{"id":99932,"date":"2016-06-30T10:30:25","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T14:30:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99932"},"modified":"2016-06-30T11:33:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T15:33:13","slug":"the-hatred-of-poetry-an-interview-with-ben-lerner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/30\/the-hatred-of-poetry-an-interview-with-ben-lerner\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hatred of Poetry: An Interview with Ben Lerner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"9780374712334\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What do we want from poetry? To read a poem is, on some level, to loathe it\u2014both poem and poet aspire to fulfill a set of impossible expectations from the culture. In his new book, <\/em>The Hatred of Poetry<\/a>,<\/em> Ben Lerner argues that a disdain for poetry is inextricable from the art form itself. Earlier this month, Michael Clune spoke to Lerner <\/em>at Greenlight Books<\/a>, in Brooklyn. The exchange below is an edited version of that conversation. \u2014Ed.
<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One of the most striking things you do in The Hatred of Poetry <\/em>is to reorient our sense of value. Your canon is \u201cthe terrible poets, the great poets, and the silent poets,\u201d as opposed to the merely good or the mediocre. You write about the worst poet in history, McGonagall, and his horrific masterpiece, or antimasterpiece, \u201cThe Tay Bridge Disaster\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv\u2019ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remembered for a very long
time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

LERNER<\/p>\n

Wikipedia says that he\u2019s widely considered the worst poet ever. <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

LERNER<\/p>\n

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 \u201cpoetry\u201d less denotes a stable set of practices than it does a set of impossible demands. I\u2019m not saying this is true for everyone or for all time, but I think it\u2019s 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\u2019s irreducibly individual\u2014it\u2019s the expression of their specific humanity, because it\u2019s this intense, internal experience\u2014and 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\u2014to 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\u2019s a tactical failure that a lot of the poems I love the most manage to achieve. Really, really bad poems, like McGonagall\u2019s, also achieve it, because the radicalism of the failure lets you intuit the importance of the ambition. But this way of talking doesn\u2019t have much to say about good poems in all their diversity. That\u2019s not my subject here.<\/p>\n

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\u2014in modern art, like, My kid could have painted that, or, Why is this in a museum?\u2014but 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\u2014this connection between poetry and personhood. You\u2019re 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\u2019ll be intelligible to others. You\u2019re a poet and you don\u2019t even know it, that\u2019s 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\u2019m not saying this is the case for everyone\u2014there 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\u2019s like, What do you do?, and I\u2019m like, I\u2019m a poet. That\u2019s never the right answer. Part of the awkwardness of the exchange is that the nonpoet is still haunted by the idea that you\u2019re a poet by virtue of being human, but the nonpoet feels excluded, like they\u2019ve fallen away\u2014and so has this fund of resentment. To say you\u2019re a poet is to say you\u2019re more human than they are. You never grew up and took a job and you plan on being accommodated because you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When I was on the airplane coming here, The Economist<\/em> had this article on the Swiss voting for a minimum yearly salary. And The<\/em> Economist<\/em>, of course, was attacking this idea. The cartoon above the article showed this cheesy version of utopia\u2014there\u2019s a guy loafing and he\u2019s holding this thing that says Book of Verse<\/em>. That\u2019s what Switzerland is trying to create\u2014a world where anyone can write a book of verse. And we need to stop that.<\/p>\n

LERNER<\/p>\n

\u201cLoafing\u201d is the key word. That\u2019s Whitman\u2019s word. The weird contradiction in Whitman is that he\u2019s 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\u2019s what\u2019s going to actualize America in the future. And then on the other hand, he\u2019s always under a flowering tree, taking his ease, watching people bathe. That labor\/leisure divide\u2014in the history of defenses and denunciations of poetry, that\u2019s a big deal. The poet is doing work that\u2019s more important than the work he might do in the mundane economy, but it\u2019s also indistinguishable from leisure. You\u2019re 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\u2019s everywhere in Whitman. The same discourse surrounds any political, insurgent movement. It\u2019s a labor\/leisure problem\u2014a refusal of the available models of work, a demand for new language about what counted as labor and leisure.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I was reading Robert Musil\u2019s The Man Without Qualities<\/em>. The main character, Ulrich, says, \u201cRealization always attracts me less than non-realization.\u201d For Musil, this is the problem of modern life\u2014we have this split between the actual, where you don\u2019t 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<\/em> world and this<\/em> space. I saw it as a challenge, as someone who\u2019s completely attracted to nonrealization, to have this Austrian guy a\u00a0hundred years ago saying this is the malady of modernity.<\/p>\n

LERNER<\/p>\n

Ulrich is a former mathematician. He lost his belief in the richness of the discourse of scientific objectivity, but he\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s prior to action. And that\u2019s an important space\u2014that\u2019s what we go to art for. Maybe it\u2019s what Robert Kaufman has called a \u201cprotopolitical\u201d domain, a space where you\u2019re 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<\/em> is different\u2014saying 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\u2019s not an argument against the power of concrete historical action to say that art is valuable as the domain of the imagination that\u2019s prior or adjacent to action.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your book is very influenced by the work of Alan Grossman\u2014this 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\u2014Grossman 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\u2019s relationship to the divine by breaking the image.<\/p>\n

