
On Disliking Poetry - jonathansizz
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n12/ben-lerner/diary
======
tjradcliffe
This analysis of poetry is like declaring that the purpose of physics is to
build perpetual motion machines and then saying we all dislike physics because
it fails in this transcendent purpose.

The author trots out uncritically the entire corpus of Romantic twaddle,
swathed in sufficient technical language that most poeple will feel too
intimidated to challenge it. But twaddle it is.

The failure of poetry in the modern world is a result of the rejection of
concrete experience as the foundational matter of poems. This has been
accompanied by the abandonment of the physical rhythmicities of speech
(including rhyme) as the basis of poetic structure.

There's nothing transcendent about good poetry. People are made out of meat,
and we communicate by flapping peices of meat:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tScAyNaRdQ)

Poetry reflects our meat-based lives, the physicality of our meat. When we
abandon that, when we abandon concrete, sensual experience for floating
abstraction, as the Romantics did, or for purely internal emotional states as
modern confessional free verse does, we abandon the very thing that makes
poetry possible and necessary: meat.

Poetry is speech, specifically speech where the rhythmical structure dominates
the gramatical structure. The rhythmical structure can be strong and overt
(rap, Kipling, etc) or subtle (even the best confessional free verse manages
this at times, or the L A N G U A G E poets at their most surreal, although I
don't have any use for their political programme.) The rhythmical structure of
speech comes from the way we form sounds with meat, and nothing else.

Nor does poetry have to be about anything out of the ordinary, although it
certainly can be. Poetry is, amongst other things, the literature of moments.
It's a way to capture and communicate a fleeting experience. Consider:

    
    
        young girls in blue shorts  
        street corner in summer rain  
        light changes, they run  
    

Way more memorable and evocative than "I saw some girls wearing blue shorts on
the corner waiting for the light to change and they ran when it did 'cause
there was a hard summer rain falling."

Poetry makes the mind work in useful ways, focusing on structure and meaning
and meat. We are physical beings capable of abstract appreciation of the
world. Poetry exists at the intersection, grounded in one, guided by the
other.

What's to dislike?

~~~
igravious
> But twaddle it is.

That's a bit harsh, don't you think?

> The failure of poetry in the modern world is a result of the rejection of
> concrete experience as the foundational matter of poems. This has been
> accompanied by the abandonment of the physical rhythmicities of speech
> (including rhyme) as the basis of poetic structure.

In "Ranking Contemporary American Poems"[1] Michael Dalvean uses natural
language processing and rudimentary machine learning to prise apart the
language poets use. What he finds is that professional poets tend to (among
other techniques) use more concrete language than amateur poets. This is
because imagery relies on concrete imagery to effectively evoke emotion. And
it the emotive force that moves us. So, no, poets (proper ones) haven't, as
you say, rejected concrete experience. In fact, it is one of the things that
distinguishes them from rank amateurs. Secondly, what has been abandoned is
not "the physical rhythmicities of speech" (metric verse?) but rigid form.
That is the achievement of contemporary verse -- free-form verse or projective
verse[2] or whatever you want to call it. Consider, in the same light, the
flight from representation in the visual arts that swung through impressionism
and rattled past abstract expressionism. Poetry followed suit, at a slower
pace. It is not twaddle, it is experimentation (pardon the clumsy word) with
form and it has its own "bitter logic" in its progression as Mr. Lerner
explains.

Really, where poetry intersects computation is the current frontier -- Lerner
does not even allude to this. There you'll find, perhaps, your meat.

[1]
[http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/6](http://dsh.oxfordjournals.org/content/30/1/6)

[2] [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-
creeley](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-creeley) ("Olson and
Creeley together developed the concept of “projective verse,” a kind of poetry
that abandoned traditional forms in favor of a freely constructed verse that
took shape as the process of composing it was underway.")

~~~
tjradcliffe
I said "Romantic twaddle", not "modernist experimentation". As indicated in
what I wrote, I find a number of aspects of modernism interesting and
worthwhile, for much the reasons you cite.

