Mr. Stening: Your piece never recovers from a critical structural problem and so your argument fails.
When you want to praise, you quote the text: Ashbery's lines, Frost's sentences, Bernstein's formulations. When you want to indict Ocean Vuong or Cathy Park Hong, you zoom out to an interview, a national TV appearance, a workshop anecdote. You never open Night Sky with Exit Wounds and show us, line by line, where the performative sincerity you diagnose in the public persona shows up in the poems.
Is this an oversight? I doubt it.
Rather, it suggests your real objection is to these Asian American writers' cultural positioning rather than their literary work, which is a different and considerably harder argument to make.
You borrow authorities at the end of the piece, and in doing so, expose yourself, in an attempt to have your Campion and Laing analysis do the work of proving the contradiction rather than announcing it in advance. Peter Campion's point, that earnestness comes with the territory of writing itself, doesn't support your argument. It dissolves it. If sincerity is simply priced into the act, then Vuong and Akbar are not guilty of anything you haven't already absolved. And the Olivia Laing paraphrase is more revealing still. You invoke her generosity of spirit, her willingness to protect a cherished thing, in the very same essay that refuses to extend that generosity to poets whose work you never actually read closely enough to fairly indict. The conclusion borrows a warmth that nothing preceding it has earned.
During AAPI Heritage Month, consider what your corrective actually proposes. The poetics of privacy you champion (Ashbery, Glück, Bernstein) was never equally available to everyone. For many AAPI writers, visibility was not an aesthetic indulgence or a capitulation to the attention economy. It was the first foothold in a tradition that had long treated their experience as invisible or marginal.
To hold up a tradition as a neutral aesthetic standard, without acknowledging its own cultural specificity, is not a critical judgment. It’s a preference disguised in borrowed clothes.
You conclude that cynicism is a way of protecting a cherished thing. But a harder more intersting question sits beneath: Who has historically decided what is worth cherishing, and at whose expense?
Thank you, Ms. Jura for a more full, attentive and well written response than I personally was capable of forming in the moments after reading. I found it at the very least suspect that Mr. Stening typifies all this pernicious sincerity in the work of three poets of color and the influence of slam and spoken word, which have their roots in Black poetics. I wasn’t particularly relieved of my suspicions when he went on to describe —“ironically” no doubt—racism as “historic bad luck.” (forgive me if I’ve botched the exact wording, I’m on my phone.) I may be over personally invested in the poetics of sincerity: I did my MFA degree at Randolph College, where Kaveh Akbar is often on faculty. But more than that, as a mentally ill survivor of psychiatry, I am more than tired of being told I am feeling too much, too vulnerable in my prose, too earnest in my writing. Mr. Stening does his level best to conceal his disgust for the pained and punished of this world. He fails.
Logic, thought in addition to feeling, versatility, writing in various tones, moods and narrative voices and about different subjects are not a Western or any "ern" cultural imperative or attribute.
Nor is melodrama. Lasky was doing "heart on your sleeve" earlier - she isn't Asian. Perhaps the greatest poet in history, if we had to pick one, was Asian (Basho) but was typically anything but "heart on the sleeve."
Cherishing versatility and virtuosity doesn't come at anyone's expense, and the topic isn't related to culture other than the question of whether an individual is "sincere" only if one tears his or her heart out and does so in a respect that relates to "identity."
Identity and personal/cultural baggage is material upon which to draw, but if it's the only thing you do, it gets tedious. I don't know whether you like or dislike my poetry but I guarantee you that you would like it less if it was 100% hyperdrive emotional first person narrative about alcoholism, religious intolerance, sexual self-repression and centuries of mistreatment by the Brits. First, it's been done, and overdone. Second, monotony is tedious to read. Third, even if the first few were great, repeating the formula, any formula, doesn't require the same talent as inventing a formula. Miles didn't stay with bop or cool jazz or modal... He moved on to Bitches Brew - with a band full of people from everywhere. The tenth or eleventh time someone tears his heart out to demonstrate sincerity, one may question whether the person is actually sincere. That applies to this entire "movement" - not just this poet in particular.
Also, performance oriented "sincerity" isn't "New" - there was a Beavis episode about it 35 years ago.
