The Hatred of Poetry

by Ben Lerner

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, Criticism, Literary Criticism, Writing, Philosophy

86 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2016

About the author

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. The Lichtenberg Figures appeared in a German translation in 2010, for which it received the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie" in 2011, making Lerner the first American to receive this honor.

Born and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. At Brown University he earned a B.A. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the "25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)". Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.

Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. It won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for "first fiction" and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize.

In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.

Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 3 out of 5]

In lieu of an actual review that is potentially in the making, for the moment just some gushing over dashes, that 'vector of implication, a way of gesturing toward what language can't contain, a signature of the virtual':

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –
For Occupation – This –
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise –

Emily Dickinson

[Adam Dalva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brisk little monograph that uses a smart frame - a look at the historical forces behind the hatred of poetry - as an excuse for Lerner to dig into a few preferred subjects. The book loses a bit of its conceit as it goes (by the time we are talking about Rankine's CITIZEN, there is virtually none of the original thesis left), so it has to be evaluated on the basis of the vignettes. I loved the section on horrible Scottish poet William McGonagall:

"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."

and thought the CITIZEN analysis was sharp too. Lerner's Whitman obsession, which was apparent in 10:04, continues here, and as ever I don't quite get what he's trying to say about it. There are moments of Lernerian prose toward the end that are really beautiful (a scene from an outdoor movie with a firefly will stick with me), and the best moments are when this slips toward his fiction. This is one of the great prose writers going right now, and I think his continued fixation on self-definition-as-poet is fascinating.

Since I'm teaching poetry this semester, I found the book helpful, but I can't quite bring myself to recommend it for non-fans of B.L..

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 2 out of 5]

If anything could make me hate poetry, it would be The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner's little book is ponderously dull, troubling itself about the impossible "universality" of the perfect poem – a paradox without piquancy.

You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.

If there is a hateful way to approach poetry, this is surely it. I, too, dislike Poetry when it comes with a capital P.

Fortunately there are some bright moments among the pallid pondering. "For the avant-garde, the poem is an imaginary bomb with real shrapnel" - which is Lerner's version I guess of Marianne Moore's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." I learned the difference between "virgule" and "virga" – and a dashed snippet from Emily Dickinson had me hunting down the exact meaning of "Gambrels." Most promising for me is Lerner's praise for his teacher Allen Grossman and fellow poet Cyrus Console: I'm looking forward to reading True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing and Brief Under Water.

Last night I sat down with the tiny book Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese, Kenneth Rexroth's translations of Japanese poems, some over 1000 years old, and marveled at their miniature beauty. In the short time it took me to read them, I was healed of my miserable mood. Not once did I wonder if these poems were genuine or universal because they couldn't be anything else.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s with no regret, but some shame, that I admit I’m not a fan of poetry, and that I actively avoid teaching it. I use poems in my classes, when we’re talking about other subjects. But I avoid teaching the mechanics and technique of poetry, analyzing the metre and rhythm, looking into the intricacies of imagery and similes and repetition. I do this largely because, as a reader, I am not comfortable with poetry, and that translates then into my teaching.

I avoid poetry for the same reason I avoid graphic novels: there’s something about the way I read that precludes me from really absorbing the meaning, or enjoying the message, of a poem. Oh, I can sit down, read a poem, mull over it, study it, write an essay on it—if I have to. But give me the choice between a nice, juicy novel and a slim volume of poetry, and I will choose the novel every day of the week. There is no contest. There is just something about prose, about sentences linked together into paragraphs stacked on atop another and squished into pages of exquisite storytelling, that gets me going in a way that poetry and comics and even movies and TV and music just do not. Nothing gives me a high as good as a novel does.

And I’m a hypocrite, because even though I might say it’s totally OK to prefer reading one form over another, I definitely judge people who say, “Oh, I don’t read novels.” Then again, I also have some fairly mixed feelings about the way we teach novels.

But I digress.

Ben Lerner tries to tackle some of these common mixed emotions regarding poetry in The Hatred of Poetry, and he does a fairly good job. He describes the weird relationship that we have with poetry, in the way it is foisted upon us in schools, the way writing (and writing, in particular, poetry) is seen as a less serious occupation, the way poetry occupies a weird space within art itself.

