We might wonder about poetic traditions that duck around the constraints of verbal structure, such as Concrete or Sound poetries. Do their intended, virtual affects bypass the actuality of grammar and vocabulary? Lerner, however, takes up historically avant-garde poetry movements as some of the deepest representations of poetry-hate. Their shared dissatisfaction with decorative abuses of poetry expresses a larger dissatisfaction with the society that undertakes such decoration. The only ways to respond to this error, so it would seem to Dada or Italian Futurism, is to smash the poem. Yet this, too, is an illusion, as Lerner reminds us: ‘They might redefine the borders of art, but they don’t erase those borders; a bomb that never goes off, the poem remains a poem.’
Again, this reduction relies upon Lerner setting certain cultural boundaries, namely, those that distinguish poetry or art from other forms of living like kinship, faith, magic and ritual. Nevertheless, Lerner draws the West’s ideological promises for poetry into direct comparison with what he calls a nostalgia for the future, that is, a yearning for a mythical golden age when poetry ‘spoke’ for ‘all’. No doubt, reader, you will have encountered many versions of that conversation, and sadly it’s one that gets regularly trotted out by arts festivals, broadcasters and even critics. I am reminded of when, in the wake of Kate Tempest’s recent visit to Australia, I was invited by ABC local radio to discuss ‘the relevance of poetry’ – as though Tempest’s performances had single-handedly revived it from a deep, ancient slumber. The academisation of poetry, as it is commonly phrased, is blamed for killing a golden time of universality, by insisting upon difference and a poetics of identity politics. Lerner’s own essay may draw upon the long tradition of the defence, but it seizes a timeliness that will be most welcome to fellow haters (lovers) of the form.
While Grossman’s scholarly mode is ponderous and methodical, Lerner’s style is light and assertive. He makes a successful illusion of an organic, probing discussion without workmanlike joins to be seen. Furthermore, Lerner draws compellingly from his own understanding of writing and reading poetry; he doesn’t seek to make poetry mystical, but he is able to admit the pleasurable and hard-to-articulate aspects of the craft. In one beautiful example, he compares poetic space to ‘the little clearing’ created in a cinema. Ultimately, though, for Lerner and for many of us, it is ‘fucking and getting fucked up’ that are most akin to watching a poem struggle between being actual and virtual. Taking part in that tussle is how haters ‘perfect [our] contempt’ of poetry, sticking around to see if the raw can touch the genuine.
