You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
The main argument is that we hate poetry because it doesn't match up with a platonic ideal of what poetry could be, or could do. Sometimes tho, I have no idea what poetry is trying to do so I'm glad to read someone else talk about it. I was also glad when Lerner, in talking about the desire for poetry to be both individual + universal, points out the bias of one critic in assuming only white men can really speak for everyone and that no men could relate to Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" or example.
Lerner offers an argument for impulses that drive readers away from poetry and the contradicting themes inherent within them.
Short and interesting.
Short and interesting.
As others have stated, Lerner uses hatred as a jumping off point to explore whatever he fancies in the world of poetry, from Rankine to Whitman, with surprisingly little motif bridging them all together if we ignore the introduction and final two pages. It’s a shame the structure is messy, because he is a brilliant poetry critic when taken in paragraphs, not essays.
Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like they knew what they were talking about as in this book called The Hatred of Poetry?
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Favorite quotes:
This enables poets and their defenders to celebrate poetic capacity- "original conception"- over and against the "feeble shadow" of real poems. ...I have come to believe that a large part of the appeal of the defense as a genre is that it is itself a kind of visual poetry- it allows you to describe the virtues of poetry without having to write poems that have succumbed to the bitterness of the actual.
The problem is that these artworks no matter how formally inventive remain artworks. They might redefine the borders of art, but they don't erase those borders... And (the avant-garde) hate that... The Futurists- ghosts of the future past- enter the museum they wanted to flood.
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.
Loffreda & Rankine: We are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defending the universal, still, as white... that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it...
Whoever you are, while reading (Claudia Rankine's) "Citizen", you are forced to situate yourself relative to the pronouns as opposed to assuming you fit within them.
("/") Virgule: we hear the meteorological phenomena known as "virga", my favorite kind of weather; streaks of on ice particles trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they reach the ground. It's a rainfall that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth, between the dream and the fire; it's a mark for verse that is not yet, or no longer, or not merely actual; ((like poems)) they are phenomena whose failure to become or remain fully real allows them to figure something beyond the phenomenal.
To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your sense of it. Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signified? I think that's poetry.
(semantic saturation) Your parents enforce a bedtime and, confined to your bed, you yell, "Bedtime" over and over again until whatever meaning seemed to dwell therein is banished along with all symbolic order, and you're a little feral animal underneath the glowing plastic stars.
This enables poets and their defenders to celebrate poetic capacity- "original conception"- over and against the "feeble shadow" of real poems. ...I have come to believe that a large part of the appeal of the defense as a genre is that it is itself a kind of visual poetry- it allows you to describe the virtues of poetry without having to write poems that have succumbed to the bitterness of the actual.
The problem is that these artworks no matter how formally inventive remain artworks. They might redefine the borders of art, but they don't erase those borders... And (the avant-garde) hate that... The Futurists- ghosts of the future past- enter the museum they wanted to flood.
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.
Loffreda & Rankine: We are captive, still, to a sensibility that champions the universal while simultaneously defending the universal, still, as white... that says work by writers of color succeeds when a white person can nevertheless relate to it...
Whoever you are, while reading (Claudia Rankine's) "Citizen", you are forced to situate yourself relative to the pronouns as opposed to assuming you fit within them.
("/") Virgule: we hear the meteorological phenomena known as "virga", my favorite kind of weather; streaks of on ice particles trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they reach the ground. It's a rainfall that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth, between the dream and the fire; it's a mark for verse that is not yet, or no longer, or not merely actual; ((like poems)) they are phenomena whose failure to become or remain fully real allows them to figure something beyond the phenomenal.
To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your sense of it. Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signified? I think that's poetry.
(semantic saturation) Your parents enforce a bedtime and, confined to your bed, you yell, "Bedtime" over and over again until whatever meaning seemed to dwell therein is banished along with all symbolic order, and you're a little feral animal underneath the glowing plastic stars.
A quick, interesting read. I am not a huge poetry reader so I picked this book up in part to understand why I'm turned off by poetry. Its central argument—that all poems are an attempt to imagine a perfect ideal form of Poetry and thus all poems necessarily fail to fulfill this ideal—is one of those great counterintuitive literary criticism theses that just animates a whole text.
Very smart. I loved it. It made me understand poetry more and made me want to pick up more poetry
informative
reflective
fast-paced