I liked the part where he describes how people react to learning that he is a poet:

If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet, they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now…. There is embarrassment for the poet—couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?—but there is also embarrassment on the part of the non-poet, because having to acknowledge one’s total alienation from poetry chafes against the early association of poem and self.

I like this, because if you replace “poet” with “mathematician” and “poetry” with “mathematics”, you get exactly my experience telling people I study/teach math. “Oh that,” they say, “I haven’t taken that since high school. Algebra was fine, but I didn’t much care for trigonometry. Never touch it now. I just don’t have that ‘math brain’, you know?”

(So much facepalming.)

Poetry, like math, is something that everyone can learn and do and that kids do with joy. As we age, we relegate it to an Else, and you are marked by your choice to participate or not participate in the activity. People who do math are fundamentally different from people who don’t; people who write poetry as a serious occupation are somehow different from those who do not. Full stop, end of story.

Except it’s not, as Lerner goes on to explore. He touches on the “bafflingly persistent association of poetry and fame” that he finds baffling precisely because “no poets are famous among the general population.” According to Lerner, this is because poetry, if it does its job correctly, sinks into the brain until your mind makes it your own. For poetry to truly work its magic, it must subsume itself into the reader/listener, until it becomes a part of their being. So when poetry affects you, the identity of the author might not be something you remember—even the words might fade away—so much as the feelings associated with the poem itself.

In case you can’t tell, The Hatred of Poetry is not so much about poetry itself so much as poetry’s place in our society. Lerner meanders through history in a search for differing attitudes towards poetry. He holds up Plato as history’s first poetry hater; Plato regards poets as dangerous liars. He takes us through the French Revolution and poetry’s decline in the nineteenth century as the novel becomes the rising star of the literary scene. He compares Keats and Dickinson in a way that I’m sure could cause total flame wars if he were to post it on a poetry subreddit. And he spends some time with Walt Whitman, looking at how poetry can be an exercise in timelessness and identity.

Despite being only 84 pages, this is a very ambitious book. Lerner sets out to accomplish much, and for the most part, I think he achieves it. My friend and former coworker Emma gave this to me as the response to my gift to her of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too . At the end of the book, she has written: “Well. Twas a bit dense at times and I felt his argument a wee repetitive, but overall I’m glad I read it.” I concur. I don’t necessarily think that The Hatred of Poetry is going to make you jump up and go read the nearest poetry anthology to hand (and yes, I have several sitting on the shelves around me, including a complete collection of William Blake’s poetry I received as a gift from my dad…).

Moreover, despite being white and male (like myself), Lerner displays a healthy awareness of issues of gender and race and how these play into the reception of poetry. He draws on the work of Claudia Rankine, explaining the context:

…Rankine confronts—as an African-American woman—the impossibility (and impossible complexity) of attempting to reconcile herself with a racist society in which to be black is either to be invisible (excluded from the universal) or all too visible (as the victim of racist surveillance and aggression).

before then quoting at length from Citizen and analyzing:

My privilege excludes me—that is, protects me—from the “you” in a way that focuses my attention on the much graver (and mundane) exclusion of a person of color from the “you” that the scene recounts (how could you have an appointment. Citizen’s concern with how race determines when and how we have access to pronouns is, among many other things, a direct response to the Whitmanic (and nostalgist) notion of a perfectly exchangeable “I” and “you” that can suspend all difference.

This is where I think The Hatred of Poetry gits gud, so to speak. Lerner avoids the pitfall of trying to present poetry, poets, or poetical activities as monolithic and functioning to serve a single greater artistic or cultural good. Indeed, he freely admits that poetry is a fractured exercise, that there are as many philosophies towards poetry as there are poets (and thus, people). I respect and appreciate his attempt to dive deeper than whether or not we should “like” poetry and attempt, rather, to look at why it is so persistent despite its failure to find purchase in mainstream popularity.

