Sincerity Run Amok

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.