Just gonna try to puzzle out some of my thoughts on this here.
I was going to reference some recent poems from Poetry Daily, but that website has keeled over unresponsive again, so never mind that.
It is the vogue in literary poems to use very cold, technical, bare-bones and factual language, and often to mimic or reference a more "formal" or "scientific" form of writing. I think "factual" is the best descriptor. Most contemporary literary poets' writing delivers every line and sentence as a fact—not "presents it as literal fact," but scrubs and scours it clean of the tonal and stylistic qualities that connote subjectivity, informality, or the "presence" of the writer's feelings and opinions.
As discussed in the posts linked above, literary poetry has an extreme preoccupation with trauma, particularly minorities' trauma, sexual violence, and climate despair.
Publishers of literary poetry are very, very conscious of the material they publish as social commentary and as "platforming" the "voices" of specific groups.
Literary poetry values, praises, and rewards "vulnerability" and "authenticity."
The previous 3 things are related to each other.
Vulnerable and authentic are so ingrained as complimentary to an artist that I feel I have to remind everybody that it's possible to ask: Why are either of these things important or desirable in a piece of art?
"Authentic" implies the existence of something the art is authentic to. I think we all automatically "get" that it means the artist—that the art is presenting "authentic" insight or information about its artist, that it is the artist being "real" with the audience.
There are some limited circumstances where this could be important—an artist could reference their own experiences with difficult, complicated, potentially shameful emotions and thoughts about something and therefore be able to handle it with great sensitivity and offer comfort by virtue of having "been there"—but generally speaking, why the fuck do we want this?
A crucial part of the job of being an artist is the inauthenticity. The job of being an artist is to create something that did not exist before, to imagine and build and extrapolate outside of reality, to enter experiences that are fully outside your own. The central axiomatic premise of art, the whole idea, is that humans can add something to the universe that did not exist before, something that can be experienced just as reality can be, and that this experience can be not only as powerful as reality, but even more powerful. As a writer, I create the experiences of people who are nothing like me—prisoners, refugees, socialites, shamans, assassins, scientists, people of a different gender, age, religion, and cultural background. My main characters have radically different personalities than I do; they make decisions I would not make. Every good writer can capture experiences that they have never had in a way that is not only like the real thing, but is itself a "real thing." I'm not lying. This is just a straightforward description of the job.
In literary poetry, however, poets are expected to write "as" themselves, and they are judged on their utility as vessels for experiences that can be "authentically" transmitted to poetry. The presence of minority poets in literary magazines has an initial whiff of social and personal benevolence, but it sours as it becomes apparent how these poets are used—as the lenses of a voyeuristic microscope that turns their marginalization and especially their trauma into a product, a consumable thing that is profound because it is painful and offers a pleasant buzz of social awareness and self-indulgent empathy because it happened to a real person. Obviously this problem is not exclusive to literary poetry, but it is such a plague there that the entire category is turning rancid.
I think we should be honest with ourselves and recognize that "vulnerability" is a barbaric thing to want and expect from an artist. To be entirely honest, I would hope that artists I enjoy feel safe from me, not vulnerable to me; I hope that their art stimulates healing, curiosity, catharsis, and play, and that their needs for privacy and comfort by default take precedence over any imagined obligation to bare delicate and deeply personal suffering to an audience. As the audience to a piece of art, I am not entitled to authenticity or vulnerability from the artist. Some of my favorite artists create deeply personal art drawn from their own pain and I have clung to that art for survival, but I don't mistake it for a faithful outline of the shit they discuss with their therapist.
In literary magazines, I read so many highly graphic descriptions of writers' trauma that I'm pretty sure it would have made anyone's mental state worse. These poems and essays were often deeply, piercingly vulnerable, and often extremely disjointed, stream-of-consciousness writing that was nakedly autobiographical but at the same time displayed the "factual" style that is overtaking literary poetry like kudzu. A Black lesbian poet describes a flashback to her sexual assault in blank, cold lines that might as well be in a scientific journal; a woman outlines her traumatic experience with childbirth with medical specificity, weaving it together with (literal) encyclopedia excerpts and journal articles, describing how her body was touched and torn. Rape, abuse, violence, being called slurs, it goes on and on and the journals seem to revel in highlighting the most traumatic accounts of belonging to marginalized groups. Every poem about something innocuous or joyful seems to be written by a white dude, and "joyful" is a strong word for literally anything found there.
I hate the magazines for seeking and prioritizing graphic trauma dumps over anything else. I don't blame the poets. But I won't lie and say the trauma dumps were good art—they were so often written in such a blank, emotionless, "factual" style that I was left feeling disturbed, hopeless, and sick, as if I had just experienced the writer's utter lack of compassion toward themselves as the subject.
Being vulnerable (which is common) is a completely different thing than being sincere (which is nowhere to be found). Poems that aren't trauma dumps are mostly wank sessions of people obsessed with how intellectual they are. And I think poets that aren't actually self-absorbed as people end up here because of the homogenization of style in literary poetry—scientific vocabulary colorfully seeded in and multiple cross-references to a jarring variety of ideas and famous books/essays/people are practically required. On some level I've started to think that a high level of polish almost inevitably leads to a poem sounding pseudointellectual and contrived, because of the messiness and cliche of all real, genuinely articulated sentiment.
Literary poets end up writing like scientific journal articles because they completely reject being "present" in their own poems to feel and respond, and this is because the real, powerful passions of being human are almost innately dorky and cliche—your experience of pain or wonder is not unique, and you are not articulate and smart and cool when you are feeling. When you care, when you feel, well, that's cringe.
There is a post somewhere on here about how the root of "cringe" is sincerity. I think this is true of poetry—the edgy poems a depressed teenager writes are cringe. Poems about love and flowers and spring are cringe. It is cliche, almost unacceptable, to write about the beauty of the natural world. Nothing is more cringe than happiness.
And likewise, it is also cringe to acknowledge trauma as something painful that you didn't deserve and should be angry about—to give yourself the compassion that is human. That gives the narrative too much of a "conclusion," stealing away the ambiguity that all Deep(tm) literature ends on. And, I think, it robs readers of a kind of voyeuristic free rein they feel entitled to. Your own consciousness that you were wronged, your own progress toward healing, it diminishes the "raw" confessional potency of the trauma and the social commentary it appears to provide.
I think a vast wasteland of unreadably bad poetry might be the natural result of a long-term effort to seek, refine and publish a body of "good" poetry. Poetry is a paradoxical art because if you read lots of it you get drawn to novelty and abstruseness; you want the meaning to be even more indeterminate, the combinations of words even more unexpected, but you must inevitably backtrack into being a little too obvious, a little cliche, a little messy, in order to be actually understandable to others. The cliche threshold of literary poetry is presently so low that any understandable common thread, consistent image, or entity that persists for more than 3 lines of a poem makes it too clear and predictable for editors conditioned to respond exclusively to combinations of words that are equally comprehensible to consecutive results of pointing randomly into a dictionary.
