The Hastings Room Series’ Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading with feature reader Meg Tyler and Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Death of a Naturalist

Meg Tyler

The Hastings Room Series’ Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading with feature reader Meg Tyler and Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Death of a Naturalist

Wednesday September 14th at First Church Congregationalist

11 Garden Street near Harvard Square, at 7pm

by Michael Steffen

The book Death of a Naturalist, with its well-known title poem, was published in 1966, fifty years ago this year. Seamus Heaney’s first major published collection, it won the Cholmondeley Award, the Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award—an auspicious welcome in publishing for the Irish poet who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize twenty-nine years and many collections later in 1995.

Death of a Naturalist consists of 34 poems based on childhood experiences and the coming to age of adult recognitions, family relations and life on the farm and in rural Ireland.

Helen Vendler has written about the identity groups Heaney confronted in forming his early poetic character, his family name “Heaney,” his national conversation with Ireland and the Irish, as a Catholic, as an English speaker, a European, a member of rural rather than urban background. Vendler writes, “If Heaney is to write about any of these several groups, he vows not to be intimidated by what those groups think of him and of his work… This vow is one all poets must take, and one which is always very difficult to keep; but it becomes particularly hard when the claims of affection and solidarity attempt to establish confines around what can be said or written.”

Vendler also speaks of the anonymity the child’s persona takes on in the poems of Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, of the “outsideness” of the perception. In one of his books of essays on poetry, Preoccupations, Heaney writes with admiration for the childhood poems of Theodore Roethke. Like Roethke’s greenhouse poems, Heaney’s early pieces, especially the poem “Death of a Naturalist,” make a broad, nearly immediate appeal to readers. In these lines which begin—“All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there…” —the poet is acknowledging and confronting perhaps his most encompassing identity mirror, nature/sexuality, in the image of the frogspawn which fascinates the young Heaney, then of the frogs themselves, who with their coarse croaking voices take on a transcendent, demonic aspect which frightens and turns the child away.

On Wednesday evening, the poem “Death of a Naturalist” will be read, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Heaney’s marvelous international debut, in the introduction to our readers,

George Kalogeris, David Blair and Meg Tyler. We’re putting Meg on the spot this year as the “feature” guest. All three readers are equally wonderful.

Tyler is the 2016 Fulbright Professor of Anglophone Irish Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University in Belfast. She's the author of a monograph on Seamus Heaney, A Singing Contest (Routledge 2005), and is now working on a book of essays about the Irish poet Michael Longley. Her first book of poems, Poor Earth, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014.

It’s a pleasure and so interesting how Tyler talks and writes about poetry. She takes less-traveled paths to look at Heaney’s poetry. Edna Longley and Ciaran Carson have caged the power of Heaney’s pieces on history as “dangerously mythologizing” and mystifying. But Tyler’s opening, almost thesis-like view of the poet’s “impulse” as one “towards unity and regeneration” both is unexpected and makes great sense in the overall estimation of Heaney’s poetic character, which time and again attests to wariness for the superficial arguments and identifications that give rise to enmity and conflict.

Meg speaks of Heaney’s “working model of inclusive consciousness” for poetry, including

“an engagement with the past.” This opens an inexhaustible door to the influences and conversations with other poets that have sparked Heaney’s interest and imagination. Tyler reiterates that Heaney did not make giants of his predecessors, but equals of them. And like

a faring poet, Heaney conversed with so many poets, from the speaking yesterday of Virgil, Dante or Kavanaugh, Lowell and Larkin to his contemporaries at home, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and abroad, Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.

While Tyler’s scope is broad and far-reaching, she can be wonderfully forensic in her prosodic analyses. In one, of many instances throughout A Singing Contest, Meg compares Heaney’s translation of passages from Virgil’s Eclogues with those of David Ferry. “Ferry’s puzzles are subtle,” Tyler writes—

as he relies less on dialect, which heightens the line’s rhythmic movement in Heaney. Ferry adheres to a pentameter line. However, the line that reads, “Heartbroken and beaten, since fortune will have it so,” displays metrical ingenuity with a spondee in the first foot followed by other anapestic substitutions. The variations…express the strain and stress of circumstance, a weight too great to carry… (A Singing Contest, Routledge, 2005, p. 63)

Drawing our attention to the line and its meter, she appreciates the subtly signifying and illustrative dance of the language’s rhythm composed in its metrical difference. It is as fine an observation as that rare diner’s who tastes a sauce and then proceeds to analyze the wine, vegetables, herbs and saltiness of the butter used to prepare it.

