What do we want from poetry? To read a poem is, on some level, to loathe it—both poem and poet aspire to fulfill a set of impossible expectations from the culture. In his new book, The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner argues that a disdain for poetry is inextricable from the art form itself. Earlier this month, Michael Clune spoke to Lerner at Greenlight Books, in Brooklyn. The exchange below is an edited version of that conversation. —Ed.
INTERVIEWER
One of the most striking things you do in The Hatred of Poetry is to reorient our sense of value. Your canon is “the terrible poets, the great poets, and the silent poets,” as opposed to the merely good or the mediocre. You write about the worst poet in history, McGonagall, and his horrific masterpiece, or antimasterpiece, “The Tay Bridge Disaster”:
Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry TayAlas! I am very sorry to sayThat ninety lives have been taken awayOn the last sabbath day of 1879Which will be remembered for a very longtime.
LERNER
Wikipedia says that he’s widely considered the worst poet ever.
You do this great reading of McGonagall, line by line, showing the way the virtual poem gets projected by the failure of the actual verse. I wanted to ask how you think about value. There’s two kinds of hatred of poetry, right? One comes from the inability of the poem to be what it wants to be, and the other comes from a genuine hatred of actually good poems.
I think there are a lot of good and great poems that manage to do what they want to do. But part of the persistent sense that poems are always failing to live up to the expectation of the historical moment has to do with how “poetry” less denotes a stable set of practices than it does a set of impossible demands. I’m not saying this is true for everyone or for all time, but I think it’s an interesting structure of feeling worth thinking through. The main demand associated with lyric poetry is that an individual poet can or must produce both a song that’s irreducibly individual—it’s the expression of their specific humanity, because it’s this intense, internal experience—and that is also shareable by everyone, because it can be intelligible to all social persons, so it can unite a community in its difference. And that demand, I think, is impossible. It wants a poem to do something that only a revolution could do—to eradicate different kinds of inequality and social differences and violence. A lot of great poetry gets written because it wanders away from that pressure in some strategic way. It manages to work with the assumptions gathered by that fundamental lyric ambition and then to strategically disappoint them. It’s a tactical failure that a lot of the poems I love the most manage to achieve. Really, really bad poems, like McGonagall’s, also achieve it, because the radicalism of the failure lets you intuit the importance of the ambition. But this way of talking doesn’t have much to say about good poems in all their diversity. That’s not my subject here.
I think some people I know hate what I consider actually good poems because they are really anxious about intelligibility. Many people feel threatened by exclusion from poems in a different way than they feel threatened by exclusion from other kinds of artworks. There are versions of it—in modern art, like, My kid could have painted that, or, Why is this in a museum?—but many people are more upset by difficult poetry than they are by, say, atonal music. I think that has to do with an early fact of education—this connection between poetry and personhood. You’re taught from a young age, at least I was, that you write poems by virtue of being human. You have an intense internal experience, and if you have those feelings and express them in language, they’ll be intelligible to others. You’re a poet and you don’t even know it, that’s the saying. But what happens is that a lot of people stop reading poetry or stop writing poetry, and they only really encounter it at weddings, or they encounter it if someone is foolish enough to claim to be a poet. Again, I’m not saying this is the case for everyone—there are all kinds of poetic practices in all kinds of communities that are alive and well. I talk in the book about seeing a dentist, and he’s like, What do you do?, and I’m like, I’m a poet. That’s never the right answer. Part of the awkwardness of the exchange is that the nonpoet is still haunted by the idea that you’re a poet by virtue of being human, but the nonpoet feels excluded, like they’ve fallen away—and so has this fund of resentment. To say you’re a poet is to say you’re more human than they are. You never grew up and took a job and you plan on being accommodated because you’re still in the space of the abstract potential of language or whatever. That can produce a lot of species of resentment, even if the encounter is a good one.
When I was on the airplane coming here, The Economist had this article on the Swiss voting for a minimum yearly salary. And The Economist, of course, was attacking this idea. The cartoon above the article showed this cheesy version of utopia—there’s a guy loafing and he’s holding this thing that says Book of Verse. That’s what Switzerland is trying to create—a world where anyone can write a book of verse. And we need to stop that.
“Loafing” is the key word. That’s Whitman’s word. The weird contradiction in Whitman is that he’s always claiming to be doing, on the one hand, the most important work that can be done, which is to produce this secular Bible for the United States. It’s what’s going to actualize America in the future. And then on the other hand, he’s always under a flowering tree, taking his ease, watching people bathe. That labor/leisure divide—in the history of defenses and denunciations of poetry, that’s a big deal. The poet is doing work that’s more important than the work he might do in the mundane economy, but it’s also indistinguishable from leisure. You’re just taking dictation from spirits. People can get offended if you think poetry is work. But part of that is this idealistic vision of a kind of labor that transcends the labor/leisure divide, and that’s everywhere in Whitman. The same discourse surrounds any political, insurgent movement. It’s a labor/leisure problem—a refusal of the available models of work, a demand for new language about what counted as labor and leisure.
I was reading Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. The main character, Ulrich, says, “Realization always attracts me less than non-realization.” For Musil, this is the problem of modern life—we have this split between the actual, where you don’t expect anything to happen, and this virtual or unrealized or impossible space, where we put all of our dreams and hopes and desires. It impoverishes the possibility of making things matter in this world and this space. I saw it as a challenge, as someone who’s completely attracted to nonrealization, to have this Austrian guy a hundred years ago saying this is the malady of modernity.
