Re-hating Poetry

Revisiting Ben Lerner's essay two years later.

What if the closest we can come to hearing the “planet-like music of poetry” is to hear the ugliest earthly music and experience the distance between them?

Lerner’s essay—in its small and unpretentious presentation in the grass-green paperback I own, which was recently rained on and now sports a rumpled but elegant distortion (like my brain!)—has for some time now been on my mind. I waded into these Substackean waters to deal with poetry just about two years ago. The first submerged stone I stubbed my toe on was Lerner’s. Some of his ideas just won’t leave me alone. I covered the broad gist of The Hatred of Poetry and my first brush with the essay in 2022 (which, I find amusing, was based on the initial reading I did in 2020—I’m on a biennial cadence with this guy, apparently).

Revisiting my annotations in the book and re-reading what I wrote about my reading in that April 2022 newsletter, I realize I’m still meditating on the idea that a poem (Poem) can never actually manifest as a Poem proper, and it always remains a lower-case-p poem. I keep circling back to this idea like a dog pining for a slobbery stick to gnaw. Then I remember that said stick is stored on a bookshelf about five feet to my left. Take it down. Hallo to you, Ben.

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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 the impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream, your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can't be represented, (e.g., the creation of representation itself), but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you're back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.

Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure.

I want to first make clear that this sometimes overly pretentious and even maudlin way of talking about poetry is right up my alley. I love this nonsense. Like my recent frustrations with ruining important, good things with bad and bloated writing, I find Lerner both transfixing and challenging to say the least. I have this unending capacity to at once take things too seriously and to be offensively facetious about them. I’m the worst student in the classroom. Someone please stop me from talking.

I especially appreciate that early on in The Hatred of Poetry (which I will now refer to exclusively as THOP), Lerner links to the story of Cædmon and the origins of poetry in English. His particular use of this story is a perfect illustration or correlative for his argument. Damn. Why are you so good at this, Ben? Is that what an MFA will get you? Are these the gifts the creative academy bestows?

Pirating Allan Grossman (Ben’s words), he says that

Grossman develops his notion of “a ‘virtual poem’”—what we might call poetry with a capital “P,” the abstract potential of the medium, as felt by the poet when called upon to sing — and opposes it to the "actual poem" which necessarily betrays that impulse when it joins the world of representation.

Poems started emerging from me in earnest in 2010. Something in me clicked on, and what I have previously described as an electric compulsion to compose began to take hold. Much or most of the energy behind that jolt to create—which I’ve only recently come to recognize is helpful but not necessary for me to write—was diverted into teaching for me. Pedagogy became my art and my outlet. But, since leaving teaching (or at least classroom teaching), the creative energy previously diverted suddenly has become available to me. So when Lerner says that the act of writing itself, of representing sounds with abstract symbols to make meaning, “betrays that impulse”—well, I’m a bit tongue-tied.

Let’s move to something more practical to test this theory. On Tuesday, while ducking in to a tenth grade class, I felt “called upon to sing”, and this is what I did:

Tenth Grade Rhetoric

With absolute creative freedom,
They arrange the desks in an arc

Like the one from Sixth Grade Physics,
The one made from upturned tables and sound.

Anyway, they all sat in an arc
And talked and whispered and helped each other.

"Do you think I should write it here?",
"How small can these illustrations

Actually be?", "But, like, when you
Dress really cute & you're alone—".

They tease, they headlock, they get sent 
Outside to run. They do the work.

They mostly listen; they take deep breaths.
When dismissed, they softly push in their chairs.

* * *

Something struck me, and words began buzzing in a swarm around my head again. Mary Oliver calls this “experience”, and she doesn’t advise dwelling here too long:

Poems begin in experience, but poems are not in fact experience, nor even a necessarily exact reportage of an experience. They are imaginative constructs, and they do not exist to tell us about the poet or the poet’s actual experience—they exist in order to be poems.

And then the bloody killer of a sentence,

Loyalty to the actual experience—whatever got the poem started—is not necessarily helpful; often it is a hindrance.

I can say that something real and affecting did come from this poem, however, and maybe I was successful in getting over my “loyalty to the actual experience”. One day after composing it (imagine this poem as a newborn), I had a chance to read it to a group of grandparents who were visiting my school, and there were smiles and sighs and laughter all the way down. So. Catharsis achieved? Move on? Move on! We mustn’t dwell—no, not today. We CAN’T! Not on Rex Manning Day!

When I revisit THOP and I think about the past two years of my life spent in the happy frustration of writing poems, I feel this gap between the ideal and the practical, the spiritual and the earthly, more acutely. And, for full disclosure, there’s something you should know: this is my life’s leitmotif. The discrepancy between what could be and what is gets me down on a regular basis. And when I say “down”, I do mean trapped in the throes of a Major Mood Disorder for which medication, therapy, and lifestyle changes are required. Don’t sweat the small stuff has been a mantra spoken to me by my family for most of my life (since 1997, in fact, when I was 10 and gifted the book by the same title—the book I received again just last year for my birthday. Do you ever feel so seen and so exposed by a gift?)

You can only clear a place for it—you still don’t encounter the actual poem, the genuine article.

Shit.

Actual poems are structurally foredoomed by a "bitter logic" that cannot be overcome by any level of virtuosity: Poetry isn't hard, it's impossible.

Oh dear.