Even though it’s a new year, I won’t be so silly as to spout off some resolution about reading more poetry. I am defiantly and unapologetically not going to do such a thing. Without question, I will read and consider some poems this year, for they will come across my desk in my research and lesson-planning, or simply because cool people I follow on Twitter might share them. Nevertheless, my abiding passion and obsession must remain novels. Lerner’s essay is erudite and interesting, but poetry … sorry, still not a fan.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Hatred of Poetry was the thirteenth book in my October poetry project. It is not an actual poetry collection but an essay about poetry, so I guess using it for a poetry challenge is cheating—but I'm making the rules here! Anyway, this was WONDERFUL. For such a short book Lerner's thoughts were quite freewheeling and covered a lot of angles. There was a lot to think about, and I found myself often talking back to the book even though I didn't really disagree with much of it. It just invites conversation, and had more humor than I was expecting too. After a rocky start, Ben Lerner and I are now getting along fine. I look forward to catching up on the rest of his work!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This fluid essay asks how poetry navigates between the personal and the universal. Socrates famously wanted to ban poets, fearing poetry might be turned to revolutionary purposes. Lerner wonders whether poetry still has a political role. Whitman’s goal was to create a new American verse style. But was it realistic for him to think that he could speak for everyone? The same might be asked about the poets who read at presidential inaugurations. Can different races and genders speak to and for each other, or is it only white males who are assumed to be able to pronounce on humanity’s behalf? Those are some of the questions addressed in this conversational yet unabashedly highbrow essay. Lerner’s points of reference range from Keats and Dickinson to Claudia Rankine, with ample quotations and astute commentary.

See my full review at Nudge.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s only in the last short number of years that I’ve been actively reading poetry. Before that, I thought it was impenetrable, that it’s secrets were locked behind a door which had no key. But, like most everything, I was wrong. Poetry is different than my beloved prose, even when prose stretches its wings and takes experimental flight. It’s not explanatory like an essay or philosophic text. Poetry speaks more to the space between what is known and what is unknown, and to inhabit this almost mystical place requires the use of language in ways not strictly lucid.

Ben Lerner is a lot smarter than me. He’s a poet and a writer of two well-received novels that play with form. He’s just published a short monograph with the perfect title THE HATRED OF POETRY, perfect because that’s his theme. He doesn’t reject the hatred, but embraces it, acknowledging his own and the need for it, even. Poetry, as he sees it, and as I would expand to include almost all creative endeavors, is a failure. It tries to articulate the inarticulate, the Platonic ideal (and Plato/Socrates get an earful on their distrust of poetry, even though Plato delivered his newfound philosophy in an almost poetic form), within means that are limited.

Success is impossible, so much so that great poetry only alludes to that perfection, and even the worst poetry, because of its utter lack of success, suggest the ideal in contrast. It’s only the mediocre or even just good poetry that doubly fails, because it never hints at the wellspring of potential behind the artificial structure erected by a poem to point there. The difference between poetry and prose, and certainly philosophy and science, is that a poem may be the greatest vehicle in language to reach the divine. It makes us slow down, speak the words aloud and follow its music, which is really the melody of existence.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed spending time with Ben Lerner's prose and I enjoyed getting to know his thoughts and even when he went off on a path where I didn't want to follow, I did follow, and was rewarded.

Even so this was so cussingly not the book I wanted to read. I don't hate poetry. So I guess I should have known this wasn't exactly my book. In fact I love poetry, whenever I discipline myself enough to read it. Even so I approach poetry the way a lot of people approach music, where they just listen to Death Metal or Mozart or Country Western or Blues or whatever and they never wish to try anything else. Poetry wise, I keep going back to Rilke or the German Expressionists. Also I really love re-reading Dover Beach and no one can talk me out of it--it makes me cry every time. I like Yeats and D.H. Lawrence. I tend to flounder otherwise. And modern American poetry just feels like a hermeneutically sealed box and I can't get it to open and I don't even know where to start. I felt like Lerner is in something of the same boat, vs. being the person who could help me enjoy poetry more than I do.

[Emma Townshend · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this: like having a late night conversation with an incredibly smart friend who makes you feel cleverer too. Admittedly I did wake up the next morning and go, "What WAS Ben saying about the unachieved presence of the virtual poem within the poem? Did ANY of that actually make sense, or was he really, really drunk?" But his likeable, funny, intelligent grasp of all things (ranging from Poetical Dentists to Keats to the rollerskating aisle patrollers of The Topeka Hypermart) was impressive and good to read.

