The poems of John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Ron Silliman may seem to offer endless small details of expression, observation, thought and narrative which fail to hang together even from one line to the next. But as Elina Siltanen shows here, this extraordinary flow of uncoordinated detail can stimulate readers to join the poets in a delightful exploration of ordinary language. When readers take a poem in this spirit, they actually begin to read as members of a community: the community not only of themselves and other readers, but also including the poet and other poets, plus all the speakers of the language in which the poem is written. For all these different parties, that language is indeed a shared resource, and the way for readers to get started is simply by recalling or imagining some of the numerous kinds of context in which the given poem’s words-phrases-sentences could, or could not, be successfully used. The rewards for such proactive readers are on the one hand a heightened sense of the subtle interweavings of language and life, and on the other hand a freshly empowered self-confidence. The point being that, within the community of contemporary experimental poetry, poets have no more authority than readers. Rejecting older cultural hierarchies, they present themselves as teasing out the idiomatic serendipities of their own poems together with their readers.

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"New Sincerity", a renewed attention to sincerity, has been connected to metamodernism, a periodizing term that marks a tension between irony and sincerity and an extension of modernism and postmodernism. While both New Sincerity and metamodernism have been discussed in relation to fiction and the other arts, they have not been widely considered in poetry. The article considers the associations of the term New Sincerity in US poet Dorothea Lasky's work, placing her work in the context of metamodernism. With reference to metarepresentation, a cognitive science term that refers to conceptualising what others think, I argue that in Lasky's poems, New Sincerity functions as a persuasive tonal orientation that exhibits sincerity's vexed position as both seemingly naïve and necessary. Lasky's poems make use of the human mind's metarepresentational capacity as they fluctuate between sincerity and irony.

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In the above, untitled, poem taken from Niillas Holmberg's collection Jos itseni pelastan itseltäni (2015, If I Save Myself from Myself), the speaker neutrally observes that he is frequently asked to comment on Sámi identity and on their relationship with nature. Holmberg, too, is Sámi: the indigenous people of the northernmost regions of Europe. Formerly referred to by the pejorative "Lapp," the Sámi are comprised of a number of smaller ethnic groups with different traditions, practices, and even languages which are for the most part mutually comprehensible. The Sámi languages, cultures and identity have been threatened by educational policies promoting national languages (Finnish, Swedish, Russian, and Norwegian) at the expense of the indigenous languages. In addition, mining, energy production, agriculture, forestry, and tourism, both from abroad and from Southern Finland, have had a major impact on the region, and negatively impacted in traditional Sámi lifestyles and cultural practices (e.g. Frandy 2017). The poem also indicates that the speaker frequently has to "explain" Sámi culture, a point Holmberg has also noted in interviews (e.g. Mikkonen 2016, n.p.). The need to "explain" indicates the power imbalance that allows the Finnish majority to remain ignorant about the indigenous population but not vice versa.Holmberg composes his poetry and songs in North Sámi and Finnish, and his work has been translated into more than ten languages. In an interview, he explained that "in my first books, my poems were almost as if from a diary. I wrote about the things that were on my mind each day" (Rasmus, 2018 n.p.). His more recent works, like Juolgevuođđu, are more overtly political, reflecting Holmberg's increasing activism in campaigns protesting against infringements of traditional Sámi practices such as herding reindeer, hunting and fishing in Sápmi. Holmberg's home is Ohcejohka (Utsjoki), which he describes as beings in "Saamiland (occupied by Finland)" on his website. For readers unfamiliar with the geography of the region, Western maps would situate Ohcejohka as Finland's northernmost town on the banks of the Deatnu River (River Teno) that marks the border between Finland and Norway. For the Sámi, the river is not a border, but rather a natural highway connecting areas within Sápmi which also provides water and fish. In short, Holmberg has all the credentials for being a spokesperson for the Sámi; his poetry and music are easily read through this lens. In interviews, in YouTube clips and on his website, he encourages readers to respond to his works in this way. Indeed, this viewpoint is so dominant we refer to it as the "Sámi script." Scripts are our default, habituated ways of behaving; they are inherently lazy. Racial prejudices follow scripts: rather than seeing the individual, we use scripts related to ethnicity, nationality, body shape, and so on to form lenses for interpreting behaviors. First articulated by Schank and Abelson (1977), scripts describe the way in which knowledge is stored, created, and a...