My five-year-old daughter and I have been reading Winnie-the-Pooh this week. In the seventh chapter, the nativist Rabbit tries to drive out recent arrivals Kanga and Roo by kidnapping Roo and then blackmailing Kanga into leaving the Forest. (“That’s not nice!” my daughter interrupted, early in the chapter. She’s also anti-Brexit and anti-Trump.) Kanga deflects this boorish welcome with grace and resolve, and a few pages later a regular Forest and Hundred Acre Wood Union is established (with free movement principles and tariff-free honey). Roo gambols with Rabbit, Kanga gambols with Pooh, and “they were all happy again.” So, a fairy tale for our time.
But there’s one dissonant note that deserves mention:
“Oh, Kanga,” said Pooh, after Rabbit had winked at him twice, “I don’t know if you are interested in Poetry at all?”
“Hardly at all,” said Kanga.
“Oh!” said Pooh.
Undeterred, Pooh rips off sixteen lines of iambic tetrameter—much of it good, and all of it belying the poem’s title: “Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain.” So what if it’s in the service of distracting Kanga in an attempt to steal her child? As Plato warned, poets are liars. But I’m preaching now to a poetry-loving, or at least poetry-tolerant, choir.
In his newly published essay The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner takes on, and occasionally sides with, the Kangas of the world. “The fatal problem with poetry: poems,” he writes, in one of the book’s many aphoristic flashes. Our poets hope to sing like Caedmon, the first English poet, but they simply can’t. Even Caedmon can’t sing like Caedmon. After dreaming that he gives voice to the story of creation, he’s unable to fully recreate it upon waking. “The actual poem Caedmon brings back to the human community,” Lerner writes, “is necessarily a mere echo of the first.”
Lerner offers an unlikely pairing, Keats and the hapless William McGonagall, in his attempt to capture what makes poetry uncapturable:
Keats’s incredible skill, his woven vowels, tempt us into believing that the impossible music is just out of reach, whereas McGonagall’s supreme ineptitude allows us to intuit its possibility via a confrontation with its opposite. Neither presents the genuine, and Keats, master that he is, doesn’t even pretend to. I think of these lines from “Hyperion”: “A living death was in each gush of sounds, / Each family of rapturous hurried notes, / That fell, one after one, yet all at once,”—those are gorgeous lines of ekphrastic verse, but what they describe cannot be realized by any human instrument in time.
A tremendously resourceful poet himself, Lerner puzzles over the myriad ways that poetry disappoints us. (Marianne Moore’s “I, too, dislike it” is one of his book’s refrains.) But he’s equally alive to the ways that poetry might bring us closer to the sublime, to the disruptive—as felt in the work of Whitman, Dickinson, and Claudia Rankine.
But maybe McGonagall is the poet for our moment. The great Scottish bard of catastrophe! The “Poet and Tragedian of Dundee”! What I wouldn’t give to hear his views on the Brexit vote—a vote that will be remembered, as he would surely say (and then say again), “for a very long time.” And for Remain supporters looking for a silver lining (or silv’ry lining, in McGonagall-speak), take note: “The Tay Bridge Disaster” is only the second poem of a trilogy. The final poem, as Lerner reminds us, deals with reconstruction. The EU dream lives on!
