each crevice. But Hofmann’s erotic frankness is marked by his own particular stagecraft. When I read the lines, “It’s not a tragedy that we couldn’t have a child. / I had a pain inside me / and I needed you to deepen it,” I think, The poet never intended this to be read without recourse to his vocal cords. Hofmann’s velvety reading voice, which so often accompanies his published poems, does the commendable work of making these lines palatable, guiding the reader’s attention away from the page to the physical poet-person. Hearing Hofmann is almost — but not quite — the explanation required for such treacle: the effect a good jingle has on bad lyrics. Again, you need a fearsome, surefire gimmick to carry you through lines like:

A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks—
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.

I was coming home from Gymnasium,
I was so sweaty from running,
we all were, we all ran into the sea,
its freshness,
we gargled the water, we threw it from our hair—

I washed my limbs in the waves,
and I heard him calling.

I didn’t want the other boys to see.

The other event I am thinking of is the publication of Claudia Rankine’s seminal Citizen: An American Lyric, a meditation on structural racism in America. No one disputes anymore that Citizen marked a turning point in American poetry: it put a stamp on the oblique protest lyric, obliterating a purely hedonistic reading for a shared, weight-of-the-world-type communing of sensitivities toward the plight of oppressed peoples, cultures, and traditions. (See, also, Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry, for the full effect.) To be sure, this kind of thing complements the open mic era’s brand of knock-’em-dead, stick-it-to-the-man balladeering: it likes to mutedly think through the various personal and structural infelicities the performance poets sound off about, only Rankine and her imitators don’t make nearly as much direct fuss. Rankine, in a quiet litany, illustrates this in trademark fashion:

The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

Rankine’s range is more expansive, so it would be unfair to peg her exclusively as the poet of antiracism and other forms of structural bad luck. But this act of inviting open inquiry into the state of things as foreclosed (“The world is wrong”) — that’s what the academics like to do when they take such and such as their object. Rankine is, if anything, an academic poet; and so, a great deal of what came next, and is still coming, under her influence — her seminal book-length poem, it should be noted, narrowly preceded Donald Trump’s golden escalator ride — is a poetry of bland erudition and smokily intoned analysis. At its most convincing, poets of this persuasion give us a huff of graduate seminar intellection. At its most unbearable, they convert, or rather regress, into full-blown dissertation-speak.

Take an example, from a recent issue of American Poetry Review, a poem titled “Future Grief,” which begins: “In late capitalism, we harvest our grief, / boil it down to the salt, which we keep / in glass jars and sprinkle on our meat.” After some noise and kumbayas, the poem ends: “In late capitalism, the bees almost disappeared / before we remembered their barbed stinger, / the work of being stung.” The poet, here Susan Nguyen, demonstrates she’s at least heard of Fredric Jameson, gathering extinction symbolism into a world-anxious metaphor (an obvious one at that). We see this a lot out there in the world of contemporary poetry: the personal “I” adopts the “critical-theoretical lens” as an exercise in signal-boosting. But Nguyen, eager to signal her sophistication, cramps her own style: the poem is just objectively better without the qualifying jargon. Many lyric poets feel compelled to layer on that little bit of discursive expertise over the personal and call it know-how. It’s more suggestive of bad imitation.

The tendencies of the last decade or so have had all the ingredients for a dominant, highly commercialized poetics that swings, on one end, from what Paul McAdory once described as “weepy disclosure and self-serious sentimentality,” to an equally dour, flavorless, theory-inflected essayism — one that operates in both hybrid-prose and the lyric line and hardly ever compromises the stakes for levity. Both modes are well-represented within the New Sincerity: one performs its earnestness in a mirage of life-or-death stagecraft, the other deals earnestly in the new troubling sociologies — the status of the “contemporary subject,” the “white canon,” the legacy of American racism (no doubt real and troubling), the potential for seemingly innocuous speech to perpetuate systems of oppression, and so on. It’s here that arguments for poetry’s social utility take form. (Recall Rankine’s own stern utilitarianism: “Not everything remembered is useful. . . .”) If a poem, much like an off-color greeting card or GIF, can contain microaggressions, then it must also possess the power to remedy the apprehended harm.