[sevdah]

I'm having such a hard time understanding poetry, especially lately (and especially contemporary Bulgarian poetry but that's a whole other topic). This whole journey of discovering what I enjoy in a text or in a language or in a book has left me thinking poetry is just not for me. Literary criticism, however, of any genre is straight up my alley, so I got this book knowing it won't change my taste but hoping it would be enjoyable. Which it was, I liked it a lot. The basic premise is this: we all hate poetry, because it's just never "enough" - the actual existing poems, even the best of them, can only remind us what we imagine poetry could, should be like. We put a great strain on poems, expecting them to speak to everyone, to be everlasting, to save our souls, bring us back to our own high-school impulse of composing poems, or start a revolution (too big an expectation on just a few lines). Lerner examines different ways we hate poetry, and the result is intelligent, sometimes funny, forever filled with just the right dose of self-doubt, and most importantly it combines ideas in new ways, which is always inspiring. It wasn't in any way too academic or inaccessible, but it wasn't too simple or playful either - a fine balance. (I might also be completely in love with the publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, props to them for a great selection and such an incredible design inside and out.)

[Sleepless Dreamer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was so short, putting this in my reading challenge feels like cheating.

Briefly, this is an essay about poetry, or more accurately, why everyone seems to hate poetry. It's written very well. I found myself losing track of the content of his words because I just enjoyed seeing them work together, feeling them. That's not something that's happened to me before, to be honest.

All in all, I think this is a nice idea. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to remember from this or what impact will it have on me. I like that he used poetry to base why people don't like poetry. It made me want to read one of his books, more than anything.

What I'm Taking With Me
- Ack, all I do in life now is work on my comparative politics paper and like, my brain is actually dying, I just.
- However, this book provides some hope cause Ben Lerner also did a BA in Political Science, so there might be some hope left for me.
- In the end of this book, there's a conversation about political poetry and it is great.

[Ammar · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

Ben Lerner takes us into a journey into poetry and why do we hate it. Do you hate it because we don't understand it ? Or just hate it because it is poetry ? He describes various personal observations and aspects in vignettes. A Thought provoking slim volume. A beautiful crafted essay.

[Jeroen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I. / Some people argue that the age of poetry is over, and that the capacity of speaking to the greater public in the poetic mode is now situated in the songwriter. Indeed, it is very likely that more people can quote from Bob Dylan than from Robert Frost (or from Dylan Thomas, for that matter). Yet how many people can quote a song from beginning to end – rote learning complete poems was a relatively common skill in previous centuries, after all. No, we don't think in songs, per se: we think in song lines. Or rather – to avoid incurring Lerner's aversion to the universalist urge – I think in song lines. They are always on my mind.

II. / Indubitably, this move from replication to quotation is an expression of our diminished capacity for memory, which has been eroded by consecutive technological progress in the external storing of our memories and thoughts: the invention of paper, print, the encyclopaedia, the public library, and ultimately of course the internet. But I would argue it is more than that. As Ben Lerner argues here (appropriately enough by citing from his own earlier work), the poetic ideal is an utopia, it strives for something that is impossible to achieve. Says Lerner: Poetry isn't hard, it's impossible. His argument in The Hatred of Poetry is that poetry is only perfect when it is unrealised. It is the idea of poetry, not poetry itself, that we appreciate. Having said that, surely the mere idea of poetry is a mere boast: to say that one is poetic without spouting poetry is a classic “show, not tell” error. Clearly, we need a compromise. We need to infuse the virtual poem with actual poetry, but only to the point that the actual does not overshadow the virtual. This is where the citation comes in. As Lerner himelf wrote in an earlier novel: “I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.” A dark sea has to encircle the words, one that might just contain the Ideal (even though we know it cannot, will not, realistically.)

III. / One of the song lines that for the past decade or so has kept me occupied, has run deep grooves in the fabric of my mind, is in fact occupied with poetry. It is, in fact, so apposite here as to function as a summary, an abstract, of Lerner's essay. In “Obscurity Knocks,” the first single of a little-known English band called The Trash Can Sinatras, the chorus goes: “Though I ought to be learning I feel like a veteran / of 'oh, I like your poetry, but I hate your poems!'” It took me a while to wrap my head around this one, but I ultimately understood it to be about potential: Lerner's “echo of poetic possibility”. What the singer expresses, I think, is that he considers himself a great poet in theory, yet not in practice. I can identify. When I sit in the office, doing drudgery administrative work, I always compose stories and essays in my mind. I get positively excited. “When I get home,” I invariably think, “I am going to work this out. It'll be the break I've been waiting for.” Yet when I do get home, whatever idea I had seems to slip through my hands in the process of reifying it. The idea seems to work only as idea.

