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timhoiland's review
3.0
“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
plan2read's review
4.0
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."
buzzgirl's review
funny
informative
fast-paced
4.0
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
cstefko's review
5.0
4.75 stars
I really enjoyed this essay. To be fair, I'm not super academically-minded, but I can appreciate literary criticism on occasion. I found this book pretty accessible to someone who has fairly limited experience (in my case, a college minor in literature) with such reading.
Ben Lerner hates poetry the way a Harry Potter fan hates Snape--you love to hate them/it. It's an affectionate, respectful hatred. I think one of the aspects I most appreciated about Lerner's essay was his playful but pointed tone.
Lerner does close readings of poems from several very different poets (Dickinson, Keats, Whitman, Rankine, and the terrible McGonagall poem that I had never heard of before), and somehow it all works together. I love that he included works by women and people of color, and fired back at critics that dismiss such poets as not "universal" enough. Also, anyone who defends Sylvia Plath is okay in my book.
I also learned (or maybe I had previously learned but forgot until reading about it now) the technical term for the " / " that separates lines of poetry in quotation is a "virgule." Learning the etymology of that term was interesting, too, and his examination of how the use of virgules can influence our readings/influence the effect of poems. I particularly loved his interpretation of Emily Dickinson's dashes and the format of her envelope poems. He sees the dashes as "vectors of implication," and notes that the structure of Dickinson's poems "caus[es] us to shift back and forth between modes of perception--we read one minute and look the next, the object refusing to become or to remain a typical poem." I thought this was one of his strongest considerations of the potential over the actual.
Definitely feeling eager to finally dip into Claudia Rankine's work after reading some of her poems here, and to go back to some classics that I didn't spend much time with in college (Pound especially; I still regret having to drop that Modernist Poetry seminar for a business school pre-req... sigh).
This might be too dense for a very casual poetry fan, but I found it a rather light and enjoyable read. I spent most of the book nodding my head in agreement and silently mouthing "yasss." The ending is a little scattered, but I didn't hate the inclusion of some of his personal experiences/observations beyond poetry.
I really enjoyed this essay. To be fair, I'm not super academically-minded, but I can appreciate literary criticism on occasion. I found this book pretty accessible to someone who has fairly limited experience (in my case, a college minor in literature) with such reading.
Ben Lerner hates poetry the way a Harry Potter fan hates Snape--you love to hate them/it. It's an affectionate, respectful hatred. I think one of the aspects I most appreciated about Lerner's essay was his playful but pointed tone.
Lerner does close readings of poems from several very different poets (Dickinson, Keats, Whitman, Rankine, and the terrible McGonagall poem that I had never heard of before), and somehow it all works together. I love that he included works by women and people of color, and fired back at critics that dismiss such poets as not "universal" enough. Also, anyone who defends Sylvia Plath is okay in my book.
I also learned (or maybe I had previously learned but forgot until reading about it now) the technical term for the " / " that separates lines of poetry in quotation is a "virgule." Learning the etymology of that term was interesting, too, and his examination of how the use of virgules can influence our readings/influence the effect of poems. I particularly loved his interpretation of Emily Dickinson's dashes and the format of her envelope poems. He sees the dashes as "vectors of implication," and notes that the structure of Dickinson's poems "caus[es] us to shift back and forth between modes of perception--we read one minute and look the next, the object refusing to become or to remain a typical poem." I thought this was one of his strongest considerations of the potential over the actual.
Definitely feeling eager to finally dip into Claudia Rankine's work after reading some of her poems here, and to go back to some classics that I didn't spend much time with in college (Pound especially; I still regret having to drop that Modernist Poetry seminar for a business school pre-req... sigh).
This might be too dense for a very casual poetry fan, but I found it a rather light and enjoyable read. I spent most of the book nodding my head in agreement and silently mouthing "yasss." The ending is a little scattered, but I didn't hate the inclusion of some of his personal experiences/observations beyond poetry.
gvenezia's review
5.0
“The fatal problem with poetry: poems.” (23)
Lerner's smart tract meditates on the meaning behind the widespread hatred of poetry. His salve is to draw out the paradoxes and idealistic values implicit in this hatred.
