The Hatred of Poetry Quotes

“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. 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 that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“The fatal problem with poetry: poems.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“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. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that 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, 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.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“The more abysmal the experience of the actual, the greater the implied heights of the virtual.”
― ben lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“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.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“Poetry" is a word for a kind of value no particular poem can realize: the value of persons, the value of human activity beyond the labor/leisure divide, a value before or beyond price. Thus hating poetry can either be a way of negatively expressing poetry as an ideal [or] it can be a defensive rage against the mere suggestion that another world, another measure of value, is possible.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“Poetry isn't hard, it's impossible.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“Whatever we think of particular poems, "poetry" is a word for the meeting place of the private and the public, the internal and the external: My capacity to express myself poetically and to comprehend such expression is a fundamental qualification for public recognition.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“Great poets confront the limits of actual poems, tactically defeat or at least suspend that actuality, sometimes quit writing altogether, becoming celebrated for their silence; truly horrible poets unwittingly provide a glimmer of virtual possibility via the extremity of their failure; avant-garde poets hate poems for remaining poems instead of becoming bombs; and nostalgists hate poems for failing to do what they wrongly, vaguely claim poetry once did.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“This is one underlying reason why poetry is so often met with contempt rather than mere indifference and why it is periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed: Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

“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.”
― Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry