I think what makes poetry “special” in this regard is precisely the assumptions and expectations that gather around the amorphous term. Is it prosody? Rhyme? An emotional quality? A decision on the part of the writer? The reader? Is it just a superlative? What’s a prose poem? And so on. And I say this is a fantasy that can be represented but not fulfilled by any specific poem.ĬD: What makes poetry special though? People don’t tend to talk about novels, for instance, as being disappointing when they don’t reach perfection.īL: There is no stable definition of what counts as a poem. One persistent idea about poetry-particularly about lyric poetry-is that a poem should at once be irreducibly individual and totally accessible to others, that it can reconcile the individual and the collective. When that’s the case, actual poems can only fail. “People getting upset about poetry,” Lerner told me, “is a nagging sign of poetry’s relevance.”Ĭody Delistraty: You write, “The fatal problem with poetry: poems.” How do poems get in the way of poetry?īen Lerner: I think “poetry” is a word that is often used to name a set of impossible demands.

And yet, as Lerner writes, our hatred of poetry only serves to signify its continuing importance. We hate poetry though not just because it fails in living up to its potential for perfection, but because it makes us, as humans, feel like failures-poetry denotes humanity, and if we cannot understand it, if we cannot create it, then we wonder if a core aspect of our humanity has been taken away. And it is through poetry’s failure that we come back to it (hoping for better) and are repelled from it (knowing it can never reach the perfection expected of it). Poetry can theoretically achieve anything-it can conjure complex emotions it can describe a work of music or art with a beauty and depth greater than that work of music or art itself-so that any time it does not reach its near-limitless potential, whether it is as far off the mark as McGonagall’s poem or as close as, say, Keats’ six odes or Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” it is viewed-by definition-as a failure.

Ben lerner atocha