Ben Lerner. (2016). The Hatred of Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ben Lerner. 2016. The Hatred of Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Ben Lerner. The Hatred of Poetry. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

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35. • value: poetry commentary
36. • value: poetry craft
37. • value: beauty ideals
38. • value: poetry studies
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41. • value: keats poetry
42. • value: Charles Whitman
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creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Lerner, Ben
   • bioText: Ben Lerner is the author of seven previous books of poetry and prose, as well as several collaborations with visual artists. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.
   • name: Ben Lerner

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2016-06-07T00:00:00-04:00

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title

The Hatred of Poetry

fullDescription

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Jeff Gordinier, New York Times
   • content: "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 . . . Mr. Lerner skates across this frozen lake of pique with delicate skill . . . 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."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Katy Waldman, Slate
   • content: "The Hatred of Poetry does a brilliant job showing how poets 'strategically disappoint' our assumptions about what the medium should do . . . Engaging . . . Superbly written . . . [Lerner's] granular, giddy analysis of Scottish bard William Topaz McGonagall, 'widely acclaimed as the worst poet in history,' fascinates as the negative expression of a Parnassian ideal. It's also comedic gold."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Meghan O'Rourke, Bookforum
   • content: "The Hatred of Poetry is one of the best denunciations of the genre of lyric poetry I have read--and one of the more intriguing defenses . . . it offers two for the price of one, and this is its insight."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from April 25, 2016
     In lucid and luminous prose, poet and novelist Lerner (10:04) explores why many people share his aversion to poetry, which he attributes, paradoxically, to the deeply held belief that poetry ought to have tremendous cultural value. The “bitterness of poetic logic,” Lerner claims, is that its
     transcendent ideal—universal, trans-
     historical, divinely inspired—always falls short in the actual expression. He explains that when readers read with, in Marianne Moore’s words, “perfect contempt”—skeptically and critically—they find that poetry clears a space for the genuine, even if the “planet-like music” of the spheres cannot be adequately captured by human language. Ably moving from Plato and Caedmon to John Keats and Emily Dickinson and then to Amiri Baraka and Claudia Rankine, Lerner offers a concise primer on how to read a poem, along with a humorous, faintly regretful look at how individual poems fail to live up to the ideals readers have for them. Lerner’s brief, elegant treatise on what poetry might do and why readers might need it is the perfect length for a commute or a classroom assignment, clearing a space for both private contemplation and lively discussion.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     May 1, 2016
     Poetry doesn't want to be your friend. Get over it.For poet (Mean Free Path, 2012, etc.), novelist (10:04, 2014, etc.), and MacArthur Fellow Lerner (English/Brooklyn Coll.), the only kind of love poetry permits is tough love. It's an art with a mean streak, or at least a highly forbidding, unlikable temper. It may be a lot of things--melodic, perceptive, brilliant, awful--but it also carries a threat that warns you to either tread slowly or stay away altogether. "I, too, dislike it," Marianne Moore famously wrote; Lerner adds that dislike is part of the bargain: "What kind of art has as a condition of its possibility a perfect contempt?" The problem seems to be that poetry aims higher than other arts and runs the risk of greater failure. "Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical," writes the author, "the human world of violence and difference--and to reach the transcendent or divine." The payoff, if there is one, is in the effort. "The hatred of poetry is internal to the art," writes Lerner, because it is the task of the poet and poetry reader to use the heat of that hatred to burn the actual off the virtual like fog." The author pays homage to the individual, solitary nature of poetry and its refusal to be tamed or coddled, but he does the act of reading no favors. He makes writing poetry seem like a zero-sum game and reading it like torture. The closer he gets to some usable approach, the more it eludes him. His struggle to give concrete form to an increasingly abstract concept of art is just "form gulping after formlessness," as Wallace Stevens put it. A learned but knotty defense on poetry's behalf, persuasive to no one but those who need no convincing.

     COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     January 1, 2016
     

     Lerner may be better known for his fiction; his 10:04 was recently an international best seller and multiple best book honoree. But he's also a prize-winning poet, and this brief, pointed book looks at poetry as an art that seemingly everyone shies away from as difficult or possibly tedious. In his head-on defense, Lerner says, "I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     April 1, 2016
     

     With this book-length essay, novelist and poet Lerner (10:04; The Lichtenberg Figures) demonstrates that hating on poetry is reserved not only for critics--it is also the national pastime of poets. Reoccurring common criticisms are that poetry "is dead," "has died," and is in some declining state of insignificance. In the American tradition, the verses of Walt Whitman are usually thought of as the shining example of successful or good poetry. They are interpreted to contain a universal quality or truth that can be understood by any and all. However, Lerner argues that even Whitman's poems failed to achieve such a "poetic ideal" because no poem or poet can "be no one in particular in order to stand for everyone." He asserts that such contradictions are inherent and integral to the form and its social relation. People hold a certain reverence for the poet, even though most nonpoets are unaware of and unreceptive to the majority of lyrical works. Lerner reasons that the love/hate duality is innate to the Western tradition of poetry and that is as it should be. VERDICT Recommended for anyone interested in poetry. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/15.]--Jeremy Spencer, Univ. of California, Davis, Law Lib.

     Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."
In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an...

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