Ben Lerner - The Hatred of Poetry

I n ninth grade English, Mrs. X required us to memorize and recite a poem, so I went and asked the Topeka High librarian to direct me to the shortest poem she knew, and she suggested Marianne Moores Poetry, which, in the 1967 version, reads 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.

I remember thinking my classmates were suckers for having mainly memorized Shakespeares eighteenth sonnet, whereas I had only to recite twenty-four words. Never mind the fact that a set rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter make fourteen of Shakespeares lines easier to memorize than Moores three, each one of which is interrupted by a conjunctive adverba parallelism of awkwardness that basically serves as its form. That, plus the four instances of it, makes Moore sound like a priest begrudgingly admitting that sex has its function while trying to avoid using the word, an effect amplified by the deliberately clumsy enjambment of the second line and the third (in / it). In fact, Poetry is a very difficult poem to commit to memory, as I demonstrated by failing to get it right each of the three chances I was given by Mrs. X, who was looking down at the text, my classmates cracking up.

I, too

Unceasing
prayer

My contempt for the assignment was, after all, imperfect. Even now I routinely misquote the second sentence; I just Googled the poem and had to correct what I typed out above, but who could forget the first? I, too, dislike it has been on repeat in my head since 1993; when I open a laptop to write or a book to read: I, too, dislike it echoes in my inner ear. When a poet is being introduced (including myself) at a reading, whatever else I hear, I hear: I, too, dislike it. When I teach, I basically hum it. When somebody tells me, as so many people have told me, that they dont get poetry in general or my poetry in particular and/or believe that poetry is dead: I, too, dislike it. Sometimes this refrain has the feel of negative rumination and sometimes a kind of manic, mantric affirmation, as close as I get to unceasing prayer.

The defenses
light up

Poetry: What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within. What kind of art has as a condition of its possibility a perfect contempt? And then, even reading contemptuously, you dont achieve the genuine. You can only clear a place for ityou still dont encounter the actual poem, the genuine article. Every few years an essay appears in a mainstream periodical denouncing poetry or proclaiming its death, usually blaming existing poets for the relative marginalization of the art, and then the defenses light up the blogosphere before the culture, if we can call it a culture, turns its attention, if we can call it attention, back to the future. But why dont we ask: What kind of art is definedhas been defined for millenniaby such a rhythm of denunciation and defense? 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 (albeit with far less discipline and skill than Marianne Moore) and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are for meand maybe for youinextricable.

What should
I sing?

Caedmon, the first poet in English whose name we know, learned the art of song in a dream. According to Bedes Historia, Caedmon was an illiterate cowherd who couldnt sing. When, during this or that merry feast, it was decided that everyone in turn would contribute a song, Caedmon would withdraw in embarrassment, maybe claiming he had to go look after the animals. One night, somebody tries to pass Caedmon the harp after dinner, and he flees to the stable. There among the ungulates he drifts off and is visited by a mysterious figure, probably God. You must sing to me, says God. I cant, Caedmon says, if not in these words. Thats why Im sleeping in the stable instead of drinking mead with my friends around the fire. But God (or an angel or demonthe text is vague) keeps demanding a song. But what should I sing? asks Caedmon, who I imagine is desperate, cold-sweating through a nightmare. Sing the beginning of created things, instructs the visitor. Caedmon opens his mouth and, to his amazement, gorgeous verses praising God pour forth.