Many of us hate poetry because we find it boring or pretentious. We wish that it could do more for us. These attitudes cannot be reduced to philistinism, though. Lerner, a poet and literature professor himself, readily admits he dislikes it, too—even hates some of it. He shows how this attitude is actually widespread among poets, so much so that some of the most revered poets are those that give up on the endeavor completely!
At the same time, most of us have at some point experienced the potential for poetry. According to Lerner's estimation, one of the primary wishes people have is for poems to speak beautifully for a wider group of people—they want to see themselves and/or want everyone who reads the poem to be seen. This is a desire for a universally sublime language. A utopian desire for the truly democratic artistic expression.
In other words, there is a ghost of Whitman in the desires we currently have for what poets should be: Writing for the New Yorker, George Packer calls for a universalizing, collectivizing inauguration poet (42-45). In the pages of Harper's, Mark Edmundson criticizes the obsessively subjective contemporary poet (55-63).
While Lerner dispels the false promise of a truly universal poem, he does cleverly tap into a unifying attitude or expectation about poetry. The attitudes of both poetry haters and lovers are strikingly similar in their wont for the sublime and the extension of language, in their feeling that poetry is always failing and that some child-like, exploratory linguistic self has died and can’t be regained. There is a certain kind of matured, secular shame at the state of poetry as compared to what it was or could be.
He shows how this attitude arises from and is expressed through the best and worst poems: For example he analyzes the oft-cited worst poem: McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:
I find this poem simply boring and uncompelling but not horrible on first reading. Lerner goes further to show the many technical and thematic flaws in its delivery. Lerner uses this criticism as the prototypical example of hatred-of-poetry as another instantiation of hope-for-poetry. We find the poem to be lacking because we can see where it would be better, where merely descriptive words and phrases could rise above the practical.
Lerner also reveals his adept criticism in a fresh reading of one of my favorite poems—and one of Dickinson’s most cited—“I dwell in Possibility—“. He focuses on Dickinson’s masterful ambiguity and dissonance in upending expectations for meter and rhyme (see the long first quote after my review).
Lerner associatively ties together all of these disparate readings and traditions of hatred toward poetry. The tract is less argument or report than expert meditation. Despite succinctly covering a wide variety of topics, poets, and cultural critics, one never feels that Lerner is moving too fast, disjointedly, or illogically. Notable, too, is that Lerner’s short critiques and analyses still function well on their own.
Adding a bit more structure to the tract, Lerner bookends the meditative middle with analysis of a poem he learned as a young boy and his recapitulation of its themes in prose:
This small exercise and the meditative middle reflect Lerner’s skill at weaving the poetic and prosodic. Lerner’s novels are largely prose, but frequently dip into poetic phrasing or even actual poetry.
The last seven pages in particular see Lerner modulating to his novelistic tenor, drawing out several recurrent themes in this essay and his three novels: the role of art, the linguistic practices of social networks, the democratic multiplicity of modern life, the potential for language to change our view of the world, the Whitmanesque in the actual and hoped for vision of America, and the ineffable, sublime-liminal zones between prose and poetry. This is the Lerner many of us have come to love: the reflexive voice between styles: the virgule ‘/‘ embodied: the virtuality of language being used in new contexts: the emotional zeitgeist put to prose. The hatred of poetry, yes, but at the same time the love of poetry.
Further Recommendation
If you liked this approach to poetry, pairing a thematic concern with wide reading and analysis of representative poems, I highly recommend Edmond Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.