Also, I wrote about concrete experience and you've replied by talking about
concrete language. Weird.

Good modern poetry has much to recommend it, but there is also a vast amount
of unstructured garbage. Unfortunately anyone who complains about the latter
is assumed to hate the former even if he explicilty states--as I did--that
there is much value in it. For example, someone chimed in agreeing with me and
then dissed Seamus Heaney. Err...

But the Romantic theory of poetry is twaddle, and it does represent a detour
that has taken almost 200 years to recover from. We're slowly getting there.

The relative value of "rigid form" (I'm not sure why "rigid" is required... it
certainly isn't a characteristic of any good formal poetry at any time) is
something that non-technical people have trouble understanding (you see, I'm
doing the same thing you did: assuming I know something about you, and then
condescending to explain things to you on the basis of that baseless
assumption... irritating, isn't it?) There is a proverb that every engineer
knows: "Form is liberating."

We've actually got more in common in our views than you're apparently willing
to acknowledge, and have instead chosen to project onto me some fairly weird
ideas rather than engaging the words I've actually written. "O no! Someone is
misunderstanding me on the 'Net!" is about as useful a call to action as
"someone is wrong on the 'Net" but you're clearly not an idiot, so I couldn't
help but be tempted to put things right. Now all I need to do is figure out
how to buy you a virtual beer with bitcoin... this sort of argument is always
much better with beer.

~~~
igravious
Fair enough.

Thank you for giving me the benefit that I failed to give you.

Part of what poetry tries to do is capture experience. It does this with
language. The more concrete the language the better. A perhaps unwarranted
value judgement but... I stand by it... I think that contemporary poetry still
does this. I really must disagree with you if you see otherwise. We may be
talking at cross-purposes here.

Of course you use the word "transcendent". And "romantic". These words Lerner
studiously avoids but, as you've noted, this is his thesis. I think that this
central argument/position holds though. Without using poncey language --
"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple
with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." \-- Lerner
is stating that the (primary?) aim of poetry is to put into words that which
cannot be put into words. That is why to be silent is to succeed. Notice that
a similar idea runs through philosophy. Apparently Wittgenstein was happiest
when a student _gave up_ philosophy. Also, isn't this the same chap who said,
"the limits of my language […] mean the limits of my world"? Same with the
Joycean epiphany. Poetry (and poetic prose) really sings, really lifts off,
when it gets us to connect in whatever way with what the words are pointing
towards. But all the words can do is point! They can never be a substitute for
the thing-in-itself, how can they be! Other forms of writing don't have this
aim because they don't have the concision that poetry strives for. By
definition almost they don't have the concision. Do you not agree?

Regarding form. I had not come across this, "Form is liberating." I agree
100%. And, I will steal it. The thing is: poetry had not even properly begun
to explore the combinatorial space of forms. (Including formlessness.) What
has happened is an enlarging of the space (of forms). This is why Lerner
points out the irony of those who push against becoming in time part of that
which they push against. I am not criticising form. I embrace and celebrate
the bigger house. My nature means that I do privilege the new and that is a
failing of mine. I do not reject the old, do not misunderstand me here.

Besides, I felt the piece was really well written. Written with a poet's ear.

[hashing this out over a bevvy would be most agreeable :)]

------
wwweston
I'm seeing some parallels to writing software here:

"you’re moved to write a poem because of some 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. So the poem is always a
record of failure. There’s an ‘undecidable conflict’ between the poet’s desire
to make an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, ‘resistance to
alternative making inherent in the materials of which any world must be
composed’"

Or, for that matter, the desire to transcend/reshape a current market we
sometimes name as the entrepreneurial impulse. Though I think poetry is a much
purer form.

------
weeksie
Poetry is pretty popular. Most of it is called hip hop now, though.

~~~
zyxley
Two examples that come to mind...

