If you’ve ever taught a literature class, you’ve seen it before: the student seated in the back raises his hand, puffs out his chest and proclaims his distaste for poetry, as if pushing broccoli off his plate. As the teacher, you wear an expression of shock, for the sake of performance. And each semester, you ask yourself: What’s at the root of this disdain? And more to the point, what does poetry do to deserve it?
It’s curious that something as seemingly harmless as poetry could inspire hatred, and yet denunciations of the genre are nothing new. Starting with Plato’s argument that poets should be banished, many criticisms have been lobbed over the centuries, some more biting than others. (My favorite diss comes from the early-19th-century English novelist Thomas Love Peacock, who took aim at the poet’s mind: “The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backwards.”) Today, the battle over the value of poetry rages on.
Enter Ben Lerner. A poet first and foremost, with two celebrated novels under his belt, Lerner attempts to stay above the fray by analyzing the unending debate with fresh eyes. The thesis of The Hatred of Poetry is as clear as it is counter-intuitive: people hate poetry because they hold it in such high esteem—and poems fail to fulfill their lofty promise. It’s not so much a matter of quality, but rather the mechanism by which poetry is produced: “You’re moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of [a] 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.” The poem, Lerner proposes, is poetry’s undoing; it cannot live up to its sublime origins. Thus, critics and poets alike are unhappy with what materializes on the page, all the while affirming their faith in what poetry should be. “Hating on actual poems,” he explains, “is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry.”
But why single out poetry? What separates it from other art forms? “Some kids take piano lessons, some kids study tap dance, but we don’t say every kid is a pianist or dancer.” Lerner recognizes that being called a poet is about more than artistic practice; it’s a marker of human imagination. Figures like Ella Fitzgerald and Philippe Petit are poets because they deliver a message that inspires us—whether they ever composed a sonnet is beside the point. And so society celebrates the role of the poet while spurning poems themselves. (I feel compelled to mention that in the press kit that accompanied my copy of The Hatred of Poetry were many pages of praise for Lerner’s two novels, but none for his three books of poems. Indeed, poetry is “an art hated from without and within”—or at least easily eclipsed.)
A refrain common to recent rebukes of poetry is that today’s poems don’t achieve universality. But is that an appropriate standard? With razor-sharp intelligence sans merci, Lerner dissects Mark Edmundson’s 2013 Harper’s essay criticizing poems that, in Edmundson’s words, “don’t slake a reader’s thirst for meanings that pass beyond the experience of the individual poet and light up the world we hold in common.” If common experience is the goal, then Lerner suggests looking to Whitman, the famed bard of the generalized self. As Lerner wisely points out, however, any blind attempt at universality must backfire: no one poet speaks for everyone. He contrasts how it feels to encounter Whitman’s poetry with the work of contemporary poet Claudia Rankine, whose best-selling book, Citizen, addresses racial injustice and identity: “Whoever you are, while reading Citizen, you are forced to situate yourself relative to the pronouns as opposed to assuming you fit within them.” If Whitman strives to elide differences of personhood, Rankine tacks in the opposite direction, heightening the reader’s awareness of one’s place in a racially determined world. Lerner praises her writing—a blend of poetry, memoir, and visual art—for how it admits inherent imperfections of the lyric, noting that “great poets confront the limits of actual poems.”
For his part, Lerner acknowledges the shortcomings of The Hatred of Poetry, a slim volume. “It doesn’t have much to say about good poems in all their variety,” he writes, adding that another essay might consider “how hip-hop, or spoken word, or other creative linguistic practices” enter into the discussion. He also offers little on poetic praxis outside Western lit. But perhaps a more head-scratching omission is that Lerner, so keen on advancing his own argument, never stops to examine the more usual explanations given for poetry’s unpopularity. According to his calculus, most everyone—from Marianne Moore to the passenger seated next to you in coach—dislikes poetry for being, as Shelley phrased it, a “feeble shadow” of its “original conception.” But what about people who resent poetry because of its association with conceptual high-mindedness—elevated in speech, inaccessible in meaning? What about the student who hates poems for being too hard to understand?
