On Disliking Poetry | Hacker News Reader

On Disliking Poetry

lrb.co.uk

74 pointsjonathansizz39 comments

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

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?

like

For me, its always been about Rhythm and Contrast, which, if you think about it, is the foundation of all art. Poetry, and prose, in a different way, use rhythm and contrast to draw attention to things, to make words mean more than their surface implies. its an endowment of depth.

I love that you pointed out that poetry is the "literature of moments". I never liked really long poems, as the rigid structures often get in the way of the narrative, preferring short verses that capture a moment or feeling.

You're absolutely right. Those are the right reasons to like Poetry. Which is why I tell people that the stuff that the "Poetry Society of America" has been plastering NYC subways with is not poetry (none of them care about any of the beautiful traits of a Poem that you enumerated).

(Chase Twichell, Jim Moore, Seamus Heaney, Tracy K. Smith, see them here: http://web.mta.info/mta/aft/poetry/poetry.html)

Is this a joke? Your position is that Seamus Heaney's work (etc) isn't poetry? And that's because you don't think there's rhythm and melody to what he writes?

I find that very disheartening.

I believe poetry is the highest level of expression, using words. It's the purest and most powerful form of writing.

Now talking about poetry and programming (object oriented programming), here's a nice pun:

    [...]
    What might have been is an abstraction
    Remaining a perpetual possibility
    Only in a world of speculation.
    [...]

Poetry is hugely successful in the modern world, it just happens to be set to music most of the time.

Do you have any examples of genuine poetry—as opposed simply to lyrics using poetic structures, like rhythm and rhyme—in music? (Or would you take issue with the distinction that I draw, and declare that lyrics with poetic structures are poetry?) The closest that I can think of are Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, but both of them stand out mainly by being much closer to poets than their peers, rather than seeming to me to be authentic poets themselves: trying to read their lyrics without the music usually robs them of their sense of poetry (for me, anyway).

AesopRock. Some of his more involved songs read as much as poetry as anything I've encountered in the past. (ZZZ top provides a good example and is a personal favorite for me.)

But what do you describe as "genuine poetry"? Some sort of meter usage, some form of writing, structure? I think that creates an artificial divide, and prefer instead to just see many forms of storytelling through organized words, a continuum of various implementations of poetry/prose.

Zero Dark Thirty is a good example of what I would consider poetry by Aesop.

http://genius.com/Aesop-rock-zero-dark-thirty-lyrics

> But what do you describe as "genuine poetry"? Some sort of meter usage, some form of writing, structure?

I don't have a good definition, just an "I know it when I see it" sort of thing.

> I think that creates an artificial divide, and prefer instead to just see many forms of storytelling through organized words, a continuum of various implementations of poetry/prose.

I think that I would agree with the point that I thought tjradcliffe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9707954) was making upthread. Informally, a 'genuine' poem to me is a way of communicating a story, an experience, or an emotion in a way that would be less effective if translated into prose. I don't know if this sort of definition by opposition is worthwhile; and, in fact, as I state it this way, I wonder if maybe I am arguing against my original position that not much music is poetry.

> I don't have a good definition, just an "I know it when I see it" sort of thing.

Without a decent definition, no-one can hope to satisfy "as opposed simply to lyrics using poetic structures, like rhythm and rhyme". Basically you're asking people to prove your personal preferences.

'What is the difference between poetry and lyrics' is an age-old difficult question, with an easy answer for those who don't think there's a difference, and difficult searching for subtle differentiation for those who do. The link below is a good write-up of many of the issues, with the author thinking there is a difference, and that is only that lyrics don't work 'as well' without their attendant music (but which means we should to define what 'as well' means... and exceptions can always be found).

http://bostonreview.net/forum/poetry-brink/difference-betwee...

Ultimately, if differentiation is that difficult a question, the two entities aren't all that qualitatively different, in my opinion.

> I don't have a good definition, just an "I know it when I see it" sort of thing.

Does this meet your definition?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K81UGHwhWaw

As noted in a different comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9708878), substantial amounts of hip-hop and rap music are essentially long poems set to a beat.

when I think of hip hop as poetry, I think of Saul Williams. I'm on mobile and traveling at the moment so I can't provide a link, but one of the suns of his that comes to mind is Scared Money

> Do you have any examples of genuine poetry—as opposed simply to lyrics using poetic structures, like rhythm and rhyme—in music?

Poetry is often set to music. It's totally common to read in literature texts about a poet's works being set to music; I'm reading Donald Keene's book on post-Meiji Japanese literature and for at least one poet he mentions that his poems were popular enough that they were recited with music, and there's examples in Western literature, especially the Greeks like Sappho with lyric poetry.

This is a good point, but I took murbard2's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9708591) to refer to works that are intended to be musical, but that can be recognised as poetry, rather than to works that were first written as poetry, and then set to music. (I recognise that I am on possibly dodgy grounds here by trying to determine whether a given work is 'really' poetry, but musical, or 'really' music, but poetic.)

So much in the space of folk (of many cultures), your examples are closer to that than most other music. Indeed some of the best music out there melds the poetry perfectly with the music. It's an art that doesn't exist if either part is missing.

Example that comes to mind, Nanci Griffith's 'Wing and the Wheel' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDs1kXTS9r8

    The wing and the wheel they carry things away
    Whether it's me that does the leavin' or the love that flies away
    The moon outside my window looks so lonely tonight
    Oh, there's a chunk out of it's middle big enough for an old fool to hide
    
    Where are all the dreamers that I used know?
    We used to linger beneath street lamps in the halos and the smoke
    The wing and the wheel came to carry them away
    Now they all live out in the suburbs where their dreams
    Are in their children at play
    
    There's a pale sky in the east all the stars are in the west
    Oh, here's to all the dreamers may our open hearts find rest
    The wing and the wheel are gonna carry us along
    And we'll have memories for company long after the songs are gone

This is a good example of the technical restrictions that make lyrics a (proper) subset of poetry: note in particular the abundance of long vowels, which make it not just readable but singable.

It enables the lyricism of the song! Even more beautiful. That actually makes a lot of sense, thanks for pointing it out.

Bob Dylan would be another example, although I don't personally feel passionate about his work.

Would you consider Stairway to Heaven to be poetry when read without the music?

> 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

[2] 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.")

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.

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 :)]

You aren't by any chance Yvor Winters?

I'm much less dead, and have numerous other important differences, but I can see why you might see similarities.

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.

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

murbard2 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9708591) made a similar point earlier.

Two examples that come to mind...

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

Kanye's "Jesus Walks": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYF7H_fpc-g 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.

You might also like Milo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwGwD-0OYuM&list=PL_KFGCl1le...

Some of it is called hip hop now. Some of hip hop is poetry.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.)

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