The Hatred of Poetry

Despite my two-star review, I want to start by saying that if the title of this book interests you, you should read it and form your own opinions. Having said that, I found myself underwhelmed. Having a poet write an essay called "The Hatred of Poetry" is a little like having a golf pro write an essay called "Why People Hate Golf." Not that it can't be done, but one might do better to start by examining why people ACTUALLY hate poetry, rather than theorizing from an ivy-covered ivory tower about why one THINKS people hate poetry, which is what Lerner seemed to me to be doing. One of the oddest theories in this book is that people hate poems because their expectations for poetry are too high -- they want poems to be transcendent but poems rarely are (and maybe never can be). I honestly don't think that's why so many people hate poems, or poetry. I think people hate poetry because their expectations are actually quite low -- at minimum, they want what they read to make some sort of sense on a first reading -- but poems (especially modern poems) often fail to pass that very low bar. Too often, poetry reads like a transcript from a dissociative schizophrenic: words and phrases jammed together in seemingly random fashion, causing the reader to have to work too hard to figure out what the poet is writing about (Lerner's poetry is like this), or, as Stephen King complains about in On Writing, meaningless phrases such as "angry breasts." Lerner also uses odd examples for his arguments, swinging wildly from Walt Whitman to William Topaz McGonagall ("widely acclaimed as the worst poet in history”), from college-paper-like over-scanning of Emily Dickinson to the phrase, "You're a poet and you don't even know it," out of which Lerner manages to pull meaning the way a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat (I’m not saying this is magic, I’m saying it’s a trick). Given the title of this book, I was hoping Lerner might help nudge me toward loving poetry more, the way Robin Williams does for his students in Dead Poets Society. I guess my expectations were too high, because instead, I just ended up hating The Hatred of Poetry. (Actually that's overly harsh but I couldn't resist the irony.) Having said all that, I'm giving it two stars, not one, because Lerner is clearly an intelligent writer, trying to write about an interesting and worthwhile subject. I just found what he had to say unconvincing.

Ben Lerner's view of poetry is bracing, smart, original and humbling. All poetry must fail, he posits, because language is too limited to express our deepest feelings. We can dream we've written the perfect poem, but when it comes to setting it down, we fail (or, as Coleridge claimed, some jerk from Porlock comes along to spoil our ecstatic vision). Non-poets complain that poems are too complicated or abstruse (or they were ruined for poetry by a high school teacher insisting on meaning and memorization); traditional poets bemoan the loss of rhyme and meter; post-modern poets argue for purity of sound, and total freedom of form. That is, everyone hates poetry because it cannot possibly succeed, regardless of type. Yet, as Lerner's presiding genius, Marianne Moore, wrote:I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyondall this fiddle.Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, onediscovers init after all, a place for the genuine.That is, we should read poetry with no illusions, even with contempt for its failure, but to recognize that so many poems stir something in us, give solace in bad times, delight elsewise. Robert Frost said a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom. We shouldn't expect any more.

I read The Lichtenberg Figures some weeks ago and was impressed. When I heard the Lerner was releasing a book title The Hatred of Poetry I had to pre-order it. It arrived yesterday and I finished reading this evening. I am not disappointed.An essay centering on Mariann Moore’s “Poetry,” he quotes the 1967 version—the short version. Her collected poems starts with the line, “Omissions are not accidents.” I have always loved that line. It indicates that the volume has blank spaces. It is this space that Lerner defines as Poetry. We hate it because it does not and cannot exist.Learner explores the gap between what poetry is as a dream and what it is in reality. He explicates what Moore means when she tells us that if one reads poetry with perfect contempt “one discovers in/it, after all, a place for the genuine.”While I think of poetry as entertainment (because I am such an audience), I appreciate the exacting efforts poetry practitioners bring to their art—how seriously they think about it. Lerner is a fine poet and has interesting ideas about his art.

Okay so I had completely different expectations for this book… I expected the book to talk about why people have a hatred of poetry and why they shouldn’t and for this book to actually have poems in it.. but instead, the author talks about HIS hatred of specific poetry, proceeds to bash authors BC ( before Christ ) and completely ramble's about why there works are bad and says there will never be a good poem because a good poem doesn’t exist. Fortunately the book is short because I honestly wanted to put it down multiple times. I do appreciate that it has a college sort of writing though but that’s about all I appreciate about this book. I’m not mad, sad, but only disappointed that it didn’t feature actual poems from the author himself.

The first 60 percent of this all too short essay were excellent, written with remarkable elan, humor and wit. In short very quotable. Lerner's main point is that actual poems, even by Keats and Bishop, inevitably disappoint by not living up to the writer's and/or the reader's expectation of Poetry's ideal. Once the book has made this point over and over again an extensive discussion of recent boring and problematical work by current critical darlings drains the essay of its energy and charm. The book closes with extensive blurbs about Lerner's own books. The discussion of Plato's writings on the limitations of aesthetic criteria for poetry strangely ignores Adorno's book Aesthetics in which he explains how no theory of the beautiful is possible without a knowledge or theory about the anti-aesthetic.

An excellent book on poetry that explains in ways I never could, perhaps why I hate but also love the form. A great read.

wordy, rambling, but insitive and well written. I feel like it's something a poetry enthusiast would enjoy very much, but I, a creative writing student, would have given it a pass if my teacher hadnt reccomended it to me. It doesnt have chapters which makes it hard to pick up again after being put down, but is short enough to read in a two hour or so sitting.

Good essay, but the Kindle formatting is screwy.

Best prose book about poetry for years if not decades. So clear, strong, relevant. I shall read and re-read.

Interesting read