No Art: Poems

by Ben Lerner

This book brings together for the first time Ben Lerner's three acclaimed volumes of poetry, along with a handful of newer poems, to present a decade-long exploration of the relationship between form and meaning, between private experience and public expression. No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

Genres: Poetry

261 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 3, 2016

About the author

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. The Lichtenberg Figures appeared in a German translation in 2010, for which it received the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie" in 2011, making Lerner the first American to receive this honor.

Born and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. At Brown University he earned a B.A. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the "25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)". Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.

Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. It won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for "first fiction" and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize.

In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.

Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.

Reviews

[Simon Sweetman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fearsome, amazing talent. Dazzling.

[Mugren Ohaly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Everyone has their own definition of poetry. To me, this isn't poetry.

It is a collection of snippets and scribbles. Also, none of the "poems" have a title, which means that some of the poems end up bleeding into one another.

[Pe · Rating 4 out of 5]

too dumb to understand half of this but what I got was good

v detached and jargon-y tho

[Loretta Riach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a slog for me but still, I think an inspiring approach to poetry, incisive and tidy. Really liked Twenty One Gun Salute For Ronald Reagan, and the writing from Marfa.

[Hannah Poppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fire this book gave me is unmatched, the amount of times I frantically ran all around my room late at night for a piece of paper to scribble my unhinged thoughts down on! Ben reminded me of the absolute joy I can get out of writing silly things that only really mean anything to me, to use big words in hilarious and deliciously pretentious ways. To feel Ben's fire in this book, the giggles he must have had, the sincere madness his brain went through writing not only whatever the hell he wanted but also the hard things, the damned things ,fragmented, hopelessly, recklessly, beautifully.

[ger · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a great deal of humour in the first set of poems and he does give incredible pleasure in the sheer pronunciation of the words he chooses.. I like all that. Later on, his use of forced change of perspective mid sentence and iteration was arresting and novel. Worked for me too.

The thing is it's all text and rules of poetry which I'm not familiar with and so must be lost on me. To use his own words " For the architecture was a long lecture lost on me," Those exact words sum up my entire experience. A pleasure to read and say out loud and a statement of my lack of discipline knowledge and my profound lack of interest of it.

I also prefer my poetry with more piss and vinegar In it. Useful in life and not just surface.

[Sevim Tezel Aydın · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ben Lerner’in şiirlerinden küçük bir seçki. Kitabın bir sayfasında şiirin orijinali, diğerinde ise çevirisi var. Çeviriler beni çok tatmin etmedi.

[Elliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every now and then I get all Anxiety-of-Influence and decide Ben Lerner is bad actually, but then I go back and read him and, no. He's a truly exceptional artist.

[Emirhan Aydın · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Bak şimdi de halın mahvoldu."

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Intention draws a bold, black line across an otherwise white field. / Speculation establishes gradations of darkness / where there are none, allowing the critic to posit narrative time.” Ben Lerner’s No Art brings together the three poetry collections he released prior to his latest, The Lights (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path), nestling them in between four poems featured in The Lights (‘Index of Themes’, ‘The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon Me Also’, ‘Contre-Jour’, and ‘No Art’). Formed of inventive sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures is full of self-reflexive turns (“I wish all difficult poems were profound. / Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound”; “To fear the activation of the white space of the page /// is to fear poetry”; “Poetry has yet to emerge”) and dark provocations (“I’m going to kill the president”; “The chicken is a little dry and/or you’ve ruined my life”). The poems in Angle of Yaw are just as self-conscious and arresting questions and images: “In your most intimate moments, my average reader, do you not rely on large cards held beyond the audience's sight? Have you ever applauded withour being prompted by an illuminated sign?” “If I want to want you, isn’t that enough? No. Way too much.” “Astronauts sleep strapped to their beds, like lunatics, like the lunatics they are.” Mean Free Path abstracts further: “There must be an easier way to do this / I mean without writing, without echoes / […] There must be a way to speak / At a canted angle of enabling failures / The little collisions, the path of decay”. As with The Lights, Lerner is shown to be a formally, linguistically daring poet.

[Chris Merola]

Self-conscious, winking, sporadically vulnerable - look at enough of Ben's fragmented, playful, ironic poems and the linear act of reading will break down.

At times I found myself reading lines 1, 3, 5, then 2, 4, and 6 of a given poem and having an equally valuable experience as having read it in order - much of the writing is clever mish-mashing of common images and sayings ("then hold each other like moments of silence", "hold me, says the microphone"), or meta statements on art, literature, and poetry, or dissonant combos of media/military jargon and quotidian life, or just straight up bars ("An expert described your son as incapable of some really important shit").

It's the rate at which Ben unmoors me from any expectations I happen to be developing that makes this special - he's prey gleefully shaking his scent from the nose of the hunter, he refuses to let his work speak clearly, to be one thing. The experience of reading this feels like gamified obfuscation - and I like that. I like being unable to wholly parse out what the hell these poems mean, to feel brief flashes of excitement when one of them comes together. The more poetry I read, the more I find that confusion vs mystery is just a matter of perspective.

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ben Lerner has more prestigious fellowships, critical acclaim and awards than I can count on my fingers, but to me this collection was mostly a set of profound, hard-hitting lines packed with affective and political punches, serving as punctuation within whole poems which I really didn't get – but that's on me, and my lack of context(ual comprehension).

Still, I enjoyed this collection. Insight came in bursts, trails, abstraction and metaphors, but it was illuminating on the whole, and I was never bored (at best, only slightly puzzled).

I particularly enjoyed '21 Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan' and 'Mean Free Path'.

[Raymond · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some good poems there, especially about Reagan's funeral, but alot of it felt like outtakes from an unfinished rap record. I like what I've read of his work, especially The Topeka School, but I would not suggest this as an entry point.

[Josie Barboriak · Rating 4 out of 5]

some of these are amazing. some the sentences are great individually and I can't figure out how they fit together into one poem. just a guy having so much fun with words! I wanna meet him!

[Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fertig wird man mit so einem Gedichtband ja nie. Im besten Fall wird das Buch zu einem Begleiter, der irgendwo auf einem Stapel rumliegt und einen manchmal zum Lesen verlockt. Mehr als zwei oder drei Gedichte schaffe ich nie, eher eins, und das verstehe ich oft auch nicht. Gedichte wie diese machen selten Sinn, sie sind einfach da und bringen einem zum Schmunzeln, oder zu einem Geistesblitz, oder man klatscht zeilenweise Beifall, oder man legt das Buch schnell wieder weg. Ein ziemlich eigenartiger Mitbewohner. Es passt ganz gut, dass Alexander Kluge das Vorwort schreibt. Sein Umgang mit den Gedichten - er klaubt sich eine Zeile und erzählt dann eine kluge Geschichte dazu - ist sehr hilfreich.

[İlker Şaguj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Türkçe'de böyle başka bir şiir yok, özgün bir şair Ben Lerner ve Donat Bayer'in özenli çevirisiyle okuması ayrıca keyifli.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

i was a fan, but i am a fan of most of what ben lerner produces, so maybe i was biased towards liking this. my favorite part compared the events of 9/11 with the experience of 9/11