So, looking forward to Wednesday evening: Because “Death of a Naturalist” will be among the poems read for the audience, I’ve chosen a poem of a very different inspiration to leave our readers with this week, in a far different situation and meditation from the child’s instinctual attractions and dreads.

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

Marc Zegans The Book of Clouds

Marc Zegans

The Book of Clouds

Kite-string Press

Copyright 2016

Review by Lo Galluccio

In Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities” Marco Polo is a messenger to Kublai Khan and his reports to the Emperor are dream-like and baroque descriptions of cities to which he’s traveled.  In the middle of the book, Polo admits that all of these cities are tropes on Venice, so even though they are all unique in design, style, purpose, essence, they have a Venice-like template.  In short, all the cities are the same city.  

In Marc Zegans latest collection, “The Book of Clouds” he relates an offering made to a loved one-- a friend or lover-- of a flange of clouds.   In this assortment, there are many different kinds of clouds, yet one wonders if they are all variations on the very first cloud in the book, given to the loved one as pleasure, diversion, protection and whim.  

In the first poem, the beloved asks for a “cloud tonight/a cloud hanging over the Pacific/high above the sunset, glowing with dusk.”  At the poem’s end we understand that the author and object of the cloud will be tethered together –“you sit on the beach in a small chair/your stringed toe rocking me on my cloud gently.” It is a beautiful image of a cloud, like a balloon tied to a toe that is rocking, while the lover sits on the beach.  We can picture dusk, perhaps the most lovely time to be on any beach as the sun starts to set.  The second poem is quite simple – “Would you like a cloud tonight?/ I think so./What sort of cloud?/ A simple cloud that you will pull with you as you walk the beach.”  This is a compacted version of the first poem story.  It echoes the first one, like a bell’s resonance.

There are all wonder of clouds in this collection: clouds heavy with night rain, clouds of magnificent colors, clouds of wakefulness and sleep.  Each cloud intended as a lullaby, a cushion, a spectacle for the beloved.  In number 7, denoted by a roman letter, the poet writes:

“As though dropping from a wall/you fall into tonight’s spun grey-cloud/softer than lambs wool, stronger than silk. It stretches around your sides, cradling your leap into dreamless sleep.”

Thus cloud as cradle or hammock leading to a sleep without dreams.  Sometimes we just want to sleep and not be beset with dreams, good or bad.  This is one condition that this poem grants the beloved with a magical grey cloud.  There is also this cloud’s opposite coming right after, “Free and festive, rested now for many days/you ask me for a cloud of vivid dreams/and I give you this cloud of radiant white/from which you can draw a million colors/strand upon strand/on which to weave your dreams.”  

Cloud 14 is a simple play on words: [c]loud/thunder/clap! The loud noise of the thunder is derived from the thunder cloud that claps to herald a storm.  There are thin clouds, and shy clouds that cleanse the day from weary eyes.  The most obvious benefit of these story-book clouds is that they promote sleep.  In cloud 19 the cloud’s colors transmute “From byzantine to aubergine/amethyst through mauve into orchid/eggplant entwined with English violet/the varied purples of your cloud/remove the robes of public office/leaving you only, ready for sleep./

In number 22, we find another cloud offering by the poet: “Your cloud glows Venetian Red/it has the scent of history/and the lushness of ripened fruit./  And in number 24, “Your cloud tonight is a delicious/confection of oranges and lemons/with enough cream to make a Pavlova.”

So the author explores the cloud as being a confection, like cotton candy, or full of cream like the Pavlova cake mentioned.  These poems are delightful offerings to the loved one’s hunger and add a dimension of taste to the clouds.  There is also an overall quality of parfait to these poems.  They are easy to take in, like a light dessert, something that cleanses the palate after a heavy meal or nourishes the dreamer with beauty and devotion.   