The poetry world has long fretted over the issue of difficulty. Since readership is low relative to other genres, it’s often assumed that many are tuning out on account of frustration. (To remedy this, some have advocated for more accessible poetry, while others, like Charles Bernstein, have railed against any perceived effort to ‘water down’ the art.) The conventional logic is that many contemporary poems are too conceptual for the public, just as abstract art is dinged for being too obtuse. This is where Lerner, if he engaged with complaints about poetry’s difficulty, could flip the script. If he’s right that the best poems are virtual—vague notions that flicker through our heads—then they must remain inaccessible by definition. In a sense, the expression of a poem is never conceptual enough.
This claim that the ideal poem is the one never written is reiterated, as Lerner observes, by countless poets throughout history. But it ignores a key aspect of the art form: named after the Greek word for “making,” poetry—from poiesis—is also rooted in the tactile. In an interview for Bomb, the poet Dean Young describes his methodology: “I make a poem out of what interests me: subjects, phrases, rhymes, blurts, philosophies, recipes, dreams, animals, everything I’ve stolen from other poems. To some extent my process is most often a combination of automatic writing and collage… I want a poem to be a whole thing.” Young’s aspiration isn’t virtual; he constructs poetry as a handiwork of collage, of moving materials around on the page to create something. Or, as Amiri Baraka declared, “Art-ing is what makes art.” This isn’t to dispute the importance of abstract thinking or divine inspiration in the poetic process, but to honor how our bodies give form to poems; how we put them within reach.
Perhaps The Hatred of Poetry is most compelling when reflecting on how poetry shapes our childhoods. Adults are eager, Lerner asserts, to return to that time of nursery rhymes, when language was rich in possibility, when meaning was still something to be discovered. If some of us are salty, at least the sentiment is understandable: “Our resentment of that falling away from poetry takes the form… of contempt for grownup poets and for poems.” Here Lerner is psychoanalyzing the antagonists. It’s no mistake that his book’s closing word is love; he is suggesting that, despite the “rhythm of denunciation and defense,” both sides betray an abiding affinity for what poetry was. Hold dear the haters, for they too come from a place of longing.
15 responses
That poetry can be unpopular strikes me as odd since poetry set to music is one of the most popular art forms. I write what I term poetry because I become intrigued with the way words have extensions beyond communication of meaning alone through their definitions. Since I get small response to my efforts I assume my outlook does not slide easily (or perhaps, genuinely) into the accepted understanding of the definition. To me nursery rhymes, Dr.Seuss’ output, and a whole range of ancient and modern efforts qualify as poetry because I enjoy the ideas and the way the words perform a joyful dance of meaning and funny ideas and rhythm and rhyme and whether the ideas are inspirational or merely strange or an unusual way to stretch language is irrelevant to my delight and acceptance. I find a good deal of modern poetry inscrutable and I am unhappy it does not reach me but I accept that people deeper in the field than me who praise it must find it very worthwhile and, like my basic lack of comprehension of quantum physics, I accept its probable worth and let it go. I do not hate it but am very sorry it is beyond my reach. I presume my naivety in this mysterious material and hope I may, eventually, pierce it value.
Although I write what I assume is poetry I do not identify myself by that since I do many other things which equally do not place me in a category.
I think much of it is simpler. Poems, old a new, rhyming or not, are often rich, dense, allusive and personal. It can be very difficult to figure out ‘what is going on’ or ‘what they are saying’, especially if the reader is new to poetry (like a student) or comes from a point of view far from the poet’s. If I read a poem and ‘don’t get it’, it is easy for me to take that as some kind of criticism of me. I’m too dumb to understand poetry. It is then easy to hate something that implicitly criticizes you or makes you feel inadequate. I think one important message is that not all poems are for everyone but that there are poems that will speak to you, whoever you are, so don’t worry if one doesn’t work for you, just read another one. At least they are (mostly) short.