LERNER<\/p>\n

I went to synagogue in Topeka, Kansas, and we were told a story where there\u2019s a child who\u2019s just reciting the Hebrew alphabet when he\u2019s supposed to be praying, and he\u2019s just saying the alphabet, and the rabbi comes up and says, Why are you just saying the alphabet? And he says, I\u2019m 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\u2019s part of Grossman\u2019s idea\u2014a 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\u2014What about Sharon Olds? What about Ashbery?\u2014and he\u2019s always like, No, they failed. The point is that it\u2019s not difficult, it\u2019s impossible. It\u2019s a structural thing.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019t do anything that isn\u2019t shot through with capital, but we also want to figure the outside\u2014you can make works that can negatively figure what they can\u2019t<\/em> actualize.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You give this great reading of Claudia Rankine\u2019s Citizen<\/em> in which you say\u2014how do you put it?\u2014lyric is felt as loss. There\u2019s this ghostly sense of what the lyric could do that\u2019s not available, in her case because of racism. But I thought, as a counterexample, about Grossman\u2019s essay on Hart Crane. For Crane, it\u2019s not so much that the virtual refers to an ideal\u2014it\u2019s rather that the commitment to the virtual, to the impossible, is a force that disfigures the poetry. It\u2019s not something outside<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

LERNER<\/p>\n

Grossman has interesting things to say about how Whitman was a Civil War nurse\u2014that he could get close to history, that he could tend to the wounded of both sides but he couldn\u2019t enter history, because taking sides would compromise his claim to universality. And there\u2019s a way that Whitman is disfigured by that decision. In his notebooks, Whitman says, I\u2019m the poet of both master and the slave, which is the contradiction he can\u2019t ever deal with. He can\u2019t even put it in the poem. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Whitman gives this very evacuated, general set of perceptions that anyone could share. In Citizen<\/em>, there\u2019s a fundamentally Whitmanian idea, this idea of representative poetry\u2014I 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\u2019ve encountered the poem. But I\u2019m wondering if that\u2019s the only model. There\u2019s this other kind of virtuality, in which the encounter with the poem itself will transform your experience\u2014we may not be the same before<\/em> we enter into a relationship with a poem, but there\u2019s this prospect of communion on the other side.<\/p>\n

LERNER<\/p>\n

Claudia powerfully debunks a certain universalism that lurks in the tradition of poetic ambition. I think that universalism is always corrupt. But there\u2019s still a possibility of enlargement, or a testing of what kind of consciousness is shareable, through the technology of the poem. It doesn\u2019t have to be as absolute as universalism. Poetry\u2019s denunciations and defenses tend to participate in universalism, and that\u2019s what I\u2019m responding to, but no, it\u2019s not at all the only model. The reason I wrote this book is because there was an essay in Harper\u2019s <\/em>that Mark Edmundson wrote. He asked, \u201cWhere are all the poets that could unite us? Now poets only write out of their own experience.\u201d And all of his examples of poets who spoke for everyone were white men writing in traditional forms. There\u2019s even this part where he says, And Sylvia Plath was great, and then he excerpts \u201cDaddy\u201d or something and says, This poem taught a lot of women to rethink their relationships with their fathers. And there\u2019s this bizarre misreading of a Baraka poem. Now, there are lots of other powerful ways to respond to Edmundson and those kinds of denunciations\u2014by pointing out all the great poets working now in various modes.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a nostalgic fantasy that is often recycled by critics that implies the Whitmanic poetic vision was realized in the past. It\u2019s the bad universalism that keeps resurfacing. But that doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t all kinds of ways to test what\u2019s potentially social in literary practice. And people are doing that work.<\/p>\n

Michael Clune\u2019s most recent book is <\/em>Gamelife<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do we want from poetry? To read a poem is, on some level, to loathe it\u2014both 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1010,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[23056,23058,3263,4665,14345,23059,18531,16571,14748,5558,136,7316,1132,2619,16837,687,16883,23053,4225,18823,23052,2426,23055,23051,3471,23054,2704,23057,4675,23049,3472,23050,264,16231],"class_list":["post-99932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-alan-grossman","tag-alphabets","tag-ben-lerner","tag-capital","tag-capitalism","tag-citizen","tag-claudia-rankine","tag-expectations","tag-failure","tag-greenlight-bookstore","tag-harpers","tag-hebrew","tag-interviews","tag-kansas","tag-labor","tag-language","tag-leisure","tag-loafing","tag-mark-edmundson","tag-michael-clune","tag-personhood","tag-politics","tag-protopolitical-domain","tag-robert-kaufman","tag-robert-musil","tag-scientific-discourse","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-synagogue","tag-the-economist","tag-the-hatred-of-poetry","tag-the-man-without-qualities","tag-the-tay-bridge-disaster","tag-walt-whitman","tag-william-mcgonagall"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Hatred of Poetry: An Interview with Ben Lerner<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Michael Clune and Ben Lerner discuss the long tradition of despising verse.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/30\/the-hatred-of-poetry-an-interview-with-ben-lerner\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hatred of Poetry: An Interview with Ben Lerner by Michael Clune\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 30, 2016 \u2013 What do we want from poetry? 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