Fitzcarraldo Editions (2020)
I.
Any work with the word hatred in the title is likely to catch my attention.
For hatred is a poorly appreciated passion, often understood purely in reactive terms as love on the recoil, as if the latter were the great primary term or essential prerequisite and the former lacked its own positivity or dynamism.
The fact is, however, that whilst love makes blind and compromises judgement, hatred activates areas of the brain involved in critical evaluation. Thus, whilst love may seem to promise human salvation, it's hate which has enabled us to survive as a species [a].
Still, we're not here to discuss hatred per se, but, rather, Ben Lerner's essay from 2016 in which, paradoxically, he uses his hatred of poetry to construct an interesting defence of the art and craft of which he is himself a skilled practitioner [b].
II.
Lerner opens with the revised (shorter) version of Marianne Moore's 'Poetry':
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect
contempt for it, one discovers in
it, after all, a place for the genuine. [c]
And that's a clever place to open and a clever little poem to open with, although I must confess to being uncomfortable with the final word; one that not only refers us back to ideals of truth and authenticity, but retains echoes of a concern with paternal origins and racial purity.
Still, we're not here to discuss the etymology and politics of the word genuine: it's the unforgettable first line that matters most; a line that has been on repeat in Lerner's head for even more years than Bartleby's I would prefer not to has been in mine [d]. I know exactly what Lerner means when he speaks of a refrain having either "the feel of negative rumination" or "a kind of manic, mantric affirmation" [e].
There is, then, something about poetry that makes us all dislike it - even if we continue to read it, write it, and wish to safeguard it. It's an art form which, as Lerner points out, has been defined for millennia by this rhythm of denunciation and defence. Maybe, he suggests, that's because poetry always fails to deliver what it promises to deliver; i.e., it always at some level disappoints.
This probably has something to do with the limits of language. For language can never quite capture the transcendent impulse that often inspires great poetry and, as Nietzsche says, we posit words where feeling ends.
Thus, whilst poetry clears a space for something, it isn't the thing itself. At best, poetry is a kind of approximation or simulation and this irritates a lot of people who want the real deal and demand the impossible from language (that it describe the indescribable, for example). The song of infinitude, writes Lerner, "is compromised by the finitude of its terms" [13].
This means that the poet is a tragic figure - someone gripped by a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, filled with recurrent dreams and imaginative fantasies and repeating the same errors over and over again. In my view, the sanest poets learn to climb down Pisgah and attend, like Francis Ponge, to the nature of things as actual objects. To substantiate mystery is the task of the artist and their concern should be with immanence, not transcendence.
But that's just my view: it's not necessarily Lerner's view. For even if he admits of the impossiblity of genuine poetry - and confesses that he can't hear the planet-like music that the Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney claims to hear - I sense that he still admires those who attempt to project existence into the fourth dimension of being and place individual experience within something bigger - something like Humanity, for example.
But I might be mistaken here; for Lerner, like many contemporary poets, expresses acute hesitancy about the desire to speak for everyone and is sceptical of the Whitmanesque fantasy of a poet who could "unite us in our difference, constituting a collective subject through the magic of language" [60] [f].
III.
There are many reasons to dislike Plato. But, to his credit, he didn't take any shit from poets, as Larry David might say.
The irony of Plato's dialogues, however, is that "they
are themselves poetic: formally experimental imaginative
dramatizations" [26]. And Socrates might even be thought of as "a new
breed of poet" [26]. The further irony, is that by attacking poetry as he did, Plato makes it seem sexier - more powerful, more dangerous - than it really is:
"How many poets' outsized expectations about the political effects of our work, or critics' disappointment in what actual poems contribute to society, derive from Plato's bestowing us with the honour of exile?" [28] [g]
This mistaken attack on poetry has continued in one form or another down the ages. One suspects that the Romantics were very much aware of something that Nietzsche later formularises: what doesn't kill a thing makes it stronger. Thus they secretly revelled in the attacks upon them: It is better to be hated than loved ... an idea which Malcolm McLaren would later subscribe to.
