Zach Savich on Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry

At Full Stop, a much-talked-about review by Zach Savich breaks down Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry. "Despite the currency of ire in online commentary, let alone in bars after poetry readings, Lerner’s contempt is less for actual poets than for the lapsarian fact of actuality itself, recalling when the narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station suggests that poetry’s purpose is to prevent 'the triumph of the actual.'" More:

He seems less temperate, chiefly, when portraying his own disaffection, his desire to protect the possible from the actual. A poetic temperament, he suggests, can’t handle much. An actual film? Better to have the indistinct possibility of “each moment the houselights dimmed.” A difficult poem to know by heart? He’s led to Moore’s poem, he says, because he wished to find the shortest poem for a memorization assignment; given how much The Hatred of Poetry leans on that poem, it’s surprising that Lerner never mentions its more complicated, longer version, nor the complicated history of its revision. The actuality of that complication might trouble the points he uses the poem to make, much as it assaults his poetic disinterest when curious strangers ask him about his favorite poets. He prefers to respond inscrutably and judge his interlocutor’s reaction:

. . . he squints as if searching his memory [for recognition of the contemporary poet Lerner mentioned] and nods as if he can almost recall the work and the name, even though of course he can’t (none of the hundreds of non-poet acquaintances who have asked you this sort of question ever can.)

He’s done this hundreds of times? What nerve those non-poets have, to try to take an interest! If my seatmate is a scientist, and I ask about her field, I’m relieved when she tells me something, rather than judging me as being among the hundreds who are unfamiliar with an obscure name. But Lerner’s rudeness supports poetic possibility. If the stranger resents it, it’s a “contemporary descendant” of Plato’s skepticism about poets’ place in the Republic, not a reaction to one sulky poet. This disaffected posture might seem refreshingly contrarian, as when Lerner suggests that no critic has actually been entranced by the poetry of Keats; but this is a hip and populist stance, less challenging than it would be to assert in 2016, as I am glad to do, that I have wandered through many neighborhoods of Philadelphia reciting Keats in a type of trance that I don’t believe conflicted with the actuality of my surroundings.

But the poet’s lot is hard enough without needing to make conversation, Lerner suggests, since the best a poem can do is point toward an ideal that’s always out of reach. Keats and Dickinson do this when they “express their contempt for merely actual poems by developing techniques for virtualizing their own compositions.” “Virtualizing” refers to methods that help a poem temper the burdensome fact that it’s a poem. Don’t worry about what it means, exactly; Lerner uses the term so variously that it refers to poetic effect in general, to both the long lines of Whitman and to Dickinson’s dissonant syncopations...

More at Full Stop.