I would love to hate this little book, but I can’t.
The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is not a book for someone who does not read poetry, believes s/he does not “get” poetry, or otherwise wants an introduction to help them fill the need to get a better great in Lit class. This is a thoughtful and passionate critical essay that ranges over centuries of conundrum: Why have so many for millennia spoken of their hate for poetry?
Along the way, Lerner provides brief and cogent explications of some poems. He clearly is careful and loving reader of poems. I Loved it when he said that Keats’ poems failed to send him into trances or transports. And I agree that Dickinson’s discords sing to me more than Keats’s chords.
Ben Lerner loves poetry so much that he hates it. His explanation is a very Platonic one, that there is a sphere of ideal poems and that all earthbound ones are pale shadows. The gap between drives us to desire more from the individual poem we read than it can deliver and so the desire turns love of “Poetry” to hate of the particular poem.
I have defined poetry as “saying in words that which cannot be said in words—which means that every poem is a failure.” That seems different from seeking a perfect poem and failing in that way. Seeking to say or sing the ineffable is by definition impossible. And I guess I have more of a Buddhist view of the music of perfect silence. The poem as koan is fine with me–a beautiful failure that means by failing to embody the meaning.
Enough of that—reading this little book was like listening to a fascinating friend tell a story by the fire. Definitely worth reading for haters and for lovers.