Ben Lerner – the internationally acclaimed novelist, poet and Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College – hates poetry because each poem fails to live up to its ideal, reflecting Plato’s infamous claim that every existing poem is a lie.

Lerner begins his essay by quoting the first line of Marianne Moore’s Poetry which reads “I, too, dislike it.” I resonate deeply with Moore and Plato and Lerner, even though my own poetic dabblings kept me from falling into the unexpected pits of despair. I write for the same reason that artists indulge their craft: It anchors my imagination in states of serenity and bliss.

But Lerner’s thin book did something that no other exposé has done: It helped me , not to recognize what a good poem might actually be, but to identify what a bad poem actually is:  “Great poets confront the limits of actual poems,” says Lerner, even though they continually fail us. “If the poems are impenetrable, they are elitist … If they are cliched, they embarrass badly … and if they are weapons in a revolutionary struggle, they seem only to shoot blanks.”

This is Lerner’s defense of Poetry, even though it has been despised for thousands of years, and he concludes his book by asking haters to “strive to perfect their contempt” where it might “come to resemble love.”

And that is why I love this book so much.