Lerner's Emily Dickinson Analysis
"Instead of the expected opposition of poetry with prose, the former term is replaced with “Possibility”—an immaterial dwelling, all threshold and sky. The poem dramatizes the impossibility of actually gathering paradise; the poetic occupation, the poem’s structure asserts, is spreading wide the hands, not containing anything within them (which is what it means to dwell in the porous house of possibility). The poem goes out of its way to emphasize the distance between the short “i” of “This” and the long “i” of “Paradise”—a rhyme the previous patterning would lead us to expect—and so we feel the distance between the writing of this poem on earth and whatever passes for Poetry in heaven. Long “i” ’s are in every stanza of the house—the poem begins with one—and the sound of “eye” and “sky” is preserved in “wide,” which, positioned above “Paradise” in both the manuscript and typed version, draws our attention to the parallelism of the two terms, their vastness. But this can’t compensate for the failure of “This” and “Paradise” to rhyme because meter and rhyme are in tension at the end of the poem, at least to my “feeling like a true rhyme with “Sky.” “Paradise” is normally dactylic (PARadise), but here the pressure to make it rhyme and scan requires promoting the final syllable (paraDISE, or PARaDISE). That’s a common enough thing to do in a poem, to be sure, but Dickinson is so precise and weird that I find myself worrying over that alteration: I feel that I’m either stretching “Paradise,” mangling it a little, in order to gather the rhyme, or letting the rhyme go in order to privilege pronunciation; I have to choose between “one after another”—the accentual unfolding of the word in time—or “all at once,” the verticality of rhyme." (35-37)
———
Favorite Quotes
"You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. . . Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure.” (8)
"You can hate contemporary poetry—in any era—as much as you want for failing to realize the fantasy of universality, but the haters should stop pretending any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone." (64-65)
"'virga,' my favorite kind of weather: streaks of water or 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 fire; it’s a mark for verse that is not yet, or no longer, or not merely actual; they are phenomena whose failure to become or remain fully real allows them to figure something beyond the phenomenal.” (75)
“To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your use 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.” (79)
"Warhol is the Whitman of the actual: 'A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.'" (82)
Lerner's smart tract meditates on the meaning behind the widespread hatred of poetry. His salve is to draw out the paradoxes and idealistic values implicit in this hatred.
Many of us hate poetry because we find it boring or pretentious. We wish that it could do more for us. These attitudes cannot be reduced to philistinism, though. Lerner, a poet and literature professor himself, readily admits he dislikes it, too—even hates some of it. He shows how this attitude is actually widespread among poets, so much so that some of the most revered poets are those that give up on the endeavor completely!
At the same time, most of us have at some point experienced the potential for poetry. According to Lerner's estimation, one of the primary wishes people have is for poems to speak beautifully for a wider group of people—they want to see themselves and/or want everyone who reads the poem to be seen. This is a desire for a universally sublime language. A utopian desire for the truly democratic artistic expression.
In other words, there is a ghost of Whitman in the desires we currently have for what poets should be: Writing for the New Yorker, George Packer calls for a universalizing, collectivizing inauguration poet (42-45). In the pages of Harper's, Mark Edmundson criticizes the obsessively subjective contemporary poet (55-63).
While Lerner dispels the false promise of a truly universal poem, he does cleverly tap into a unifying attitude or expectation about poetry. The attitudes of both poetry haters and lovers are strikingly similar in their wont for the sublime and the extension of language, in their feeling that poetry is always failing and that some child-like, exploratory linguistic self has died and can’t be regained. There is a certain kind of matured, secular shame at the state of poetry as compared to what it was or could be.
He shows how this attitude arises from and is expressed through the best and worst poems: For example he analyzes the oft-cited worst poem: McGonagall’s “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:
Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.
I find this poem simply boring and uncompelling but not horrible on first reading. Lerner goes further to show the many technical and thematic flaws in its delivery. Lerner uses this criticism as the prototypical example of hatred-of-poetry as another instantiation of hope-for-poetry. We find the poem to be lacking because we can see where it would be better, where merely descriptive words and phrases could rise above the practical.
Lerner also reveals his adept criticism in a fresh reading of one of my favorite poems—and one of Dickinson’s most cited—“I dwell in Possibility—“. He focuses on Dickinson’s masterful ambiguity and dissonance in upending expectations for meter and rhyme (see the long first quote after my review).
Lerner associatively ties together all of these disparate readings and traditions of hatred toward poetry. The tract is less argument or report than expert meditation. Despite succinctly covering a wide variety of topics, poets, and cultural critics, one never feels that Lerner is moving too fast, disjointedly, or illogically. Notable, too, is that Lerner’s short critiques and analyses still function well on their own.
Adding a bit more structure to the tract, Lerner bookends the meditative middle with analysis of a poem he learned as a young boy and his recapitulation of its themes in prose:
I, too, dislike it . . . / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it, after all, a place for the genuine. (excerpt from Marianne Moore's “Poetry” (1967))
All I ask the haters—and I, too, am one—is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love. (85-86)
This small exercise and the meditative middle reflect Lerner’s skill at weaving the poetic and prosodic. Lerner’s novels are largely prose, but frequently dip into poetic phrasing or even actual poetry.
