By Gerald Hausman
Santa
Fe, NM, USA
Ben Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry is an interesting book with a catchy title. It
is a conundrum book, too, not by title alone but because of what Lerner is
tackling as a poet and as a critical thinker/essayist.
Who doesn't remember poet Marianne
Moore's famous line about poetry: "I, too,
dislike it."
Lerner starts out with this as a
kind of premise ... and by asking the question, why is it so. What is there
about poetry that stops us in our tracks? It isn't the precious beauty
angle,
it's the fact that most of us don't read poetry any more. And yet ... Bob
Dylan's recent Nobel Prize is proof that while we don't read poetry so much, we
do listen to it. Who would argue that Dylan is not a poet? Few could disagree
that his poetry put to song also reads wonderfully on the page: the words sing
however you lay them down – on paper or on musical notes.
 |
| The Hatred of Poetry |
But what happened to printed Poetry
(yes, with a capital P) that it should languish so terribly in our time? Was it
captured and imprisoned by the universities? Was it destroyed in countless high
schools across the land? Was it killed by the Testing Bureaus? Or is it just
that Plato started the whole thing, the hating of poetry, because he believed it
would corrupt and mislead the youth of his time?
Who knows? Who cares? Well, Ben
Lerner does and he makes a lovely and profound
case in this clever little book
of his. And he covers a lot of sacred ground. Genuine poetry, he contends,
creates a place for possibility. He ends his book length essay with the fact
"it might come to resemble love."
 |
| Gerald Hausman |
Those of us who love poetry, and
always have, might smile at this, for poetry – and here I am speaking for
myself – IS love. The act of writing it, seeing it written, and feeling it
within is the very essence of being in love with life. Thanks, Ben.
_______________________________
John Nizalowski's East of Kayenta is a case in point. It
is the very essence of the Southwest in tight, uncluttered verse that could be
spoken in a bar, as poet Lew Welch once suggested, and the man sitting next to
you would imagine you were just talking to him. Nizalowski's writing is spare,
beautiful, deeply felt language that never fails or falls to the superficial.
Rather, the poet digs under the surface of things and leads you
along on desert
paths of the imagination, through the halls of literature, and the unlikely
haunts of Jack Kerouac's cat. He lets you hear jazz on the streets of San
Francisco and he lets you smell black coffee while you traverse wide deep
rivers of thought. In his poem "Ornette's Blues", the poet says:
 |
| East of Kayenta |
The blues detonated
inside out. Yes. The
galaxy charted, sung,
spun into silver and
hot phosphorous.
Nizalowski sings of crickets in the
deep grass, sirens, fires, crimes, suicides and a "freight train rumble
receding into/the long Colorado desert night." Whatever he touches upon
and it is mostly a matter of myth and travelogue, vision and music, he does so
elegantly, simply elegantly. Few have written as wisely about the desert and
its hold on those who personally let go within the empty heart of that
landscape. Where the sand ends, the music begins. Where the music begins the
whirling sand is pure poetry.
(Gerald Hausman photo credit: Mariah Fox)
Links:
Gerald Hausman
Gerald Hausman at Stay Thirsty Publishing
(Gerald Hausman photo credit: Mariah Fox)
Links:
Gerald Hausman
Gerald Hausman at Stay Thirsty Publishing
_____________________________________________________________________
Gerald Hausman is the author of Not Since Mark Twain and
a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.
