Objectivism in the afternoon

I spent a lot of this afternoon waiting in Haringey Council offices for a booklet of parking permits; friend S is visiting tomorrow night and I left various things to do until the last minute, foolishly. I always feel guilty if I'm not working during working hours, no matter how many extra hours I've been putting in at night or over weekends. But according to today's Daily Wail, in an article written by Lionel Shriver, most women feel guilty all the time because of just about anything, so I suppose I'm fitting the mould there. It's horrible to feel tense though, counting the hours and the minutes. I had over an hour waiting in there and by the end of it lacked the good grace even to smile at a couple of small children running round and clearly wanting my attention for some reason. I kept my eyes down on the form I had to fill in.

The rest of the time I told myself to make the best of things so another American Poetry book of essays out of my bag and read. Objectivism, mainly situated in Thirties America, is located a bit earlier than the period I'm lecturing on but I'm attempting to fill in the gaps in my literary history there as well as use the awkward gaps of half-available time. This on the Objectivists from Christopher Beech: The Objectivists ...used the idea of sincerity as an ethical or political directive...For them, sincerity connoted a commitment to their social and political situation.' He explains further by showing that poet George Oppen claimed the Objectivist poetic of sincerity could be opposed to traditional post-Romantic poetics, primarily for the 'delectation of the reader,' and the poem should convey nothing extraneous to 'the poet's attempt to find his place in the world'. It was the truthfulness of the poet's language that would be the ultimate test of his sincerity: 'there is a moment, an actual time, when you believe something to be true, and you construct a meaning from these moments of conviction' .

I thought about this: 'moments of conviction'. It makes everything seems very simple. Even if the moments of conviction don't last without erosions or mutations engendered by changing situations and the passing of time, I like the clarity of poetic vocation suggested by such an injunction. A sort of micro-manifesto. Can it be translated to the twenty-first century, well into (beyond?) the post modern age where certainty and sincerity are routinely shied away from, mocked, at best subverted? Does the women's perspective (guilt ridden as it is) attest to a different place, a lack or multitude of places in the world? Or are these moments of conviction philosophical adjuncts to Wordsworth's spots of time, where imagination and perception of nature are interfused in moments of lingering clarity.

This all opens up examination of what makes a 'sincere' poem too. Should all poems be sincere – or can they just be linguistic play. Well ideally they should be both, I would assume...Finally, is there any connection to the 'art of blogging' (which I have so sadly neglected of late – more guilt) in that it should be possible to find 'moments of conviction' in individual posts which go towards construction of some sort of meaning, unknown at the time and perhaps always to the blogger herself.