Ben Lerner Considers the Poem That Never Appears

From Ben Lerner's "Diary," now up (gratis!) at the London Review of Books: "The fatal problem with poetry: poems. This helps explain why poets themselves celebrate poets who renounce writing." Certainly! What else: some fine writing in this here essay. An excerpt:

There’s an important class of intense poetry-haters who would probably hate my description of poetry as providing an inverted and necessarily limited glimmer of poetic potentiality: the avant-garde. It’s their hatred of poetry that gives rise to the poem in which formal experiment is going to eviscerate existing canons of taste and help bring about the revolution. So Marinetti advocates a language that’s broken free of syntax (‘Parole in Libertà’) and that experiments with typography (‘Immaginazione Senza Fili’; ‘Analogia Disegnata’) and pure sound (‘Zang Tumb Tuuum’), and these works obliterate what passed for culture in the past, obliterate the category of art itself. The problem is – and here’s where a second kind of avant-garde hatred comes in – these artworks, no matter how formally inventive, remain artworks. They might redefine the borders of art, but they don’t destroy those borders; a bomb that never goes off, the poem remains a poem. And they hate that. The avant-garde is a military metaphor that forgets it’s a metaphor. The Futurists – ghosts of the future past – enter the museums they wanted to flood.

I’m offering this aggressively cursory summary of avant-garde hatred – a particularly bitter poetic logic – because I think it gets at something crucial about the disdain for poetry. Even writers and critics allergic to anything resembling avant-garde rhetoric often express anger at poetry’s failure to achieve any real political effects. The avant-garde imagines itself as hailing from the future it wants to bring about, but many people express disappointment in poetry for failing to live up to the political power it supposedly possessed in the past. This disappointment with the political feebleness of poetry in the present unites the futurist and the nostalgist and is a staple of mainstream denunciations of poetry.

[...]

Poems can, of course, succeed in any number of less grand ambitions than the ones I’m describing (they can be funny or lovely or offer solace or courage or inspiration to certain audiences at certain times; they can play a role in constituting a community; and so on), but I’m attempting to account for a persistent if mutable feeling that our moment’s poems are bad, that we hate them or at least strongly dislike them, and that it’s their fucking fault.

Read it all at London Review of Books.