Ben Lerner: The Hatred of Poetry (A Review)

Ben Lerner is a very clever man: a poet, a novelist, and a professor of English. And so it's no real surprise to discover he's written a very clever little book on the hatred of poetry, which, he argues, is essential to the practice of writing poetry; a practice that is also destined to failure, no matter how successful certain poems might appear. For whilst it aspires to be an art of transcendence, poetry is ultimately as mortal and as mundane as everything else. Thus, as Lerner points out, the poet is always a tragic figure.

Discovering this, however, is a bitter disappointment to many practitioners and readers and it makes them rather resentful. But hate, as Lawrence says, is more often than not only love on the recoil. And so as much as Lerner claims to dislike poetry and to read it, like Marianne Moore, with a perfect contempt, he remains of course devoted to it and his book is a defence of poetry (as a space of authenticity), not an assault upon it, nor another tedious and premature announcement of its death. 

Unlike those who feel in some manner betrayed by poetry's failure to deliver on its promise, Lerner seems to rejoice in the impossibility of writing a genuinely successful (or successfully genuine) poem, i.e. a virtual as opposed to an actual verse. He has - in part at least - reconciled himself to the fact that "There is no genuine poetry; there is only, after all, and at best, a place for it." [18]

And Lerner remains determined to defend this place; not merely as an individual writer struggling with his own unique demon, but as a member of a wider human community, despite the latter often being no more than a privileged white male political fantasy - the myth of universality - as he exposes and concedes.  

Following his introductory remarks, Lerner provides fresh and insightful readings of two great poets, Keats and Emily Dickinson, who, although very different writers, nevertheless "make a place for the genuine by producing a negative image of the ideal Poem we cannot write ... [and] express their contempt for merely actual poems by developing techniques for virtualizing their own compositions ..." [51-2]

More controversially perhaps, he also makes a case for reconsidering the work of William McGonagall - thought by many to be the world's worst poet. Lerner doesn't wish to challenge this critical consensus, but, more interestingly, argue that it's the abysmal nature of his verse that gives it value:

"The horrible and the great ... have more in common than the mediocre ... or even pretty good, because they rage against the merely actual ... in order to approach ... the imaginary work that could reconcile the finite and the infinite, the individual and the communal, which can make a new world out of the linguistic materials of this one." [51-2]

Lerner then discusses Whitman. And, to his credit, he does so with the same relaxed brilliance as he discussed the other poets mentioned, concluding that Walt's great utopian project has never been - and can never be - realised.

Whitman thought he could personally embody all differences and all contradictions, could speak for one and all. But he couldn't. And Lerner's discussion of the black female poet Claudia Rankine, whose work "reflects many of the contradictory political demands made of poetry while providing a contemporary example of how a poet might strategically explore the limits of the actual" [87], explicitly tells us why this is so.

Poems, Lerner concludes, "can fulfil any number of ambitions ... can actually be funny, or lovely, or offer solace, or courage, or inspiration to certain audiences at certain times; they can play a role in constituting a community" [101-02], no matter how restricted in scale and provisional the latter might be.

But they can't rise above time, express irreducible individuality, achieve universality, defeat the more powerful language games of society, or bring about a revaluation of all values. Thus we need, if you like, to curb our enthusiasm for poetry; if we stopped expecting too much of it and persisting in our idealism, then we may possibly learn how to stop hating it too.

Indeed, if we strive in a Nietzschean fashion to consummate our hatred and perfect our contempt, then, who knows, "it might come to resemble love" [114].  

Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016). Page numbers given in the text refer to this edition.

This post is gifted to my friend Simon Solomon as a slightly premature birthday present.