In number 25, “this cloud floats over horses/grazing on the salt-breeze grass by Muir Beach./ and it travels “by jet stream to meet you/the scents of eucalyptus and sea sliding you into enchanted sleep. We are keenly aware of the fresh and minty perfume emitted by this cloud and how it provokes a wondrous night’s sleep.

I should mention that this book was set up so that there is only one poem for every page and nothing but space adjoining that page.  The author wants the reader to be able to envision his clouds without any confusing juxtapositions.  So the poem, like a cloud, inhabits its own piece of the sky.  Each page tells a story about a cloud enchanting the beloved’s existence and mainly his/her’s sleep.  There are many delightful stories in this collection, dedicated to those ephemeral yet clearly manifest phenomena, clouds.  In the final poem, number 31, the poet concludes:” Tonight’s cloud is the cloud you have made/the cloud in need of no other/the cloud drawn from the light you have bestowed.”

Marc Zegans is the author of “The Underwater Typewriter,” “Boys in the Woods” and “The Book of Clouds.”  He is also a spoken word artist and an artist’s consultant.  

marc zegans: creative development advisor | Helping Artists, Writers, and Creative People Thrive and Shine

The book is presently available only at Lulu.  It will go into broader distribution in a few weeks.  Here’s the link to the book page on Lulu.

The Book of Clouds by Marc Zegans (Hardcover) - Lulu

The Launch of the “New Saturday Club” A Literary History Celebration and Re-Creation at The Omni Parker House Hotel Kennedy Room

 
 

The Launch of the “New Saturday Club” A Literary History Celebration and Re-Creation 
at The Omni Parker House Hotel Kennedy Room followed by Parker’s Bar Saturday, September 17, 2016, 3:30 p.m.


Program    • Brief Introduction of the New Saturday Club    • Presentation by Susan Wilson, Official House Historian for the Omni Parker House, on the original Saturday Club and its literary members

  • Group discussion of literary conversation then and now at Parker’s Bar  Advisory Committee: William F. Bagley (Director Of Development, St. Mark’s School); Joe Bergin (Poet); Sam Cornish (Boston Poet Laureate Emeritus); Danielle Legros Georges (Boston Poet Laureate); Tom Johnston (Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture); Susan Wilson (House Historian, Omni Parker House). 
The Original Saturday Club: “Founded by Harvey D. Parker in 1855, the Omni Parker House is the oldest of Boston’s elegant inns and the longest continuously operating hotel in the United States. It was here where the brightest lights of America’s Golden Age of Literature—writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Longfellow—regularly met for conversation and conviviality in the legendary nineteenth-century Saturday Club.” —Excerpted from Heaven, By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House by House Historian Susan Wilson
          
SUSAN WILSON, the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House, is an award-winning photographer, writer, educator, and lecturer whose stories and images about the arts, entertainment, history, and culture regularly appeared in the Boston Globe from 1978 to 1996. In 1994, she began writing and photographing books on Boston history, including Boston Sites and Insights, The Literary Trail of Greater Boston, Garden of Memories: A Guide to Historic Forest Hills, and Heaven, By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House. Susan has long been a consultant to and member of a variety of historic organizations in Boston, including The Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Old South Association, The National Park Service, Boston By Foot, Forest Hills Educational Trust, The Dimock Center, and the City of Boston. She was project director for both Harborwalk signage and the Maritime Museum at Battery Wharf.



  Free Donations welcome for future honoraria. Food and drink at Parker’s Bar not included. RSVP and more information, Joe Bergin: jdbergin@gmail.com or 617-834-7631.  60 School Street, Boston, 02108 Paid Parking available • Near State Street and Government Center Stations

Loom By Kevin Gallagher

 

Loom

By Kevin Gallagher

MadHat Press

www.madhat-press.com

Asheville, North Carolina

ISBN: 978-1-941196-32-8

101 Pages

$21.95

Review by Dennis Daly

In the pre-dawn hours of August 21, 1863, during the American Civil War, William Quantrill led his infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, murdering at least 185 men and boys. The Confederate irregulars rode into the city, about 400 strong, with lists of their intended victims. Once there many of them simply shot any male that they could lay their hands on. Northern abolitionists, who largely populated Lawrence, were the hated targets. This attack culminated years of strife in pre-war “Bleeding Kansas” between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces, as well as the strange lead-up to this discord rooted in New England’s textile industry decades earlier.

