We all can sympathize with a sentimental (read: sincere) gesture–but such earnest gestures often account for terrible writing. It isn’t hard to imagine a writer’s attempts to get a particularly lovely sunset into line breaks; sunsets just aren’t easy to write about well. Such is the paradox of art. I cried when the dogs die at the end of Where The Red Fern Grows–but I recognize that move now as formulaic and grossly over-engineered, and that my emotions were more automatic than surprising. (Robert Frost has famously stated “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” It is clear Frost wasn’t prepared to account for sixth graders, who are wildly susceptible to tears.)
For this sincerity business, I propose the Tony Hoagland Solution: find an original version of his excellent essay “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People” here, first published by American Poetry Review. The essay is also reprinted in his book Real Sofistikashun. (Hoagland’s cartoonish puns, incidentally, always charm. If you met one at a dinner party, it would be wearing a giant red nose and over-sized patent-leather shoes.)
Meanness, as it were, survives the transcription from the real world to the page, for reasons why a warmer gesture often waffles–as Hoagland suggests, meanness breaks a huge social rule. It hustles logic. It just isn’t okay to be openly mean all the time. And rule-breaking–as a rule–gets our attention. Check the newspapers.
It is easier to write a powerful poem that enters the world with fangs than it is to write a powerful poem that comes bearing hugs. If you think I’m pulling your leg, try it.
And for the record, what the examples in Hoagland’s essay teach me is something slightly different than his essay suggests. Each of the cited poems have a subtlety–dare I say they are delicate– in that they are arranged. (Not collage, which has little narrative force–these poems progress; as such, they have a bit of fragility about them.) Their subtleties belie their brutalities. Such qualities–to be subtle or brutal–are often mutually exclusive qualities; to be both is a triumph of content and form. Meanness in writing lends itself to that chimeric place: to be both subtle and brutal in the same moment. It can be moving, and often oddly beautiful.