Where I stand with Quinn is in her judgment that Lerner twists other people’s words and arguments to serve his own ends. Browse The Guardian Bookshop for a big selection of Literature: history & criticism books and the latest book reviews fr Buy The Hatred of Poetry 9781910695159 by Ben Lerner for only £9. Told over and over that we are all poets (we just didn’t know it! [Lerner’s] granular, giddy analysis of Scottish bard William Topaz McGonagall, ‘widely acclaimed as the worst poet in history,’ fascinates as the negative expression of a Parnassian ideal. Adults are eager, Lerner asserts, to return to that time of nursery rhymes, when language was rich in possibility, when meaning was still something to be discovered.” —Ben Purkert, The Rumpus He cannot dissolve human “violence and difference,” especially by retreating into his specific perceptions; he can only serve as “a placeholder for democratic personhood,” one that “cannot become actual without becoming exclusive.” Claudia Rankine, serving up prosy blocks of deadened description, like the transcript of a story told by a PTSD patient, makes us feel the “unavailability of traditional lyric categories; the instruction to read her writing as poetry—and especially as lyric poetry—catalyzes an experience of their loss, like a sensation in a phantom limb.”. For one thing, like a twitchy friend whose charming self-deprecations mask her insecurity, verse loves to take its own failure as its subject. Poems are supposed to do everything at once, but just the fact of a poem’s existence crowds out all the other, fairer ghost-poems it could have possibly been. Reviews | summary and reviews of the hatred of poetry by ben lerner. 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. Macmillan. An entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. Title Lerner’s slapstick instincts make this spill—hardly a novel concept in life or literature—mercilessly funny. Maybe poetry remains atmospheric and diffuse, a lambent quality in the air. She cites his treatment of Plato, who did not exactly banish songsters from the ideal Republic, though such a prohibition would definitely be convenient for Lerner. The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner. At least, it’s possible. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. Join Slate Plus to continue reading, and you’ll get unlimited access to all our work—and support Slate’s independent journalism. Lerner's brief, elegant treatise on what poetry might do and why readers might need it is the perfect length for a commute or a classroom assignment, clearing a space for both private contemplation and lively discussion." Elizabeth Bishop connected verse to “the art of losing,” a creative pursuit for virtuosos who “practice losing farther, losing faster,” falling away and away from Keats’ crystalline melody, down the stairway to heaven, headlong into the dungheap of the actual. He has also published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. ISBN: 978-086547-820-6 Poetry still works. Mr. Lerner’s own poetry, like his fiction, has a habit of floating off in directions that the reader does not anticipate. It’s what makes poetry. They evoke the elusive idea of poetry. By joining Slate Plus you support our work and get exclusive content. Visitors can view some of BookBrowse for free. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's 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. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published. Summary: No art has been denounced as often as poetry. ), perhaps we experience less accessible verse as an attack on our humanity. . Just $12 for 3 months or And they’d do well to. text publishing the hatred of poetry book by ben lerner. But Lerner’s done a better job with The Hatred of Poetry, which could make non-poets, and even poetry haters, pick the book up. Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. But Lerner convinced me, at least, that distrust of poetry does simmer in the United States—and that it might seep in part from our early, Romantic association between poems and personhood, our sense that poetry expresses (and arises naturally from) an irreducible self. That’s a likable thought. Genre: Poetry (He’s penned three verse collections alongside his novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04.) Lerner examines people's distrust of poetry (including poets') as stemming from the gap between the idea poem and its (always failed) actualization. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. . He’s not bullshitting us; his rhetorical sorcery levitates plenty of plausible claims, and ones burnished with the extra shine of his sincere belief. You’ve run out of free articles. The Hatred of Poetry By Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86pp., $12) Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry is a slim book with a husky premise: “The fatal problem with poetry: poems.” This is Lerner’s first book since winning a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2015 for his two widely celebrated novels. book marks reviews of the hatred of poetry by ben lerner. Or we will next time! 96 pages, $12. Keats, famed for otherworldly, musical lines, reminds us that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ are sweeter.” Emily Dickinson prefers to “dwell in Possibility,” in a virtual house made of windows and doors, rather than the concrete hut of the actual. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. Click here and be the first to review this book! Engaging . The novelist and poet Ben Lerner’s new book, THE HATRED OF POETRY (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $12), has a title that will strike some readers as … (Here is Lerner meshing learning with wry diffidence: “A feeble shadow of an original conception sounds like Plato, although Plato didn’t think a poet could really conceive of much.”) You might ask whether Orpheus and company truly need another defense against the haters, even one packaged as a sympathetic ontology of the hate. Nothing can. “I, too, dislike it.” Inevitably Ben Lerner’s slim book The Hatred of Poetry begins with the opening salvo from Marianne Moore’s 1967 poem “Poetry,” which conveyed (in four crisp, if pointedly clumsy, lines) her “perfect contempt” for the art. “Perhaps The Hatred of Poetry is most compelling when reflecting on how poetry shapes our childhoods. 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." Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism. “Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. Photo by Kichigin/Thinkstock. A learned but knotty defense on poetry's behalf, persuasive to no one but those who need no convincing." “I, too, dislike it.” At one point, he calls the words “a kind of manic, mantric affirmation.” Say it soft and it’s almost like praying. All rights reserved. Reader Reviews. It’s engaging stuff, and superbly written, with a kind of soft-shoeing élan that wants to project humility but also delight. But on occasion we walk through it, part the right veil of molecules, and almost grasp something. - Kirkus. In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. More Books, Published in USA Information at BookBrowse.com is published with the permission of the copyright holder or their agent. Toward the climactic end of the book, Lerner discusses a typographic mark called a virgule, the slash that appears in prose to represent poetic line breaks.
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