And Beavis did it best - we could "feel the pain" of not having any T.P.
Oh dear. Little did I know. On the other hand, everything you say is true, but it's awful. I didn't think Stening invoked Ashbery, Glück and Bernstein to "champion" them. But,
Have it your way...
The world is ugly
And the people are sad.
from GUBBINAL, Wallace Stevens, p85 in The Collected Poems, if you have it handy. Gubbins are pitiful scraps or leftovers, to which a GUBBINAL is an implicitly bitter hymn. In the immortal words of Mister Natural, "Don't ask and you won't have to be told."
Not sure exactly what but, the tone of this piece is off. The type of writing when platformed makes me wonder who is meant to exit the room, or knows to stay, after reading.
They are opposites though. The issue isn't whether there is a place and use and value to heart-on-the-sleeve drama, but whether heart-on-the-sleeve personal drama - issued "directly" (which appears to mean "absent any other thought or subject") is the only legitimate or genuine product. There are other examples of this "New Sincerity" and it isn't more sincere than other poetry, isn't original and becomes tedious as does anything that isn't followed up with something else.
I really wanted to like Kaveh Akbar's novel, which had some interesting moments, but ultimately I think the book just didn't work in part due to reasons outlined here.
I enjoyed this because it made me uncomfortable. More than anything it forced me to ask whether I love certain writers for their sincerity or for their attention. Whether writing preserves or performs. Whether cynicism merely sounds intelligent. I left with more questions than answers, which is usually a good sign. I would say though, this spent enough time poking at sincerity that I started questioning my own reading habits. I need good habits
It doesn't appear to be a matter of not liking the style but more a matter of not liking the presumptions that accompany the promotion of this style and not liking monotony. Personally, I am a Rip Van Winkle - I wrote and published in college in the 1980s and then I had to pursue more practical endeavors to pay the bills, and for various reasons had to stay in that lane for 35 years - I neither wrote nor read any new poetry until 2024. I read poetry on the train - everything from classical to Shakespeare to Basho to modernists and beyond. What I enjoyed was the intellectual depth, not just the emotional sense - the fact that I would come up with new realizations every time I thought of or re-read the piece - and the variety. The concept of a poet always writing in his or her personal voice, telling his or her personal story, making it more of a diary, without anything else going on, was an anathema. There's the monotony. There's the simplicity, which we euphemistically call "directness." There's the telling rather than showing. There's the unwillingness or inability or lack of interest in exploring any other topic. 80 poems about X and only X, always in style Y, in the narrative voice of Z, the writer, rarely makes a good book. It isn't just, or mostly, this poet or even this "movement" - it's the entire approach of "finding your voice" and not knowing much about anything besides writing and oneself. It's narcissistic and boring and it honestly looks like writing that wouldn't have gotten the writer into a college level writing class in the '80s. When I first started reading the new poetry two years ago, I thought I had woken up on "Opposite Day." I don't know when this 180 took place but it hadn't taken place when my last pieces were published in college in 1990. It doesn't mean that the style is "bad" or lacks a purpose - I have a few (though the narrator isn't myself and is usually suffering a breakdown or personal crisis or is angry about something other than my personal baggage). But there is something gimmicky about it - it's all chase scene. There isn't any room, even if one wants to see the action, for assembling the Dominoes and then tipping them - or not tipping them. And that's harder to pull off. It requires and exhibits more talent. What matters is the reader's experience- not the writer's. The reader's experience is deeper when the reader is brought into it and shown, not told. Even if you love the chase scene, it works because of all the other scenes that built to it. New Sincerity doesn't do that.
I not sure you understand my comment. I DO like some of the poems. But we have with this "movement" - even in its name - the idea that what is "not" that type is "insincere." Inherent in this argument is a notion of "privilege" - which has some truth to it (almost everyone who majored in creative writing and then went straight to MFA in writing -which I only recently discovered didn't necessarily provide any discussion of art history or the ideas underlying and discussed in most art for hundreds of years-means you come from money and/or married into it and never got your hands dirty and don't have much material upon which to draw - or it means you're Rodolfo but you made it, like Pucchini). Ironically that crowd laid down many of the new "opposite day" tenets that disappoint me, but those tenets are still core to New Sincerity. The lack of layers of meaning, metaphor, symbolism, engagement with anything about culture and history other than one's personal beefs, and lack of versatility- making the entire debate frustrating for me personally. I don't have an MFA - I always worked a day job and I had to pursue the practical bourgeois path until I had some freedom to reengage with what is a very different medium - I will end up fairly widely published (and it's not been a year since I started submitting) but I get the sense that the genre is broken up into journals that print X style. And X is limiting. There's always some core grouping going on, but the narrowness of it today is surprising- as is the apparent agreement on first person narrative with the writer as narrator. Versatility today seems to be viewed like MPD. At any rate, that's the real issue- why must one write this way or that way when the ability to do both, and seven other things, is more interesting, productive and difficult - especially when it's more likely to be exhibited by people who did not come from the privilege required to obtain the advanced degree in writing (and only writing) right out of college).... ? To sum, I like some New Sincerity poems and have applied lessons learned from a practitioner - if there's a book of forty poems and 2-3 stories, a few of the poems will look like this to an extent. It won't be 40 of anything- that's boring and doesn't require as much talent. Even if you play one instrument, you don't play the same type of song or stick to only one composer. Imagine if Yo Yo Ma played only Bach! That doesn't mean I don't love his second cello concerto - I do, and reference it in one of my poems- it means don't do one thing and then proclaim that thing to be more sincere than other things. It isn't. And after a while, the lack of a second act says something. "That's easy for you to say" is neither accurate in my case nor relevant.
Help me understand: “Consider that poems, which are perhaps better suited to the attention economy than any other piece of written art,…”
How so? Because they are short?
It takes a lot of attention to appreciate Ashbery, and quite frankly I can’t imagine anyone giving themselves to his poetry while scrolling through a feed.
I found this essay as uncomfortable to read as Vuong’s work. Vuong didn’t land for me, but this sort of criticism feels performative in its own right. The essays claims it doesn’t wish to dissolve into the dichotomy of earnestness vs cynicism and ends up doing so.
I’ve never understood (or cared) to partake in any of the Discourse™️ around Ocean Vuong, or any of his ilk. I’m never really sure what critics are indicting him for; and I am very fond of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. However! This really precisely names a phenomena that puts me off of many contemporary writers; the “lavender scented”, the gauzy writer who is writing to affirm and express their authentic lived experience etc etc. Thank you for writing something so articulate, cited, and leveled. I appreciate being given a thinker of a piece to read!
I think Oscar Wilde might be apt here: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”
Interesting that the 'sincere' writers, who are always attacked, are usually POC or immigrant. It’s almost like ya’ll got something against our stories.
Thank you Tanner Stening for your intelligent, courageous and encouraging essay, clear and cogent. Yet whenever I feel this way--didn't Yeats write a poem somewhere about "Poets of the Cheddar Cheese?" Perhaps with Mother Goose in mind, or Old MacDonald's Farm, where the Rat, ach, ALWAYS winds up with it, and then stands alone. C'est mois, tois? I don't know. Mother Goose, you remember, when she wanted to wander, would straddle the back of a mighty fine gander. Was a safe landing guaranteed? It's natural for the pained and punished to tightly circle their wagons when they sense in the cry of the wind the war whoops of more and more actual abuse. I don't have your courage. It's why I write poems, and try to bury my rancor in compassionate allegory and deliberate, ironically confessed confusion. The desperate in tightly circled wagons traveling all the way west, didn't complain for a generation or two if the indiginous were brutally extirpated. Have you read Peter Sloterdijk's CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON? It clarified many of my suspicions.
Mr. Stening: Your piece never recovers from a critical structural problem and so your argument fails.
When you want to praise, you quote the text: Ashbery's lines, Frost's sentences, Bernstein's formulations. When you want to indict Ocean Vuong or Cathy Park Hong, you zoom out to an interview, a national TV appearance, a workshop anecdote. You never open Night Sky with Exit Wounds and show us, line by line, where the performative sincerity you diagnose in the public persona shows up in the poems.
Is this an oversight? I doubt it.
Rather, it suggests your real objection is to these Asian American writers' cultural positioning rather than their literary work, which is a different and considerably harder argument to make.
You borrow authorities at the end of the piece, and in doing so, expose yourself, in an attempt to have your Campion and Laing analysis do the work of proving the contradiction rather than announcing it in advance. Peter Campion's point, that earnestness comes with the territory of writing itself, doesn't support your argument. It dissolves it. If sincerity is simply priced into the act, then Vuong and Akbar are not guilty of anything you haven't already absolved. And the Olivia Laing paraphrase is more revealing still. You invoke her generosity of spirit, her willingness to protect a cherished thing, in the very same essay that refuses to extend that generosity to poets whose work you never actually read closely enough to fairly indict. The conclusion borrows a warmth that nothing preceding it has earned.
During AAPI Heritage Month, consider what your corrective actually proposes. The poetics of privacy you champion (Ashbery, Glück, Bernstein) was never equally available to everyone. For many AAPI writers, visibility was not an aesthetic indulgence or a capitulation to the attention economy. It was the first foothold in a tradition that had long treated their experience as invisible or marginal.
To hold up a tradition as a neutral aesthetic standard, without acknowledging its own cultural specificity, is not a critical judgment. It’s a preference disguised in borrowed clothes.
You conclude that cynicism is a way of protecting a cherished thing. But a harder more intersting question sits beneath: Who has historically decided what is worth cherishing, and at whose expense?
Thank you, Ms. Jura for a more full, attentive and well written response than I personally was capable of forming in the moments after reading. I found it at the very least suspect that Mr. Stening typifies all this pernicious sincerity in the work of three poets of color and the influence of slam and spoken word, which have their roots in Black poetics. I wasn’t particularly relieved of my suspicions when he went on to describe —“ironically” no doubt—racism as “historic bad luck.” (forgive me if I’ve botched the exact wording, I’m on my phone.) I may be over personally invested in the poetics of sincerity: I did my MFA degree at Randolph College, where Kaveh Akbar is often on faculty. But more than that, as a mentally ill survivor of psychiatry, I am more than tired of being told I am feeling too much, too vulnerable in my prose, too earnest in my writing. Mr. Stening does his level best to conceal his disgust for the pained and punished of this world. He fails.
Logic, thought in addition to feeling, versatility, writing in various tones, moods and narrative voices and about different subjects are not a Western or any "ern" cultural imperative or attribute.
Nor is melodrama. Lasky was doing "heart on your sleeve" earlier - she isn't Asian. Perhaps the greatest poet in history, if we had to pick one, was Asian (Basho) but was typically anything but "heart on the sleeve."
Cherishing versatility and virtuosity doesn't come at anyone's expense, and the topic isn't related to culture other than the question of whether an individual is "sincere" only if one tears his or her heart out and does so in a respect that relates to "identity."
Identity and personal/cultural baggage is material upon which to draw, but if it's the only thing you do, it gets tedious. I don't know whether you like or dislike my poetry but I guarantee you that you would like it less if it was 100% hyperdrive emotional first person narrative about alcoholism, religious intolerance, sexual self-repression and centuries of mistreatment by the Brits. First, it's been done, and overdone. Second, monotony is tedious to read. Third, even if the first few were great, repeating the formula, any formula, doesn't require the same talent as inventing a formula. Miles didn't stay with bop or cool jazz or modal... He moved on to Bitches Brew - with a band full of people from everywhere. The tenth or eleventh time someone tears his heart out to demonstrate sincerity, one may question whether the person is actually sincere. That applies to this entire "movement" - not just this poet in particular.
Also, performance oriented "sincerity" isn't "New" - there was a Beavis episode about it 35 years ago.
And Beavis did it best - we could "feel the pain" of not having any T.P.
👏🏻 👏🏻 👏🏻
tom crewe gets into vuong's text in a recent, equally scathing essay. pretty much supports the argument here.
Oh dear. Little did I know. On the other hand, everything you say is true, but it's awful. I didn't think Stening invoked Ashbery, Glück and Bernstein to "champion" them. But,
Have it your way...
The world is ugly
And the people are sad.
from GUBBINAL, Wallace Stevens, p85 in The Collected Poems, if you have it handy. Gubbins are pitiful scraps or leftovers, to which a GUBBINAL is an implicitly bitter hymn. In the immortal words of Mister Natural, "Don't ask and you won't have to be told."
do none of these people realise that irony adds humour and richness to sincere utterances, rather than defeating them?
Not sure exactly what but, the tone of this piece is off. The type of writing when platformed makes me wonder who is meant to exit the room, or knows to stay, after reading.
These potentially non-dueling approaches to poetry (to literature in general) are hereby made into binary, oppositional movements.
They are opposites though. The issue isn't whether there is a place and use and value to heart-on-the-sleeve drama, but whether heart-on-the-sleeve personal drama - issued "directly" (which appears to mean "absent any other thought or subject") is the only legitimate or genuine product. There are other examples of this "New Sincerity" and it isn't more sincere than other poetry, isn't original and becomes tedious as does anything that isn't followed up with something else.
I agree, but I didn't see Vuong throw down a gauntlet.
Great piece!
I really wanted to like Kaveh Akbar's novel, which had some interesting moments, but ultimately I think the book just didn't work in part due to reasons outlined here.
I enjoyed this because it made me uncomfortable. More than anything it forced me to ask whether I love certain writers for their sincerity or for their attention. Whether writing preserves or performs. Whether cynicism merely sounds intelligent. I left with more questions than answers, which is usually a good sign. I would say though, this spent enough time poking at sincerity that I started questioning my own reading habits. I need good habits
This article is at least 3 years late
Today's earnest, pseudo religious writers can be seen as descendants of Rod McKuen, who took his share of razzing back in the day.
when you dislike a style of poetry isn't the best reply just to offer a poem you think is better?
It doesn't appear to be a matter of not liking the style but more a matter of not liking the presumptions that accompany the promotion of this style and not liking monotony. Personally, I am a Rip Van Winkle - I wrote and published in college in the 1980s and then I had to pursue more practical endeavors to pay the bills, and for various reasons had to stay in that lane for 35 years - I neither wrote nor read any new poetry until 2024. I read poetry on the train - everything from classical to Shakespeare to Basho to modernists and beyond. What I enjoyed was the intellectual depth, not just the emotional sense - the fact that I would come up with new realizations every time I thought of or re-read the piece - and the variety. The concept of a poet always writing in his or her personal voice, telling his or her personal story, making it more of a diary, without anything else going on, was an anathema. There's the monotony. There's the simplicity, which we euphemistically call "directness." There's the telling rather than showing. There's the unwillingness or inability or lack of interest in exploring any other topic. 80 poems about X and only X, always in style Y, in the narrative voice of Z, the writer, rarely makes a good book. It isn't just, or mostly, this poet or even this "movement" - it's the entire approach of "finding your voice" and not knowing much about anything besides writing and oneself. It's narcissistic and boring and it honestly looks like writing that wouldn't have gotten the writer into a college level writing class in the '80s. When I first started reading the new poetry two years ago, I thought I had woken up on "Opposite Day." I don't know when this 180 took place but it hadn't taken place when my last pieces were published in college in 1990. It doesn't mean that the style is "bad" or lacks a purpose - I have a few (though the narrator isn't myself and is usually suffering a breakdown or personal crisis or is angry about something other than my personal baggage). But there is something gimmicky about it - it's all chase scene. There isn't any room, even if one wants to see the action, for assembling the Dominoes and then tipping them - or not tipping them. And that's harder to pull off. It requires and exhibits more talent. What matters is the reader's experience- not the writer's. The reader's experience is deeper when the reader is brought into it and shown, not told. Even if you love the chase scene, it works because of all the other scenes that built to it. New Sincerity doesn't do that.
