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3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
Found the tensions between individuality and universality illuminating. Poetry exists in a space that constantly reminds us that it is insufficient to the task of representing its referents.
Too many parentheses and em dashes tho
Too many parentheses and em dashes tho
informative
reflective
medium-paced
informative
reflective
fast-paced
"An art hated from without and within. What kind of art has a condition of its possibility a perfect contempt? And then, even reading contemptuously, you don't achieve the genuine."
I had always found poetry hard to understand. It both tries to be relatable but also precise, written for all but also for only you. In my head, it tries to do too much but is inaccessible and powerless. Ben Lerner gives a concise argument for good and bad poetry. Poetry with good structure and intentions can be both disliked and admired.
I think back to The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman. Her performance was shining and powerful. For the first time, I could imagine that poems can be powerful. They can be remembered and evoke a passion that units. So perhaps a good poem can make us empathetic for others and share emotions from other perspectives.
I had always found poetry hard to understand. It both tries to be relatable but also precise, written for all but also for only you. In my head, it tries to do too much but is inaccessible and powerless. Ben Lerner gives a concise argument for good and bad poetry. Poetry with good structure and intentions can be both disliked and admired.
I think back to The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman. Her performance was shining and powerful. For the first time, I could imagine that poems can be powerful. They can be remembered and evoke a passion that units. So perhaps a good poem can make us empathetic for others and share emotions from other perspectives.
A great, contemplative piece on a genre that has been controversial for eons.
“The question of whether poetry is work or leisure (or somehow both or neither) is everywhere in denunciations and defenses of the art . . . It’s precisely because of the contradictory nature of the poetic vocation – it is both more and less than work, its usefulness depends on its lack of practical utility – that we are embarrassed by and disdainful of the poet’s labor. ‘Poetry’ is supposed to signify an alternative to the kind of value that circulates in the economy as we live it daily, but actual poems can’t realize that alternative . . . Thus hating poems can either be a way of negatively expressing poetry as an ideal – a way of expressing our desire to exercise such imaginative capacities, to reconstitute the social world – or it can be a defensive rage against the mere suggestion that another world, another measure of value, is possible.” – Ben Lerner
Squeezed in one last read for 2017. Helpful thoughts on poetry that might generalize into other spheres for me as well.
"Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did. There of varieties of interpenetrating demands subsumed under the word 'poetry'--to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognized socially or, a la Whitman, to achieve universality by being irreducibly social, less a person than a national technology; to defeat the language and value of existing society; to propound a measure of value beyond money. But one thing all these demands share is that they can't every be fulfilled with poems. Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry, and the jeremiads in that regard are defenses, too."
"Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did. There of varieties of interpenetrating demands subsumed under the word 'poetry'--to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognized socially or, a la Whitman, to achieve universality by being irreducibly social, less a person than a national technology; to defeat the language and value of existing society; to propound a measure of value beyond money. But one thing all these demands share is that they can't every be fulfilled with poems. Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry, and the jeremiads in that regard are defenses, too."
funny
informative
fast-paced
I’m a huge reader of essay collections. That people are willing to sit down and take you through their thought process around a certain issue or question feels like the rawest form of writing - leaving, as it does, the writer as exposed as is literarily possible. It’s totally mesmerising to witness.
Some say that sportsball world cups - as in the performative display recently held in Qatar - are the great leveller; the one thing that brings the world together no matter creed, status nor colour. FIFA themselves state this as fact:
"The FIFA World Cup, through the power of football, brings people together to cross borders, unite and celebrate together. Football Unites the World..."
In contrast, I believe that it is a shared hatred of poetry, that is the "real" unifier. You could imagine the sheer delight felt upon discovering this essay by Ben Lerner which does a brilliant job of showing how poets "strategically disappoint" our assumptions about what the medium should do... claiming as it does to explore our collective rampant animosity toward the entire art form.
“Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.” - Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short
Some say that sportsball world cups - as in the performative display recently held in Qatar - are the great leveller; the one thing that brings the world together no matter creed, status nor colour. FIFA themselves state this as fact:
"The FIFA World Cup, through the power of football, brings people together to cross borders, unite and celebrate together. Football Unites the World..."
In contrast, I believe that it is a shared hatred of poetry, that is the "real" unifier. You could imagine the sheer delight felt upon discovering this essay by Ben Lerner which does a brilliant job of showing how poets "strategically disappoint" our assumptions about what the medium should do... claiming as it does to explore our collective rampant animosity toward the entire art form.
“Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.” - Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short