Kevin Gallagher, in his new book Loom, searches through these Massachusetts mill roots and unmasks the little-known unholy alliance between capitalists of the North and slavers of the South. Gallagher does this by resurrecting a public genre of narrative poetry and then uses it to impart prosaic information (in this case history) with an effective didactic force. Aside from mnemonic considerations, verse employed in this way by a skilled poet can effectively direct emphasis and insert emotion like no prose piece can. And Gallagher is nothing if not a skilled poet.

Pirating the Power Loom opens the poet’s collection by recalling Francis Cabot Lowell’s momentous foray into industrial espionage. Cabot memorized the design of the power loom used in English factories and, with his partners Nathan Appleton and Paul Moody, established his own manufacturing facilities in Massachusetts. Here Lowell details his theft,

I stole their designs with my own two eyes.

I smuggled them to Boston in my mind.

Exporting designs meant jail in Britain.

Workers of looms weren’t allowed to leave.

So I snuck into Manchester myself.

I made it back two days before the war.

I saw iron cards and spinning jennys!

Not too different from the way other industrial countries have stolen manufacturing secrets from the United States. You can also feel the larcenous excitement in Lowell’s words.

When New England’s cotton industry took off it triggered some unintended consequences. Although the international slave trade had officially ended in 1808, slavery within the country was still legal, although a dying institution. Cotton plantations in the South needed workers and a multiplication of existing slaves through breeding seemed the answer. Gallagher’s piece Breeding Negroes captures the banality of these evil times perfectly. Consider this observation,

There’s a cotton nigger

for you!

Genuine! Look at his toes!

Look at his fingers!

There’s a pair

of legs for you!

He’s just as good

at ten bales

as I am for a julep

at eleven o’clock!

Among the textile captains of New England the Lawrence family positioned itself in the first rank of importance. They founded the mill city of Lawrence Massachusetts and nurtured strong connections with the Southern plantation system. Amos A. Lawrence, known as the Prince of the Cotton Whigs, directed the second generation of the family business. Gallagher chronicles a business tour of southern plantations that Lawrence took as a young man in a poem entitled Goodwill Tour—The Prince’s Diaries. Lawrence observes that not all is well in Georgia,

The countryside is very beautiful.

The ladies are pretty and polite.

What I had imagined as the Southern

planter is an exceedingly rare sight.

Some days when it is hot as hell

every man is burning for a fight.

I am finding it very different here.

Shake hands and try not to stare.

Years later the case of fugitive slave Anthony Burns affected this same Amos Lawrence greatly. Burns was captured in Boston and, after a violent attempt to free him by an angry abolitionist mob, the authorities returned Burns, under very heavy guard, to his “master.” Lawrence renounced his family’s ties to the Northern mill/Southern plantation system and became an activist with a vengeance. In his poem, The Stark-Mad Abolitionist, the poet lets Lawrence speak for himself,

I put my hands in my face and I wept.

I went to bed an old-fashioned conservative,

I woke up a stark-mad abolitionist.

Look what you’ve done. I can do nothing less.

You’ve given me a new purpose to live.

I put my hands in my face and I wept,

Then I put myself into his footsteps.

Burns is a hero, not a fugitive.

I am a stark-mad abolitionist.

I will see to it that we free Kansas.

When the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the US Congress in 1854, the Missouri Compromise was overturned and the game changed. Now popular sovereignty would determine whether new states were slave or free. Amos Lawrence pushed his new abolitionist agenda by bankrolling anti-slavery settlers and building up cities such as Lawrence Kansas—appropriately enough, named after him. In one of my favorite pieces, Gallagher versifies a letter from Amos Lawrence to President Franklin Pierce, another New Englander. Lawrence states his position,

You have a problem with the settlers

from the “free States” opposed

to the introduction of the slave trade.

I note that you have now forced those settlers

to the conclusion that if they be safe

they must defend themselves out there.

I too have come to the same conclusion.

I have therefore rendered them assistance

By furnishing such means of defense.

The pro-slavers fought back by harassing and attacking the new settlers. Lawrence countered, fighting fire with fire. In Gallagher’s poem Farmers Turned Soldiers Lawrence explains,

To protect your freedom I send John Brown.

