The Hatred of Poetry

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. Its even bemoaned by poets: I too dislike it wrote Marianne Moore. many more people agree they hate poetry Ben Lerner writesthan 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 inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore. in this inventive and lucid essay Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetrys greatest Haters (beginning with Platos famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners providing inspired close readings of Keats Dickinson mcgonagall Whitman and others. Throughout he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In the hatred of poetry Lerner has crafted an entertaining personal and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. Review ‘Reading Ben Lerner gives me the tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I encounter a writer of true originality. He is a courageous immensely intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a delight to read.’ ― Jeffrey Eugenides author of The Marriage Plot‘Lerner argues with the tenacity and the wildness of the vital writer and critic that he is. Each sentence of The Hatred of Poetry vibrates with uncommon and graceful lucidity; each page brings the deep pleasures of crisp thought especially the kind that remains devoted to complexity rather than to its diminishment.’ ― Maggie Nelson author of The Argonauts‘Loathing rains down on poetry from people who have never read a page of it as well as from people who have devoted their lives to reading and writing it ... Mr. Lerner skates across this frozen lake of pique with delicate skill ... The book achieves its goal in the most circuitous of ways: by its (lovely) last sentence Mr. Lerner might get you longing for the satisfactions of the thing you’re conditioned to loathe.’ ― Jeff Gordinier New York Times About the Author Ben Lerner was born in Topeka Kansas in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations and is the author of two internationally acclaimed novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10: 04. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures Angle of Yaw and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.