Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions)'Hatred' doesn't look like quite the right word for it. 'Scepticism about Poetry' might be closer to the ideas here but doesn't have the same impact. Ben Lerner begins his essay with Marianne Moore's poem, Poetry, that begins,
I, too, dislike it.
and dislike is passive in its negation of liking, not forthright in its condemnation.
I was interested because I have a few poems that doubt if poetry is always sufficient for the job it sets itself. Lerner begins his discussion of objections to poetry with Plato who, in his Republic, found no place for poets because they do nothing useful as if that were any reason not to have them.
But it is with Caedmon that he finds the first genuine reasons for doubt,
'for songs, be they never so well made, cannot be turned of one tongue into another, word for word, without loss to their grace and worthiness' [Bede] If that's true of translation in the waking world, it's doubly true of translation from a dream. The actual poem Caedmon brings back to the human community is necessarily a mere echo of the first.
Compromised by its own words, a poem finds it difficult to live up to the transcendent ambitions it had during its making.
Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure.
It is noted in Keats that he can describe perfect music but not play it. We are side-tracked by an analysis of why McGonagall is so bad that he is memorable for it and then Whitman is given credit for trying to do something that was impossible.
Whether poetry is leisure or work is a good question but likely to be answered differently by those who enjoy putting together a few verses for enjoyment from those who appear on the circuit of festivals, morosely or cheerily trapped behind desks after readings ready to sign copies of their books for readers.
Lerner has a useful passage on the avant garde who 'hate existing poems because they are part of a bankrupt society' but fail through a 'nostalgia for the future'.
Lerner doesn't, of course, hate poetry but his monograph puts into context the limitations of what some have been led to believe could be sublime. For myself, I think it is necessary not to begin from a dream of what the poem potentially could be, which led to Caedmon's disappointment, but build from what raw materials we have, which are the words and forms, to make whatever we can. A carpenter has wood and the idea of a chair but shouldn't begin work believing that his chair will be perfect. There is genuine satisfaction to be had from the finished work.
Poets, or many of them, would prefer to be musicians but would be better off accepting that music is capable of something apparently closer to the transecendent, not least because it isn't tied to the meanings, rhythms and sounds of words. The Well-Tempered Klavier is not expected to mean anything.
In the end Lerner asks of the haters,
that they strive to perfect their contempt...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.
It might sound as if this is an academic treatise that talks all kind of self-indulgent theory designed for other academics but it is accessible, sensible and short. Among all the writing about poetry, of which there is no shortage, this is a piece worth reading. It's not as strident and dismissive as its title might make one anticipate and, for anybody still interested in what poetry is or can be, it is a sane and informed contribution, and most of it looks good to me.