The last seven pages in particular see Lerner modulating to his novelistic tenor, drawing out several recurrent themes in this essay and his three novels: the role of art, the linguistic practices of social networks, the democratic multiplicity of modern life, the potential for language to change our view of the world, the Whitmanesque in the actual and hoped for vision of America, and the ineffable, sublime-liminal zones between prose and poetry. This is the Lerner many of us have come to love: the reflexive voice between styles: the virgule ‘/‘ embodied: the virtuality of language being used in new contexts: the emotional zeitgeist put to prose. The hatred of poetry, yes, but at the same time the love of poetry.
Further Recommendation
If you liked this approach to poetry, pairing a thematic concern with wide reading and analysis of representative poems, I highly recommend Edmond Hirsch’s How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.
Lerner's Emily Dickinson Analysis
"Instead of the expected opposition of poetry with prose, the former term is replaced with “Possibility”—an immaterial dwelling, all threshold and sky. The poem dramatizes the impossibility of actually gathering paradise; the poetic occupation, the poem’s structure asserts, is spreading wide the hands, not containing anything within them (which is what it means to dwell in the porous house of possibility). The poem goes out of its way to emphasize the distance between the short “i” of “This” and the long “i” of “Paradise”—a rhyme the previous patterning would lead us to expect—and so we feel the distance between the writing of this poem on earth and whatever passes for Poetry in heaven. Long “i” ’s are in every stanza of the house—the poem begins with one—and the sound of “eye” and “sky” is preserved in “wide,” which, positioned above “Paradise” in both the manuscript and typed version, draws our attention to the parallelism of the two terms, their vastness. But this can’t compensate for the failure of “This” and “Paradise” to rhyme because meter and rhyme are in tension at the end of the poem, at least to my “feeling like a true rhyme with “Sky.” “Paradise” is normally dactylic (PARadise), but here the pressure to make it rhyme and scan requires promoting the final syllable (paraDISE, or PARaDISE). That’s a common enough thing to do in a poem, to be sure, but Dickinson is so precise and weird that I find myself worrying over that alteration: I feel that I’m either stretching “Paradise,” mangling it a little, in order to gather the rhyme, or letting the rhyme go in order to privilege pronunciation; I have to choose between “one after another”—the accentual unfolding of the word in time—or “all at once,” the verticality of rhyme." (35-37)
———
Favorite Quotes
"You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. . . Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure.” (8)
"You can hate contemporary poetry—in any era—as much as you want for failing to realize the fantasy of universality, but the haters should stop pretending any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone." (64-65)
"'virga,' my favorite kind of weather: streaks of water or 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 fire; it’s a mark for verse that is not yet, or no longer, or not merely actual; they are phenomena whose failure to become or remain fully real allows them to figure something beyond the phenomenal.” (75)
“To derive your understanding of a word by watching others adjust to your use 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.” (79)
"Warhol is the Whitman of the actual: 'A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.'" (82)
sapovnela's review against another edition
4.0
this is a book i know i'll revisit.
while not agreeing with everything that lerner exhibits i cannot deny the stars in my eyes that shone all through the idea of a thought [dream] being the actual poem and the distances between it and the tangibility that language provides, even now chills run trough my spine as an avid lover of words and souls.
i would say there are a handful of ambivalent takes and although i don't exactly catalogue this essay as presumptuous i would say it dives too deep into takes that (funny enough for his own author) are taken as universal by the individual who wrote them.
summing up the central thesis of this book i can see lerner going "damn poems, they ruined Poetry (with capital P)" [lol]
while not agreeing with everything that lerner exhibits i cannot deny the stars in my eyes that shone all through the idea of a thought [dream] being the actual poem and the distances between it and the tangibility that language provides, even now chills run trough my spine as an avid lover of words and souls.
i would say there are a handful of ambivalent takes and although i don't exactly catalogue this essay as presumptuous i would say it dives too deep into takes that (funny enough for his own author) are taken as universal by the individual who wrote them.
summing up the central thesis of this book i can see lerner going "damn poems, they ruined Poetry (with capital P)" [lol]
spacestationtrustfund's review
4.0
The irony being, of course, that hating poetry is in and of itself a form of poetry.