What if we dislike or despise or hate poems because they are – every
single one of them – failures? The poet and critic Allen Grossman tells a
story (there are many versions of the story) that goes like this:
you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse to get
beyond the human, the historical, the finite. 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.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n12/ben-lerner/diary