He has the look of a determined one.

When farmers turn soldiers they must have arms.

This is a simple case of right and wrong.

I send Sharps rifles so the ruffians run.

Never again shall they burn down your barns.

You must defend yourselves. Sound the alarms!

Amos A. Lawrence, like others on the wrong side of history, realized his mistakes, albeit a bit late. And, as often happens, shame and guilt bred brutality or at least the promotion of brutality in the person of Lawrence’s surrogate, John Brown.

Brown met terrorism with terrorism. At Pottawatomie Creek he slaughtered five individuals with pro-slavery ties. None of them, however owned slaves. The bleeding of Kansas had begun in earnest. Quantrill’s villainous exclamation mark on this matter waited for the cover of civil war.

Poetry collections this provocative and informative are rare. Gallagher’s Loom demands a large readership. I predict he’ll get it—and deservedly so.

The Sunday Poet: Jared Smith

Jared Smith

That Night in '41

It was their eyes that always got me,

flat and unblinking as dinner plates

or as the coins we traded in markets,

but come from the deep with something

horrible endless dredged up to the light,

to be thrown dead naked on dinner plates.

You eat what you can get, I know, but

the scales themselves catch in your throat

when everything you eat comes from dark

and is drawn to the light you spread, and

nothing comes from the land you can see.

That night the blossoms bloomed at sea was

like so many nights our lads set the nets

and lit the diesel driven lights above them,

and the ever hungry water hissed beneath,

as the nets played out and the shrimp rose

drawn to an artificial dawn, and the great fish,

those that knew the eternal darkness of life,

rose to the light that filled their lidless eyes

and thrashed in the final spectacle of death

drawn to the elusive light that gave them life,

trapped thrashing into a world of demons,

The blossoms bloomed at sea distant while

I watched, first one and then an hour later another,

so that I held my girl in wonder on the beach

asking what was that and what was that, holding

each others hands as we watched the fairy lights

those trawlers carried on their rigging burst,

becoming flames that lit those floating cities

on the beaches back in October of 1941. The next

day, that fast, the trawlers knew to dark their lights

but the bodies of some of our Town-folk came in

smelling of the world of commerce and of Europe

and their eyes like those of fish filled with memory.

We read then of the U-Boats off the coast of Coney Island

at night and the shape of freighters caught in the light

of amusement parks, and we learned to eat less

like the Great Depression that blew in from Arizona

and filled the sky over Washington. We were afraid,

but still town is town and you do what you must do.

----Jared Smith  ( Originally published in the Malpais Review) 

*** Smith is an editor at the Turtle Island Quarterly and on the board of the New York Quarterly. His poetry and prose have been widely published.

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

Review by Wendell Smith

The Hatred of Poetry

Copyright 2016 by Ben Lerner

Ferrar Straus and Giroux

New York, NY 10011

IBSN: 9780865478206(paperback)

           9780374712334(e-book)

$12.00

The Hatred of Poetry was presented to me as fortuitously as The Never Ending Story was to Bastian Balthazar Bux, as an apparition the legendary Joe Leaphorn would have told Jim Chee not to dismiss as coincidental. This monograph celebrating our ambivalent dependence upon poetry manifested one Saturday morning on the table of the Bagel Bards at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square by way of the Canton Public Library. I picked it up preparing a rebuttal that I never got to because, when I discovered that Ben Lerner had first encountered this conundrum we call poetry where I had, in an English class at Topeka High School, I was hooked, and I soon discovered that even with my head start (I graduated from THS in 1960, he in the mid ‘90s) he was way ahead of me.

Lerner begins his essay with an anecdote that sets a comic tone for our shared struggle with poetry. His freshman English teacher, Mrs. X, requires her class to choose a poem to memorize and then recite. Learner, well, let's let him tell the story:

So I went and asked the Topeka High School librarian to direct me to the shortest poem she knew, and she suggested Marianne Moore's "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 Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet, whereas I had only to recite 24 words. Never mind the fact that a set rhyme and iambic pentameter make 14 of Shakespeare's lines easier to memorize then Moore's three, each one of which is interrupted by a conjunctive adverb – a parallelism of awkwardness that basically serves as its form.