Prose is the common meal on which we all subsist. Poetry is dessert which can be fattening. Skipping dessert is not uncommon but it’s a pleasure I cannot deny myself.
Banish the poets they’re banal!
No one is craning their necks
to see them craft their lofty texts.
Not a single rational mind
gives a whiff of a fuck of whats next.
Utopia is closed for repairs.
(and who cares).
Outside it, the poets have gathered right there
in that cold plaza where wind
whispers and tickles their spider strand
hair and the emaciated dogs of war growl
at the circus bear chained to the market
to help make the customers care.
What rebukes play on the jukebox?
What jokes are croaked by the toads
waiting for kisses yet remiss of their duty
to remind princes and princesses
that a peck just to check
how difficult change is to direct
might be worth the lesson of why we connect.
It’s like golf: The only thing worse than watching it is reading about it.
POETRY AND PROSE
Some of us guys
Don’t compromise.
We rhythm and rhyme with great ease.
It’s no gift to devise
Poetic truth or just lies
In between a cough and a sneeze.
It’s a problem with prose
As it most often goes
It’s hard to make somebody listen.
Whereas poetry clicks
In a sensual mix
And casual speech gets to glisten.
Modernism killed poetry’s popular appeal….Next….
Even the universe comes at a price,
Fixed by God or Nature at Creation,
Paid in coin of small denomination,
Low-interest long-term assets suffice.
Better minds have used every device
To deduce by selfish calculation
Every thing’s final incineration—
We’re still awaiting their learned advice.
Matter is more than actuarial:
Potential energy atomic bound
Held tight by ambivalent defenses.
And poets more than secretarial:
With all their capacity to confound
Beyond the reach of the common senses.
At least the Greeks had sly Eros to blame
When hot passion overthrew cold reason;
It was part of his task and all his fame,
This trafficking in amorous treason.
But we are bred for a different season,
With our desires determined in haste;
Taking for love what is merely frisson,
Mistaking for diamonds the baser paste.
Our fault is more than a matter of taste:
It grows from an essential confusion
About what is treasure and what is waste
In lives of sentimental profusion.
Many things worse than the truth will emerge
When feigned emotion and false pride converge.
AS IT GOES
The Sun incinerates my days,
The Moon devours my dreams.
My hopes sparkle in the stars
With evanescent gleams.
But here, my hands grip the earth
To know its grit and stones.
Its chalk and grime and iron dust
Make my blood and bones.
The roar of winds, the sop of rains
The moods of atmosphere
Engineer duration’s shape
Upon this dizzy sphere.
I am of Earth, of air, of stars
Sculptured out of time
And this shaping still goes on,
with reason, sometimes rhyme.
even
a monkey on acid
can compose poems
but by all means pay 100,00 for a MFA
because then
we can all watch
Language is difficult. Poetry is a difficult language. Today’s readers are barely literate and lazy. Anything, not just poetry, that makes demands on them is too much. Just another symptom of a culture in decline.
If you read it out you can hear the beauty
And if it hits you in the gut it’s a keeper
He got it backwards. The hatred comes from intuiting that the poem is beyond you… and that the poet is an over-sharing egotist with no respect for your personal space; and that you don’t have the gift of time to spend on unlocking the poem. Sour grapes.
As somebody with plenty of time, but not much interest in literary puzzles I can sympathize with somebody intensely frustrated with poetry that seems so knotted up in personal ingenuity that no Gordian effort can be rewarding. My own attitude is that an intensely puzzling creation may have great value for a specialized audience but, like highly spiced food, it simply does not fit my palate. There’s lots of poetry requiring only a delight in many of the other rewards of poetry and that’s quite sufficient for me.
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.