okay, but think of ezra: when he didn’t like what people were liking he didn’t go on about not liking it, he did something else
I not sure you understand my comment. I DO like some of the poems. But we have with this "movement" - even in its name - the idea that what is "not" that type is "insincere." Inherent in this argument is a notion of "privilege" - which has some truth to it (almost everyone who majored in creative writing and then went straight to MFA in writing -which I only recently discovered didn't necessarily provide any discussion of art history or the ideas underlying and discussed in most art for hundreds of years-means you come from money and/or married into it and never got your hands dirty and don't have much material upon which to draw - or it means you're Rodolfo but you made it, like Pucchini). Ironically that crowd laid down many of the new "opposite day" tenets that disappoint me, but those tenets are still core to New Sincerity. The lack of layers of meaning, metaphor, symbolism, engagement with anything about culture and history other than one's personal beefs, and lack of versatility- making the entire debate frustrating for me personally. I don't have an MFA - I always worked a day job and I had to pursue the practical bourgeois path until I had some freedom to reengage with what is a very different medium - I will end up fairly widely published (and it's not been a year since I started submitting) but I get the sense that the genre is broken up into journals that print X style. And X is limiting. There's always some core grouping going on, but the narrowness of it today is surprising- as is the apparent agreement on first person narrative with the writer as narrator. Versatility today seems to be viewed like MPD. At any rate, that's the real issue- why must one write this way or that way when the ability to do both, and seven other things, is more interesting, productive and difficult - especially when it's more likely to be exhibited by people who did not come from the privilege required to obtain the advanced degree in writing (and only writing) right out of college).... ? To sum, I like some New Sincerity poems and have applied lessons learned from a practitioner - if there's a book of forty poems and 2-3 stories, a few of the poems will look like this to an extent. It won't be 40 of anything- that's boring and doesn't require as much talent. Even if you play one instrument, you don't play the same type of song or stick to only one composer. Imagine if Yo Yo Ma played only Bach! That doesn't mean I don't love his second cello concerto - I do, and reference it in one of my poems- it means don't do one thing and then proclaim that thing to be more sincere than other things. It isn't. And after a while, the lack of a second act says something. "That's easy for you to say" is neither accurate in my case nor relevant.
I ‘ll say it another way: you’re putting a lot of energy into grumbling. so now that you’ve had your grumble can you let it go?
Help me understand: “Consider that poems, which are perhaps better suited to the attention economy than any other piece of written art,…”
How so? Because they are short?
It takes a lot of attention to appreciate Ashbery, and quite frankly I can’t imagine anyone giving themselves to his poetry while scrolling through a feed.
I found this essay as uncomfortable to read as Vuong’s work. Vuong didn’t land for me, but this sort of criticism feels performative in its own right. The essays claims it doesn’t wish to dissolve into the dichotomy of earnestness vs cynicism and ends up doing so.
I’ve never understood (or cared) to partake in any of the Discourse™️ around Ocean Vuong, or any of his ilk. I’m never really sure what critics are indicting him for; and I am very fond of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. However! This really precisely names a phenomena that puts me off of many contemporary writers; the “lavender scented”, the gauzy writer who is writing to affirm and express their authentic lived experience etc etc. Thank you for writing something so articulate, cited, and leveled. I appreciate being given a thinker of a piece to read!
I think Oscar Wilde might be apt here: "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”
Interesting that the 'sincere' writers, who are always attacked, are usually POC or immigrant. It’s almost like ya’ll got something against our stories.
So glad to read the knowledgeable responses here. The review really rankled me.
Thank you Tanner Stening for your intelligent, courageous and encouraging essay, clear and cogent. Yet whenever I feel this way--didn't Yeats write a poem somewhere about "Poets of the Cheddar Cheese?" Perhaps with Mother Goose in mind, or Old MacDonald's Farm, where the Rat, ach, ALWAYS winds up with it, and then stands alone. C'est mois, tois? I don't know. Mother Goose, you remember, when she wanted to wander, would straddle the back of a mighty fine gander. Was a safe landing guaranteed? It's natural for the pained and punished to tightly circle their wagons when they sense in the cry of the wind the war whoops of more and more actual abuse. I don't have your courage. It's why I write poems, and try to bury my rancor in compassionate allegory and deliberate, ironically confessed confusion. The desperate in tightly circled wagons traveling all the way west, didn't complain for a generation or two if the indiginous were brutally extirpated. Have you read Peter Sloterdijk's CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON? It clarified many of my suspicions.