* * *

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.

He follows his narration of this joke that poetry has played upon him with some 80 pages of cogent prose exploring the implications of those three lines and 24 words. “I too dislike it,” becomes a mantra that brings unity to the variety of his arguments and I am finding his essay more useful in “understanding poetry” than Cleanth Brooks’ and Robert Penn Warren’s tome, Understanding Poetry. One reason I think Lerner’s book is more useful is that he seems to know poems should be experienced, felt not “understood.” This brings to mind a poem about poetry, which we foist upon high school students, Archibald McLeish's, "Ars Poetica"; although I find it too precious by half -- “I, too, dislike it”-- its final two lines "A poem should not mean/But be." support this idea that the “meaning” of poems is somehow beyond comprehension by our reason.

The Hatred of Poetry has a quality that I think good criticism needs; it stimulates your imagination about the poems you already love; it encourages you to freely associate with them, which enlarges their being. For example, as I was contemplating poems above for recruiting youth to The Hatred of Poetry I thought, rather than “Ars Poetica,” we would be more successful if we were to subject them to Ramon Guthrie's, "On Seeing the First Woodchuck of the Spring and the Last Pterodactyl." And, although my reasons for preferring Guthrie are an essay for another day, I think the arrival of Guthrie in the middle of this evaluation of Lerner's monograph demonstrates The Hatred of Poetry’s power of provocation. Why bother to read criticism if it doesn't set you thinking about its subject, set your mind to exploring the territory.

In fact, I think this little monograph (the book is 7.5 X 5 inches and the text blocks are 3 X 5) would make an excellent text for any introduction to poetry. Ironically, before you could subject the tender eyes of sexting adolescents to it, you would have to edit out his one use of "fucking." In spite of how refreshing it would be to have the language of everyday discourse used in a discussion of poetry and how that use might free students to think about how to dislike it, "fucking" would be the excuse censors would use to dismiss Lerner. I think, their real objection might be that his thesis brings him to praise poetry such as Claudia Rankine's with its power to make us feel; in her case its power to breed empathy in our souls for what our racism does to her, how our racism lashes at her sensibility, and to recognized the shear produced in our own souls by our concurrent awareness of our white privilege (I feel your pain and I am simultaneously protected from it.). If our hatred of poetry can lead us to appreciate such poetry, then it will lead us to appreciate our hatreds and the paradox that we can’t do anything about our hatreds until we can appreciate them. And those appreciations lead us to question a social status quo. In other words, The Hatred of Poetry is dangerous. This danger attributed to poetry is another theme dating to Plato, which Lerner explores in parallel with the paradox that poetry has also been reviled for being impotent. 

The Hatred is good criticism because it gets you thinking in new ways about poetry familiar to you while it introduces you to poetry with which you weren’t familiar. Learner has intriguing things to say about a bundle of poets beginning with “Caedmon, the first poet in English whose name we know” to Whitman and Dickinson. As he discusses them he develops his compelling thesis: poets, too, “dislike it” even as they write it, because the imaginative source of the poem can never be realized by either the poet, nor her reader. As a dream is lucid until we wake so the poem is lucid until it is written (Lerner’s metaphor). Thus the poet is doomed to failure (truth perceived is always compromised when translated into words) but also doomed to perpetually attempt that translation. The argument implies that the human condition is a divine imagination, which can’t be expressed fully in a material reality (illusion?). Wordsworth (the irony of allegory): "our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;" Browning: "Ah, but man's reach should exceed his grasp." You, no doubt, have your own fragments that point to what we might come to know about our selves through poetry once we admit our hatred for it. Here is how Lerner puts it in his concluding paragraph:

There is no need to go on multiplying examples of an impulse that can produce no adequate examples – of a capacity that can't be objectified without falsification. I've written in its defense, and in defense of our denunciation of it, because that is the dialectic of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. All I ask of 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.

And I’ll close my praise with a cheer, “Hoy! Hoy! Mighty Troy!” that may only be appreciated fully by the 15,000 or so of our fellow graduates because, if he continues writing like this, Ben Lerner could become to 21^st century American letters what another Topeka High School alumnus, Dean Smith, became to 20^th century American basketball.