“The Hatred of Poetry” by Ben Lerner: This poet and novelist can both love and hate poetry, because he is comfortable with contradictions

“Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it, and have largely organized my life around it…and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are for me—and maybe for you—inextricable” (1, p. 6).

To show that this is a view shared by other poets, Lerner quotes Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” in its entirety:

“I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however, with a perfect

contempt for it, one discovers in

it, after all, a place for the genuine” (1, p. 3).

Lerner explains: “The hatred of poetry is internal to the art, because it is the task of the poet and poetry reader to use the heat of that hatred to burn the actual off the virtual like fog” (1, p. 38).

Lerner concludes: "All I ask the haters—and I, too, am one—is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love” (1, p. 86).

Comment

Lerner says that poets hate their poems, because poems derive from the inexpressible, and so are never as good as what inspired them. He argues that if you approach poems with a mixture of hate and love, hate may burn away the inadequacy of words, allowing love to hear inaudible melodies.

However, Lerner’s argument defies common sense, because hate and love are contradictory, and the fact that he and other poets do “not experience that as a contradiction” means that they are not bothered by believing two contradictory things at the same time.

What kind of psychology may not be bothered by contradictions? In multiple personality, each personality feels entitled to its own opinion. So one personality may hate poetry, while another personality may love poetry. No problem.

1. Ben Lerner. The Hatred of Poetry. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2016.