Ulrich is a former mathematician. He lost his belief in the richness of the discourse of scientific objectivity, but he’s also critical of the available metaphysical vocabularies. His indecision has to do with feeling that the language of science or the other available languages of value aren’t worthwhile. This is too grand a statement to be right, but I think that art can insist on a domain of the imagination or of negative space that’s prior to action. And that’s an important space—that’s what we go to art for. Maybe it’s what Robert Kaufman has called a “protopolitical” domain, a space where you’re reminded that alternatives to the merely real exist. Valorizing that space in art is to valorize the way that literature can refresh a capacity to imagine alternatives. But valorizing that space in life is different—saying that, as a general rule, you should not tarry with the actual is a different thing. You should actually be a good father, or a good citizen. It’s not an argument against the power of concrete historical action to say that art is valuable as the domain of the imagination that’s prior or adjacent to action.
Your book is very influenced by the work of Alan Grossman—this idea of the opposition of the virtual and actual in poetry is something Grossman wrote a great deal about. Reading your book, I thought about religion—Grossman has a very complex relationship to Judaism in particular, but also to religion in general. A nonpolitical way of putting this dissatisfaction with the actual would be something like the iconoclastic tradition, right? Where no image of the divine could ever be remotely adequate, and one actually expresses one’s relationship to the divine by breaking the image.
I went to synagogue in Topeka, Kansas, and we were told a story where there’s a child who’s just reciting the Hebrew alphabet when he’s supposed to be praying, and he’s just saying the alphabet, and the rabbi comes up and says, Why are you just saying the alphabet? And he says, I’m giving the alphabet to God so God can make a prayer worthy of God. In other words, anything I could actually write with the available letters would be insufficient. I think that’s part of Grossman’s idea—a negative theology or prayer where you sacrifice the actual artifact on the altar of the virtual. There are these hilarious passages of Grossman where people try to give him examples of successful poets—What about Sharon Olds? What about Ashbery?—and he’s always like, No, they failed. The point is that it’s not difficult, it’s impossible. It’s a structural thing.
That’s not what drew me to the story, though. I actually approach it more out of a history of left-poetics. We all know we can’t do anything that isn’t shot through with capital, but we also want to figure the outside—you can make works that can negatively figure what they can’t actualize.
You give this great reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in which you say—how do you put it?—lyric is felt as loss. There’s this ghostly sense of what the lyric could do that’s not available, in her case because of racism. But I thought, as a counterexample, about Grossman’s essay on Hart Crane. For Crane, it’s not so much that the virtual refers to an ideal—it’s rather that the commitment to the virtual, to the impossible, is a force that disfigures the poetry. It’s not something outside the poem, but something inside the poem. This commitment to the impossible warps poetic language. Like with Crane, in his impossible effort to fuse completely incommensurable images.
Grossman has interesting things to say about how Whitman was a Civil War nurse—that he could get close to history, that he could tend to the wounded of both sides but he couldn’t enter history, because taking sides would compromise his claim to universality. And there’s a way that Whitman is disfigured by that decision. In his notebooks, Whitman says, I’m the poet of both master and the slave, which is the contradiction he can’t ever deal with. He can’t even put it in the poem. It’s the idea that you could suspend racial difference without fixing it in history, which is what I think really disfigures his work. His work is a response to pressure to not take sides.
Whitman gives this very evacuated, general set of perceptions that anyone could share. In Citizen, there’s a fundamentally Whitmanian idea, this idea of representative poetry—I want to write a poetry that will represent my experience and your experience, white male experience and African American female experience and so forth. That impossible ambition is something that Rankine is incredibly attuned to. In the Whitman model, the poet wants to write a poem that will account for the way your experience already is before you’ve encountered the poem. But I’m wondering if that’s the only model. There’s this other kind of virtuality, in which the encounter with the poem itself will transform your experience—we may not be the same before we enter into a relationship with a poem, but there’s this prospect of communion on the other side.
Claudia powerfully debunks a certain universalism that lurks in the tradition of poetic ambition. I think that universalism is always corrupt. But there’s still a possibility of enlargement, or a testing of what kind of consciousness is shareable, through the technology of the poem. It doesn’t have to be as absolute as universalism. Poetry’s denunciations and defenses tend to participate in universalism, and that’s what I’m responding to, but no, it’s not at all the only model. The reason I wrote this book is because there was an essay in Harper’s that Mark Edmundson wrote. He asked, “Where are all the poets that could unite us? Now poets only write out of their own experience.” And all of his examples of poets who spoke for everyone were white men writing in traditional forms. There’s even this part where he says, And Sylvia Plath was great, and then he excerpts “Daddy” or something and says, This poem taught a lot of women to rethink their relationships with their fathers. And there’s this bizarre misreading of a Baraka poem. Now, there are lots of other powerful ways to respond to Edmundson and those kinds of denunciations—by pointing out all the great poets working now in various modes.
There’s a nostalgic fantasy that is often recycled by critics that implies the Whitmanic poetic vision was realized in the past. It’s the bad universalism that keeps resurfacing. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of ways to test what’s potentially social in literary practice. And people are doing that work.
Michael Clune’s most recent book is Gamelife.
Last / Next Article
Share