The Hatred of Poetry

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.

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.

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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.

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.