IV. / In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy's 2015 novel that shares a kindred spirit with Lerner's work, the protagonist - a "corporate anthropologist" - is always just on the verge of writing the “Great Report” he has been tasked with. On one occasion, he realises (once more) that it is time for action. Before he can start with the writing, though, of course he has to prepare. He has to “[clear] the desktop thoroughly and ruthlessly: every object had to go from it; each notebook, stapler, pencil-holder, scrap of paper; the telephone, the clock (especially the clock); rubbers and paperweights – everything.” Then, “sitting at it, I looked out of the window at the sky. This was blue too – clear blue with the odd wisp of cloud. I angled myself so as to face the largest uninterrupted stretch of sky, then turned so as to align myself exactly with the desktop, so that the borders and perimeters of this ran parallel and perpendicular to those of my gaze. I sat there for a long time, luxuriating in the emptiness of first one space then the other: desktop, sky, desktop. It was definitely time.” He sits there for a long time, because he is in a sense sitting at the end of time: there is no move to make beyond it, there is no way to get up and over it and stalk into the Great Report. No way, that is, without destroying it. This is the problem he faces: the Great Report, which is an utopian undertaking, a text that purportedly deals with Everything, only exists in the virtual. To commence it would be to reduce it to a mere instance, to little more than “a report.” Like poetry, it only works as idea, needing to be both conceived (in the mind) and unconceived (on the paper) at the same time.

V. / Lerner writes of a visit to his dentist, who asks what he does for a living. “I'm a poet,” Lerner announces, and the man winces. Seamus Heaney once mentioned that it took him a long time (we're talking decades here, if I recall correctly) before he allowed himself the moniker poet. “It is not a word,” he said, “that I employ lightly.” This was always the conception I myself had of it. Of course, the distinction that Lerner makes here is a fair one: that if you are a published poet, if you make your money by writing poems and being paid for it, then you are certainly entitled to call yourself a poet. A published poet. Yet the word poet seems to denote something deeper than mere occupation, something Lerner also acknowledges by pointing out how people never quite seem to consider poetry a proper job. In the popular imagination, the poet always seems to be just loafing, just lying about. This is why I (carefully) side with the dentist on this one: to call oneself poet is slightly preposterous. It is to call oneself God. For, after all, “poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical and to reach the transcendent or the divine.”

VI. / Perhaps for this reason, and because of the marginalization of poetry as a viable commercial enterprise, to come across a self-proclaimed poet is a rare thing. It happened to me recently, on a trip to Ireland. I was actually startled by the announcement – so offhand and yet so confident – when the old man I met in the hostel said: “I'm an artist and a poet.�� (Not just a poet: an artist too!) Unlike Lerner's dentist though, I do not in such cases turn to annoyance but rather to admiration. Like the dentist, I, too, immediately assume that the guy is either a bad poet or a good poet I do not understand. Yet this needn't bother me: it is not his putative output as a poet that I am impressed with at this point, but the gall it takes to call oneself poet. That in itself is enough. Perhaps to then go on and write poems, would only be to ruin a good thing.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting meditation/expository essay on why we hate poetry, if we do. Which I don't. But I do teach poetry appreciation classes because many do. Lerner makes good points, mainly elaborating on Grossman's idea that poetry always falls short of its ideal. Because it attempts to express the ineffable, and words fail, it can't help but rouse ire. Any reader will sense the gap. It will frustrate everyone, its authors perhaps most of all.

From there, Lerner goes off onto several interesting tangents. I think I will have to address all of this in a longer review, probably a blog post. I hate it when people write reviews and end up directing followers to their blogs, but because this topic is where I live, I think I will have to do this myself. Sorry...

So I'll supply that link soon.

The main problem with this polemic, it seems to me, is that it suffers from one of the very things that causes the hatred of poetry in the first place. It's not that accessible--it's an academic thought piece. It's too bad he didn't choose to render his thoughts in plainer, and prettier, language, and there's no reason why he could not have.

My personal belief is that the main reason why people hate poetry has to do with the type of poetry that the New Yorker--the most visible platform for smart people who are not necessarily of the literati but who like to learn and think about things--publishes. They don't like that stuff. They don't like that fiction, either. Time and again I hear this from engineers and scientists and historians and lawyers and other professionals who love the NYer for all the other content but hate the poetry and fiction and skip it entirely. Opportunity = lost.

They'd be better off subscribing to the Boston Review overall, but they don't know this, and go on subscribing to the NYer.

