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A review by gvenezia
The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
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)