Woe is poetry, 2023

Every year there are wrap up posts—best of this and that; lists of maybe-you-should-try-this; litanies of did you, could you, will you; suggestions for what might become you, if you, should you, won’t you—while there’s still time.

Amidst The New Yorker’s best books of 2023, there is a recommendation for Ben Lerner’s collection, The Lights. Embedded within this review is a slight towards poetry, not meant to be one at all, I don’t think, that I’ve been considering for a few days now. The reviewer says:

“Much of this [collection] is about re-enchanting poetry itself, which can sometimes seem an outdated, indulgent form, severed from the modern world.”

Poor poetry! As outdated and indulgent as a mink shawl, as medieval and monotonous as any alliteration out there, just as severed from modernity as the animal from its pelt.

And yet, when a person dies, when a person is born, when a nation is harmed, when a campus is destroyed–our ears open like hungry clams for nothing more.

The next part of the Lerner review reads, to me, as a reconciliation: “But life and art can’t be held apart.” 

Because what else are we doing here?

If poetry is severed from modernity, I hope to reconsider survival. If poetry is indulgent, I beg my cry babies find a better form. If poetry is in need of re-enchantment, why allow it to mesmerize, persist?

The review ends on the poet’s own words: “Lyric poetry, Lerner writes, might be best understood as “our own / illumination returned to us as alien.”’

And that is what I wish to be doing here, rejoicing in the lament. Woe is poetry, for all it does is enchant.

Thanks to the friends of the Dandy Line Poetry for coming out to celebrate the human predicament this year. If the lines we turn to in refuge now are not now-enough, then let’s be old among them.