More later.

****

I didn't get to the stuff I thought I'd get to when I wrote my blog post... I kind of forgot what I wanted to say... but here's the post anyway: https://claudiaputnam.com/2016/10/02/...

[Johan Thilander]

På mitt bibliotek ansvarar jag för lyrikhyllan. Det var ett ansvarsområde jag bad om på min första arbetsdag, och de bästa arbetsdagar brukar kännetecknas av att jag lyckas rekommendera och låna ut en diktsamling till en intet ont anande låntagare. För det är svårt, poesi är något många människor undviker - eller som denna essä uttrycker det: de "fruktar sin egen oförmåga att bli berörd av poesi". Utmaningen som bibliotekarie blir därmed att övertala låntagarna att möta sina rädslor.

Denna bok pratar om olika anledningar till varför vi hatar poesi, men är i grunden en väldigt hoppingivande bok för poesi-läsare. Den är väldigt träffsäker och intelligent. Som en sidenote så var detta även en bok jag skrattade högt i, och det är något jag sällan gör.

[Adam3million · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know if it meant anything, but I enjoyed the writing a lot

[Daniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

A lot of people, it seems, are interested in reading about why poetry is contemptible (it’s #1 on the Amazon sales list for poetry criticism). That’s a good thing, I take it—a sign of poetry’s vigor these days. But it’s really surprising—since Lerner’s poetry and his fiction have been lauded for their innovation—to discover that he builds his explanation of poetry’s abject fate around a creaky platform of neo-Platonic principles. Lerner’s neo-Romantic stance is dominated theoretically by his conception of “virtual poetry”—an idealized (and non-material) icon of poetry that spoils, he says, our appreciation of actual poems. (I kid you not.) Even the best poems disappoint, Lerner claims, because they are inevitably haunted, and diminished, by the specter of “Poetry” and its claims to transcendence. Lerner has nothing to say about how such an ideal might actually come into existence under specific historical circumstances. Nor, surprisingly (given the title of his essay), does he show much interest in the gruesome wonderland of bad poems (emblems of the inability of even great poems to fulfill the ideal of “virtual poetry”). Although he claims that his essay is “much better at dealing with horrible instances” of poetry than good ones, he treats bad poetry for the most part as little more than an abstract foil to the ideal of absolute Poetry. Except for a brief discussion of prosody (not a very useful index of bad poetry these days) in a wretched nineteenth-century ballad imitation, Lerner simply ignores the specific qualities, and indeed the tradition, of bad poetry (stirring the “hatred” at the core of his poetics). He spends most of his time talking about “great” poetry, whose greatness is inextricable from its failure to fulfill the ideal of “Poetry”: the poetic appeal of Claudia Rankine’s writing, for example, can be explained, he decides, by the "phantom limb" of lyric poetry (missing from Rankine's writing)--a non-material species of "Poetry" haunting (and elegizing) her anatomy of race. Perhaps. In the end, the general effect of Lerner’s idealist perspective is that it prevents him from taking bad poetry seriously; it defers a materialist and historical model of bad poetry. Without such a model, it becomes impossible to identify a verbal matrix (such as the toxin of poetic diction) linking the best and the worst poems. I want to know about lyric poison in its particulars! Lerner’s idealism also obstructs any possibility of viewing toxic forms of lyric as potential catalysts for a radicalization of lyric poetry. For those interested in such prospects and in a thoroughly materialist examination of bad poetry (along with the productive loathing it arouses), one will need to look elsewhere for a more canny and observant (and more seditious) breakdown of lyric poison.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. 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.”

It was cool to notice that Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry has a conventional six-part division of speech as is dictated by classical rhetoric; it even includes a customary digression, which is accepted as the seventh part. By Through this, he follows Philip Sydney's The Defense of Poesy, perhaps the most well-known "apology" for poetry, which, in Lerner's words, "helped establish the posture of poets and critics as essentially defensive". Using Plato's Theory of Forms, he expands on Allen Grossman's work to examine the poet as a tragic figure and the poem always as a record of failure.

He advances the concept of a "virtual poem", Poetry, which is the abstract ideal felt by the poet, compared to the "actual poem", necessarily a pale imitation that's bound by human constraints & worldly limitations. This gap between virtual and actual, the dreamt and the realized, that gets seemingly bridged by a good poet or rendered an abyss by a bad one. He looks at the tussle between the universal & the specific in the poetic impulse, giving concise but generous readings of Dickinson, Baraka, Rankine, and especially Whitman. A concluding digression splendidly supplements his defence.

[Ebony (EKG) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4/5 ⭐️
Points were made.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lerner's argument is that poetry is always seeking to be transcendent: we are looking for a kind of abstract, universal piece of writing that is impossible to achieve. Lerner says, "our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and virtual will enable us to experience, if not a genuine poem -- no such things -- a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean." He is only interested in poetry that seeks to be, in some way, transcendent: he has no room for the playful, the irreverent, the narrative, or the imaginative, in his essay. He goes on to engage with a number of critics, and to express his beefs with their arguments. I like the title of this, but I found myself unconvinced by the majority of Lerner's argument.

[William Rohner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Terrific book in which the author, an award-winning poet, goes deep and with candor into the difficulties and shortcomings of poetry, both canonical and contemporary (though disappointingly, and perhaps tellingly, Lerner says almost nothing about his own poems). Despite its seeming slimness (86 pages), this turns out to be a very long-seeming essay (sorry, it's a "monograph," to use the word Lerner does) with basically one thesis and set of ideas. Though Lerner explores and elaborates on his thesis in various ways, and quite interestingly at times (often comically, and sometimes instructively, especially when discussing actual poems), the book, along with its reader, suffers from a repetition of ideas. Lerner does not unveil much new after the first 30 pages or so. That said, I do think he reaches a rather beautiful and satisfying conclusion in the final few pages on the ultimate issue of whether to hate or love poetry.

While I enjoyed it, I think I did so only because I enjoy both Lerner's prose style (which is dense and a bit convoluted but often quite clever and funny, and he does a very cool thing with marginalia here, which I won't spoil) and thinking about the value of poetry (which I enjoy reading and teaching but not without some occasional mixed feelings). I will also note that the writing and ideas Lerner offers in this book are quite similar to those in his terrific novel Leaving the Atocha Station (indeed, he quotes the narrator of that novel several times in Hatred of Poetry), and that book is probably a better read.

[Eleanor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay this book was supposed to get me to not hate poetry, and I feel like the beginning was super interesting/clever and on the right track (probably because he was talking about Plato so much), but then for the rest of the book he kept referencing a bunch of poems and all of that just went completely over my head. I think this was partly cuz the structure of no chapters made it hard for me to keep track of the progression of his argument, but I also think I just do not understand poetry at all and I thought this was gonna help me and it did not. I could tell I should have loved the last 5 pages but they just made me feel like an outsider cuz I did not get what he was talking about. I think I need to give this another try post-poetry summer and see if I get it more cuz it was really nicely written and short enough to reread. I’m still giving it 4 stars cuz my complaints are just Reader-error (flop on me)

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always find Ben Lerner's writing fascinating. I loved both Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 and found them both thought-provoking and deeply interesting. His writing is precise and evocative: I have not yet read his poetry but after reading this small but thoughtful book (long essay?) I intend to fix that asap.

The Hatred of Poetry takes its title (more or less) from a quote from Marianne Moore at the beginning: "I too, hate poetry". Lerner examines people's distrust of poetry (including poets') as stemming from the gap between the idea poem and its (always failed) actualization. He examines how terrible poets both illustrate this (in an hilarious section on the truly horrible Scottish poet, William McGonagall) in their failing so hard that it makes a perfect poem seem more possible and the brilliant poets (he uses Keats and Dickinson as his examples) underscoring both their own and our sense of their being a greater possibility.

Lerner meanders a bit but I didn't mind since the writing and analysis remains interesting. I particularly liked his section on Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric wonderfully perceptive. I love this book of Rankine's (and all her others) and wanted to reread it after Lerner's discussion cast a new perspective on it for me. I loved his take on Whitman and Whitman's project of becoming an everyman. It led to an interesting discussion of how critics complain about poetry being both too specific and, simultaneously, too general and how the perceived failures are often about it no longer being a white man's "universal" view but now includes many perspectives and varying experience, including (but not limited too) women and people of color.

Lerner is a brilliant writer. I'm not sure how non-poetry readers would enjoy this book but his digressions should appeal to everyone.

But maybe I'm just prejudiced. I intend to read everything Lerner writes.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“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. And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn’t poetry anymore—that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits.”

