The Hatred of Poetry

I'm too tired to be interesting today, but let me quote to you from the book I just finished, Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry. It's very short but incredibly chewy. Here are some highlights:

You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. [8]

On Walt Whitman:

Whitman's search for a poetic correlative to an idealized American political project is reflected in (at least) two formal characteristics of his work: the length and inclusiveness of his lines and the capaciousness of his pronouns. Whitman's famous catalogues -- his long lists -- model federalism in their very structure, uniting in a single extended syntactic unit all the differences (of people's class, race, gender, geography, etc.) that threaten the coherence of "the people"; his lines are always trying to "hold all," always unenjambed. In fact, the unconventional extension and lack of traditional verse patterning of Whitman's lines makes them approach prose, as if Whitman, in pursuing his poetic ideal for the United States, was getting rid of actual poems -- replacing them with something more like journalism or oratory. (Perhaps we can think of this as Whitman's tactic for virtualizing poetry just as [Emily] Dickinson's strange texts always threaten to be something other than poems. Moreover, no page can contain Whitman's lines; they are always running over the right margin, and so must be continued and indented on the next line to show that the break is a result of the objective limitations of space, not a poet's individual decision. I like to think of this "orphaning" of lines as another form of virtualization: The union toward which the long lines gesture cannot be actualized in any book, at least any book of standard size.) [46-47]

On the universality of poetry:

You can hate contemporary poetry -- in any era -- as much as you want for failing to realize the fantasy of universality, but the haters should stop pretending that any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone. [64-65]

Just being poetic, on the subject of the virgule:

And we hear the meteorological phenomenon known as "virga," my favorite kind of weather: streaks of water or ice particles trailing from a cloud that evaporate before they reach the ground. It's a rainfall that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth, between the dream and fire; it's a mark for verse that is not yet, or no longer, or not merely actual; they are phenomena whose failure to become or reman fully real allows them to figure something beyond the phenomenal. [75]

On the death of a mentor and friend:

I remember speaking a word whose meaning I didn't know but about which I had some inkling, some intuition, then inserting that word into a sentence, testing how it seemed to fit or chafe against the context and the syntax, rolling the word around, as it were, on my tongue. I remember my feeling that I possessed only part of the meaning of the word, like one of those fragmented friendship necklaces, and I had to find the other half in the social world of speech. [78-79]

More poetry/prose:

...Do you remember the feeling that sense was provisional and that two people could build around an utterance a world in which any usage signified? I think that's poetry. And when I felt I finally mastered a word, when I could slide it into a sentence with a satisfying click, that wasn't poetry anymore -- that was something else, something functional within a world, not the liquefaction of its limits. [79-80]

Further reading, as prompted by this: the work of Claudia Rankine, particularly Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and Citizen: An American Lyric.