Thursday, July 07, 2016

Review: ‘The Hatred of Poetry’: Let’s Count the Ways - NY Times

By JEFF GORDINIER JULY 7, 2016


In “Mean Free Path,” a collection of poetry published in 2010, Ben Lerner kicked off a stanza like this: “There must be an easier way to do this/I mean without writing.”

That central anxiety — a sense that great ideas tend to become a little discombobulated during the difficult act of putting them into words — hovers over and haunts “The Hatred of Poetry,” an extended essay that hinges on the impossibility of writing poetry. There is something impossibly knotty about the arguments it makes, too. The book comes across as such a cerebral curio that (like Mr. Lerner’s thinky and digressive novels,“Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04”) it’s almost impossible to describe.

Let’s try. (Although if we were to give up trying, Mr. Lerner would probably applaud.) The gist: A lot of people seem to hate poetry, which is arguably neck-and-neck with mime as the most animus-attracting of art forms. Loathing rains down on poetry, from people who have never read a page of it as well as from people who have devoted their lives to reading and writing it. Pivoting off a provocative line by Marianne Moore — “I, too, dislike it.” — Mr. Lerner admits that he can relate to the haters. Hostility, he suggests, qualifies as a crucial mode in which poetry and human beings start a conversation with each other. Antipathy is the entry point.

“Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is,” he writes. “I, too, dislike it, and have largely organized my life around it (albeit with far less discipline and skill than Marianne Moore) and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are for me — and maybe for you — inextricable.”

Mr. Lerner’s own poetry, like his fiction, has a habit of floating off in directions that the reader does not anticipate. “The Hatred of Poetry” expands on that signature move. After establishing that poetry is a magnet for scorn, Mr. Lerner does not do what you might expect. He does not go all Garrison Keillor and mount a passionate defense. He does not raise a frothy toast to the glorious music of verse. He does not say, “I realize that you hate poetry, dear reader, but I’m going to make you fall in love with it.”



Instead, he devotes the lion’s share of this pocket volume to exploring some of the ways that poetry has bothered and disappointed various factions, starting with Plato and passing through the countless magazine essayists who have, with tedious regularity over the decades, gnawed on the old thematic bone of “the death of poetry.”

One problem, Mr. Lerner offers, may be that readers expect too much of poetry. They want it to rouse the citizenry to political action, and it doesn’t. They want it to peal with the music of the spheres, and it doesn’t. They want it to be a magical elixir that can remove them from the demands and drudgeries of the world of commerce, and it can’t. It seems to fall short of the ecstatic perfection that the very word “poetry” calls to mind. For a lot of folks, poetry makes nothing happen (to borrow from W. H. Auden) aside from causing verse-dodgers to feel guilty for running far away from it after high school.

Mr. Lerner skates across this frozen lake of pique with delicate skill. His probing mind works in his favor: He’s virtuosic in picking apart a weak lament about poetry from a 2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine. What works against him is the curiously airless, antiseptic nature of the enterprise. Coming upon certain passages in “The Hatred of Poetry,” a reader might be forgiven for thinking that the book amounts to a contemporary version of the monastic debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

When actual lines of poetry do emerge in the book, they pass like trays of delectable hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party. It’s as though someone very smart is talking to you, or at you, making an argument in an emphatic tone of voice, and . . . ooooo, look, there’s a snack portion of Emily Dickinson, just out of reach! John Keats, Claudia Rankine, Walt Whitman: The paradox of “The Hatred of Poetry” is that it manages to induce a craving for poetry in the midst of analyzing how poetry repels people. Assuming a pose of wallflower-at-the-orgy detachment, Mr. Lerner so abstinently avoids the topic of beauty — and love, for that matter — that you reach a point where you actively hunger for it.

Mr. Lerner is all too aware of what his argument lacks. “I hope it goes without saying that my summary here doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive — poems can fulfill any number of ambitions other than the ones I’m describing,” he concedes on Page 76, when he’s already in the homestretch. “They 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; and so on.”

Well, when you put it that way, what’s there to hate? In a sense, “The Hatred of Poetry” winds up being a meticulous tangent about how the people who have contempt for poetry are (mostly) missing the point. (Possibly what has them worked up is hatred’s flip side: They love poetry too much, and their love has soured.)

The book achieves its goal in the most circuitous of ways: by its (lovely) last sentence, Mr. Lerner might get you longing for the satisfactions of the thing you’re conditioned to loathe. Or, as Mr. Lerner describes a moment of reverie in that 2010 collection of his, “Put the book away/Look out the window: we are descending/Like Chopin through the dusk.”


The Hatred of Poetry - By Ben Lerner - 86 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $12.

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