I suck poems

In this slim book, Lerner ranges widely, from Caedmon, the first known poet in English, through Plato, Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, and Claudia Rankine, among others, to assess how each has helped shape our expectations of poetry and how those expectations, along with the wider culture, have in turn shaped the work of poets. He is not afraid to look at terrible poets as well, including the nineteenth-century Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall, who was first introduced to Lerner at Brown by literary arts professors Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. Lerner takes on the complaint of contemporary critics that poems have become so inward-looking that the universalizing magic of Poetry—with that idealized upper-case P— has been lost in a dim haze of narcissism. The truth is, Lerner argues, that whatever universality poetry has expressed in the past is the universality of the white male. But some of the most interesting—and, yes, outward-looking—poems written today are by such poets as Claudia Rankine, who challenges the traditions of the form in order to use her own experiences as a black woman to reveal larger political and racial truths. The key to approaching poetry as a reader, Lerner believes, is to meet it with the kind of openness he felt as a child inside a dark movie theater waiting for the images to light the room from the screen.

Search deep within my walls, to the center of my soul. There you will find a fragile heart with a beautiful beat. She is a coastline, intricate and beautiful. In some places, the waves crash a little too hard; in others, the rocks are worn by experience and bad weather.

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