One look at my "read" shelf will show that I predominately read women, and (perhaps? probably? unfairly) avoid or procrastinate reading the work of most contemporary male writers, but Ben Lerner—despite my initial response to him as being a little self-inflating and not a little pretentious, which I think is probably still true to some extent—continues to be one of the most interesting minds to read on the page. (I love both of his novels, and recommend 10:04 regularly.) The Hatred of Poetry is a slim volume of lit crit, but it manages to do what good lit crit ought to: deepen and not dismiss, respond and not refuse, invite possibility and multiplicity, pluralize and specify. It'll be interesting to see how the book is received, as I think it aims to provoke a conversation about the use, aim, and value of poetry—a topic about which—knowing some poets, as I do—I presume many will have a lot to say.

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

5+ out of 5.

There is an inherent recognition in Lerner’s essay that the oft-repeated maxim of poetry being evident in every human mind is true. Yes, I would agree with him that it doesn’t make sense: every other art form requires some element of practice and natural talent. But poetry is itself an attempt, more than anything else, to express the inexpressible about being human – and so it may manifest itself as a moment when you’re stopped still by light dappling through trees across a fire escape out an apartment window with conversation from the neighboring restaurant drifting through the breeze and an acoustic guitar strumming quietly through the closed door at the other end of the apartment. Or perhaps it manifests as the slight dizziness at the news of another shooting, another life or lives stopped short because a policeman or an extremist couldn’t stop themselves short, and the way that the muscles around your heart constrict and your palms get sweaty and the tears don’t quite make it into your eyes even though they did the last time but maybe the last time was already one time too many. You may not be able to express how these moments or any moments strike you, or you may choose to express them in means other than the poetic. But the experience of them is Poetry – and we hate poetry because it will never quite express the inexpressible.

More at RB: https://ragingbiblioholism.com/2016/0...

[yenna]

this was actually a very surprisingly satisfying read, once you get over the general Pretentious vibes. like, i stayed up late to read this instead of falling asleep on it? an essay? wild

fave parts, i'll add to this later w some more quotes maybe but they're fairly long winded tbh:
1. when he tore apart some random dude's argument into shreds, we love to see it

2. the discussion of universality of poetry in the context of race and politics (“Edmundson might say what he demands is that a poet attempt that impossible task and fail, but his readings lead us to suspect he believes that white men will fail better.”) i'll have to read the works he directly adds as quotes because BOY THEY WERE. VERY GOOD

3. i love books that provide some definition to my thoughts or give a term to something we experience but don't have a name to and this one did very well on that front:

a) semantic satiation !!! shoutout to this book for bringing this term to my attention

b) the reasonings for why poetry is hated was so eloquently put... how we link the ability to 'understand' poetry w our humanity, how we lament current poetry because of some nostalgia for a past where poetry was more powerful (a past that he argues doesn't exist), our expectations for what poetry should achieve, poetry vs Poetry as an ideal we can't reach with actual poems was an interesting argument too (idk if i agree)

so yeah, pretty thought provoking, i should read more essay stuff huh

[Bert · Rating 4 out of 5]

One has the right to say he dislikes a novel, hates a movie, or disagrees with a study or essay. But with poetry one has to be in line with the fellow readers, the people for whom the poem is written. In this essay Lerner tries to explain why one has to, and why this causes readers to disdain poetry. Lerner does this by swiping away the universality of a poem and reducing it back to the singularity it comes from - be it an individual experience, a feeling, a thought, desire, contempt, lack of skills, outburst or aspiration, everyone can write poetry. And everyone should write poetry. As long as one doesn't write it for everyone poetry is something that can and will be loved.

[Erin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to reading this and am disappointed in the half of the book that I did read. There is lack of direction to this text since this author did a poor job of separating between technical aspects of poetry and cultural biases in relation to poetry. I respect the intention behind the text, but I was just not able to connect with the follow through.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Je kunt de hedendaagse poëzie - in ieder tijdperk - naar hartenlust haten omdat ze er maar niet in slaagt de fantasie van de universaliteit werkelijkheid te laten worden, maar de haters moeten eens ophouden te suggereren dat een gedicht er ooit in is geslaagd namens iedereen te spreken.’

[Teresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

"a Poesia nasce do desejo de superar o finito e o histórico - o mundo humano de violência e diferença - e de alcançar o transcendente ou o divino."