Review: The Hatred of Poetry

Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. (FSG 2016)
Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller

The space of poetry has always been a space of contention. Ever since Plato decried the usefulness of poetry in The Republic, poets needed to justify its value on a social scale, while maintaining a voice independent of the infinite others to which they must speak. The result of these staggering conditions lends poets the senseless expectation to write an independent experience that speaks across the gulf of time. Needless to say, this desire--supported both by poets, their critics, and non-poets--lends poetry the reputation of being a failed profession. In Plato's terms, poetry cannot replicate reality, justice, truth, or even other people's occupations better than the world itself. One only needs a mirror, apparently, to prove the uselessness of poetry. It is this oversimplified perspective of the poetic work which Ben Lerner analyzes in The Hatred of Poetry. Lerner articulates the means by which dentists and labourers, historians and critics, and even poets themselves, built the edifice of poetry upon a scaffold of resentment and how the echoes of poetry's self-contempt resonate in the poetic climate of the 21st century.

Lerner founds his argument upon Allen Grossman's conceptualization of the poetic movement as defined by the virtual potential in the writing of poetry, a landscape of possibilities destroyed by the poet's actual writing of the poem. For Lerner, poetry simultaneously contains "the abstract potential of the medium as felt by the poet" at the same time the writing of a poem "necessarily betrays that impulse when it joins the world of representation." From this he extrapolates that "Poetry isn't hard, it's impossible." Because there's no genuine space where a writer enters the work of poetry on self-decided terms, one's own voice can never sing the poetic song, for a poet's independent voice is too restricted in its access to hit every note the performance requires. The aggravation rising from the realization of a fruitless attempt leads the poet to identify with Marianne Moore's "perfect contempt" for poetry, what Lerner identifies in her awkward acknowledgment: "I, too, dislike it." Within her clumsy phrase lies the poet's revulsion not just at the futility of their task, but a nihilistic resignation towards the pointless effort despite their inability to ever succeed.

Lerner's conceptualization paints the poet's portrait as particularly absurd, Sisyphean in nature; yet unlike Camus, who offered a scene where the absurd hero finds happiness, Lerner's image of the poet appears pessimistically fatalistic. His trite dismissal of poetry's effects resonate punctually throughout the essay in the refrain: "Poetry is impossible," which builds into Lerner's choral insistence for a poetics of self-applied contempt as a means to achieve "illumination":

Poets are liars not because, as Socrates says, they can fool us with the power of their imitations, but because identifying yourself as a poet implies you might overcome the bitter logic of the poetic principle, and you can't. You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.

Attaining perfect contempt to reach a genuine poetry permeates Lerner's essay and echoes Marianne Moore's "I, too, dislike it." The sentiment resonates through Lerner's insights on McGonagall's "The Tay Bridge Massacre," Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, and the odd proclamations made by high-profile literary critics such as Mark Edmundson. In analyzing our collective hatred for poetry, Lerner underlines a collective failure of our imaginations--that one's abstract expectations of poetry do not measure the actual accomplishments of great poets.

Although Lerner's argument explains how the literary consensus reached this collective failure of the imagination, he never offers a compelling solution. Lerner's text has been widely received as a defense of poetry, despite never stepping out of the self-contemptuous framework it opposes. In fairness, this is intentional. Lerner's conclusion maintains that through focusing and deepening one's hatred of poetry, "it might come to resemble love." However, embracing this conclusion requires more convincing than his criticisms ultimately offer. Part of this is due to Lerner's premature cynicism with poetry's potential, which leads to ridiculous statements such as "poetry's failure to achieve any real political effects," an argument reductive and (more crucially) wrong. Such statements require a structure far more comprehensive than what Lerner ultimately offers; and, despite his admissions to composing a "desultory way of reading across the centuries," he never grasps beyond the restrictions Plato imposed centuries before. It's a shame, because in his refusal to imagine a poetics of possibility, his argument unfortunately reflects the same views he criticizes. While the lucid writing of his prose sharpens the point of his elocution--making visible the sinews that connect concepts across the abyss of time, place, and reason--he never offers a compelling reason for one to become, like himself, invested in a hating-that-is-loving of poetry.

Despite the contradiction of Lerner's broader claims, the perspective of his smaller insights are nevertheless intriguing. His reflections on the subjectivity of art offer an incisive commentary on the prevalence of subjective experience in literary discourse. Attributing the subjective problem to "the measure of our humanity," offers the unusual insight that thinking "you're a poet... whether or not you know it," derives from assumptions of poetry as an innate human experience, rather than measuring a poet's labour. Lerner's delineation of this dichotomous perspective of poetry as profound achievement and extreme laziness feels more refreshing, not to mention less anchored to his own fatalism. The Hatred of Poetry nevertheless presents insight to the premature dismissiveness with which all poets grapple; even if, lucid as his prose may be, it ultimately supports an argument that, much like the tragic beauty of the "virga," never reaches the earth.