IV.
Lerner tells us that his favourite poet is Cyrus Console, his boyhood friend from Kansas (which may be true, or may simply be a touching gesture on his part). And he confesses that he's "never found Keatsian euphony quite as powerful as Emily Dickinson's dissonance" [46], to which one can only reply: moi non plus.
In fact, I'm fairly sympathetic to Lerner throughout this work and mostly in agreement with what he says; even if I suspect he'd characterise my hatred of poetry as a defensive rage against all otherworldliness (that is to say, as a form of reaction, whereas I tend to see this as a form of active nihilism or a negation of the negative).
I certainly share Lerner's "refusal of modernist nostalgia for some lost unity of experience and [...] rejection of totalizing ideologies" [97]. That would serve as a fine description of my own postmodern project (even if Lerner says it with reference to Charles Orson's 1949 verse 'The Kingfishers', and not Torpedo the Ark).
I'll close this post, if I may, with what might (and should) have been Lerner's own conclusion: Poems are like the meterological phenomenon known as virga - i.e., observable streaks of water or ice crystals trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they ever reach the ground.
In other words, poetry is a shower of rain "that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth" [100] [h].
Notes
[a] I say more on the advantages of hatred in a post published in November 2014: click here.
[b] As well as three highly acclaimed novels, Lerner has also published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, (Copper Canyon Press, 2004);
Angle of Yaw, (Copper Canyon Press, 2006); and Mean Free Path, (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). These three volumes, plus a handful of newer poems, have been brought together in No Art (Granta Books, 2016).
For more information on Lerner and to read a selection of his work, visit his page on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.
[c] See The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, (MacMillan, 1967).
The original (longer) version of 'Poetry' was published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse, ed. Alfred Kreymborg, (Nicholas L. Brown, 1920) and can be read on poets.org by clicking here.
[d] I have always had an ambivalent relationship to Bartleby the scrivener; sometimes I hate him, sometimes I am taken with his strange beauty and negativism beyond all negation. See one of the very earliest posts on TTA (31 Jan 2013) in which I discuss Melville's great anti-hero: click here.
[e] Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), p. 9. Future page references to this work will be given directly in the text.
[f] Lerner provides an excellent discussion of Whitman in The Hatred of Poetry, see pp. 61-70. His conclusion is clear: "the Whitmanic program has never been realized in history, and I don't think it can be" [67]. In other words, poetry is incapable of reconciling the individual and the social; of transforming millions of individuals into an authentic people. Later in the text, Lerner describes the desire for universality as a form of white male nostalgia (see pp. 78-85) and veers towards identity politics in a fairly lengthy discussion of Claudia Rankine's writing (pp. 87-96).
[g] Lerner provides an interesting discussion of poetry and politics - particularly in relation to the idea of being avant-garde - later in his work; see pp. 53-57.
For the avant-garde, writes Lerner, "the poem is an imaginary bomb [...]: It explodes the category of poetry and enters history. The poem is a weapon - a weapon against received ideas of what the artwork is, certainly, but also an instrument of war in a heroic, revolutionary struggle [...]." But of course, ultimately poems are bombs that never go off - much to the annoyance of those who hope to achieve real political change via poetry.
[h] It's unfortunate that this isn't Lerner's closing remark; that he goes on to qualify it, thereby undermining the strength of his own argument:
"I hope it goes without saying that [...] poems can fulfill any number of ambitions [...] They can actually be funny, or lovely, or offer solace, or courage, or inspiration to certain audience at certain times; they can play a role in constituting a community; and so on." [101-102]
Lerner then provides a kind of postscript in which he attempts to explain how that can be; i.e., how poetry as a linguistic practice might overcome or bypass the internal contradictions he's been describing. Lerner thus ends his book not with an interesting comparison between poetry and a weather event, but with a (slightly nauseating) plea for the genuine and hate's sublimation:
"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." [113-114]
For an earlier review of The Hatred of Poetry - one which I had forgotten writing back in October 2016, until kindly reminded by a friend of mine - click here.
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