What are we talking about when we talk about sincerity and earnestness? If you tried to nail down Vuong & Co., you might hear something like this: the earnest writer strives for honest self-expression, avoiding, as they must, needless subterfuge and ornamentation. It’s that neat package of associations handed down to us, as Lionel Trilling pointed out, from that hot minute in Hamlet, in which Polonius, speaking to his son Laertes, delivers this famous bit of counsel: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” If we’re to follow the logic, it means somehow, despite all the trouble, getting at how to be authentic, honest, true to our feelings and ourselves. It means not running to the “métier of poetry,” as Eliot put it, to “literariness,” to the kind of depersonalized sophistication that is the basis of artifice, and which now could be said to evoke the hazy suspicion that one is concealing the plain truth, a truth we are all, as agents of the Sincerely Yours spirit of the age, called to keep watch over.

It’s a tall order coming after Trilling, who noted that the public practice of sincerity often leads paradoxically to inauthenticity; after Louise Glück, who demonstrated that sincerity and authenticity don’t necessarily follow from one another in the poetic line — that there is, perhaps, “an anxiety for formulas” driving our special interest in unmasking the speaker as the biographical poet; and especially after Christopher Lasch, who observed that irony had become the dominant cultural tendency (the “age of irony,” as the self-absorbed protagonist declares in Martin Amis’ debut novel, The Rachel Papers) in the postwar period. Lasch more than implies that postmodern irony is maladaptive excess; but 50 years of mass culture and consumption, of corporate consolidation and branding, has shown precisely why the ironic sensibility has had such staying power, and why performative sincerity — itself a cultural product — fails to persuade, let alone cohere. Irony is, if anything, sturdy equipment for living, a way to get to the truth of the matter and ourselves when sincerity is no longer an option. As the painter Eric Fischl once observed: “There’s nothing insincere about irony.” It’s precisely why so many of us prefer our daily dose of reality rinsed in Late Night laughs. It’s why we’d rather be sent memes than poems.

The paradox grows ever more monstrous in the age of social media, where brands appropriate the language of sincerity to sell all manner of products — not to mention, books. It seems to me as good a time as any to question the substance of folk like Vuong and Akbar. Whatever it means to embrace or embody the sincerity they gesture at involves “standing in complex relation” to the whole spectrum of human emotion which, to put it mildly, is mixed company at best.

Robert Frost had his own theory about sincerity, writing: “It is hard to define, but it is probably nothing more than your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead selves.” That “probably” is the most ironic part of the sentence — and the sincerest. A shrug of mystery, it transmits that shared sense of we really don’t know anything about it. But it precedes a phrase of such wrought specificity and quality (“your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead selves”) that we must double back, seized by the recognition of a complexity born of mixed feelings. Frost’s admission readies the ground for an educated guess, one permitted a flourish in the act of defying expectations. Without it — that is, the humility owed the subject — we’d know Frost was faking it.

Earnestness is no more a matter of turning up the bass to thump your brand of shred than it is participating in a creative writing workshop at, say, NYU, or choosing your daily wardrobe. It’s based, as Peter Campion once suggested, in the act of writing itself. In other words, it’s priced in, “it comes with the territory,” put it how you will. That doesn’t mean we, as writers, should have to forfeit sincere effort to get the feelings across: in art, those come through anyway, in every conceivable form.

To paraphrase Olivia Laing, cynicism is a way of protecting a cherished thing from those who would proclaim it too easily. If the cherished thing is literature — or politics, or family, or the idea of culture — then we might rightfully risk the charge of cynicism, of nostalgia, of whatever else, to maintain a deadly seriousness about it. That feels sincere enough.

Tanner Stening is a poet, critic, and journalist. His work has appeared in The Drift, Chicago Review, Fence, Poetry Northwest, The Brooklyn Review, and elsewhere. He works at Northeastern University and is rarely, sometimes occasionally, found (on X) @tstening90 and associated platforms.