Grandmaster Flash's "The Message":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqky4dSGJnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqky4dSGJnE)
[http://genius.com/Grandmaster-flash-and-the-furious-five-
the...](http://genius.com/Grandmaster-flash-and-the-furious-five-the-message-
lyrics)

Kanye's "Jesus Walks":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g)
[http://genius.com/Kanye-west-jesus-walks-lyrics](http://genius.com/Kanye-
west-jesus-walks-lyrics)

Both are lyrically dense and poetic enough that the only thing really making
them "music" rather than "spoken word poetry" is having a backing track.

~~~
peter_l_downs
You might also like Milo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwGwD-0OYuM&list=PL_KFGCl1le...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwGwD-0OYuM&list=PL_KFGCl1leB8YOEz9ZEvKMiRV76MvnOl-)

------
scriptman
I think a poet is like a sculptor that is always forced to sculpt using Lego.

Words are a coarse medium for expressing art as their look, sound and
interaction with surrounding words defines their meaning. Stray too far
outside of convention and people reading your poem won't understand it. I can
understand this being frustrating.

~~~
calinet6
So much is possible within that convention, though. So much. The best poets
(different for each of us) somehow surpass the impossibility of using language
to express true humanity, and do it anyway.

~~~
scriptman
Yes. I think that this makes their achievement all the more amazing.

------
calinet6
Never have I read more love between the lines of such an intelligent,
thorough, and obtuse criticism. Nowhere will you find more humanity than the
impossibility of perfection, and what is poetry but the shared search for that
humanity? Imperfect as it must be.

------
dschiptsov
The worst aspect of most arts are critics. Programming included. All these
pseudo-intellectual categories, analysis of sizes (forms) and styles,
anthologies stuff like that.

BTW, for those who can read Russian, Nabokov's the Gift (Dar) is the best
reading about poetry - how it is not a a mere classification of rhythms (I
imagine hipster idiots, advocating well-typed pairs of words and type-checkers
for poets) but an inner sudden insight from a pre-linguistic, non-verbal mind
(which people call "heart") verbalized on the spot.

This is what programming is also (read On Lisp) - one express his own sudden
insights by giving it a structure in terms of a programming language (and
trying it till it is hot), which means it should be restricted as less as
possible (this is fucking why Lisps or Smalltalk or Erlang feels so special).

Poetry is not the a mere form with some vague meaning, it is these sudden
insights and some structure a poet gives to it. That is why we could enjoy
Rumi without being able to read Persian.

We are excited when we found an unexpected, rare gem, a verbalization (an
expression!) of what we felt ourselves, but still been unable to express (same
experience with reading source code of the best (Norvig, rtm+PG, Sysoev,
etc.)) The rate of gems to stuff is 20/80, so do not expect to much. Read
arc.arc to understand what I mean.

Like it is with everything (at least with literature, music and programming),
95% of poetry is narcissistic or graphomanic crap, like blogs. That's why,
perhaps, most of people are convinced that poetry is something which has a
rithm in it.

Read Nabokov or Pamuk.

~~~
peter_l_downs
Not sure what you mean by hipster idiots in this context, although I agree
with your overall point. I can explain at least one reason to write a rhythym-
based poem generator [0] – the problem lends itself to some interesting code
:) I'd never claim that it's a valuable tool for creating "art", but it was
fun to write and because of it I've thought a lot more about what "art" is and
isn't. And, Sussman liked it!

> We are excited when we found an unexpected, rare gem, a verbalization (an
> expression!) of what we felt ourselves, but still been unable to express
> (same experience with reading source code of the best (Norvig, rtm+PG,
> Sysoev, etc.))

Really well written; the frisson of recognizing one's own experience described
by someone else is both validating and comforting.

[0]:
[https://github.com/peterldowns/bard](https://github.com/peterldowns/bard)

~~~
dschiptsov
I am working with tourists in Himalaya, so I am biased against hipsters (role-
playing governed behavior).

For a poet it is a process of verbalization of non-verbal insights (side-
effects of conditioning), for a reader it is recognition of ones own insights
from someone else's verbalizations. Types are irrelevant here.)

