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The Lights: Poems
A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School.
The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Ben Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate―in their unpredictability, in their intensities―the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.
The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Ben Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate―in their unpredictability, in their intensities―the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2023
74 people are currently reading
1240 people want to read
About the author
Ben Lerner
71 books1,614 followersBen 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 90 reviews
October 24, 2023
Yeah, this is my shit
September 30, 2023
I’d read fiction and nonfiction from Lerner but had no idea of what to expect from his poetry. Almost every other poem is a prose piece, many of these being absurdist monologues that move via word association between topics seemingly chosen at random: psychoanalysis, birdsong, his brother’s colorblindness; proverbs, the Holocaust; art conservation, his partner’s upcoming C-section, an IRS Schedule C tax form, and so on.
The vocabulary and pronouncements can be a little pretentious. The conversational nature and randomness of the subjects contribute to the same autofiction feel you get from his novels. For instance, he probes parenting styles: his parents’ dilemma between understanding his fears and encouraging him in drama and sport; then his daughters’ playful adoption of his childhood nickname of Benner for him.
A few highlights: the enjambment in “Index of Themes”; the commentary on pandemic strictures and contrast between ancient poetry and modern technology in “The Stone.” I wouldn’t seek out more poetry by Lerner, but this was interesting to try.
Sample lines:
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
The vocabulary and pronouncements can be a little pretentious. The conversational nature and randomness of the subjects contribute to the same autofiction feel you get from his novels. For instance, he probes parenting styles: his parents’ dilemma between understanding his fears and encouraging him in drama and sport; then his daughters’ playful adoption of his childhood nickname of Benner for him.
A few highlights: the enjambment in “Index of Themes”; the commentary on pandemic strictures and contrast between ancient poetry and modern technology in “The Stone.” I wouldn’t seek out more poetry by Lerner, but this was interesting to try.
Sample lines:
“When you die in the patent office / there’s a pun on expiration”
“the goal is to be on both sides of the poem, / shuttling between the you and I. … Form / is always the answer to the riddle it poses”
“It’s raining now / it isn’t, or it’s raining in the near / future perfect when the poem is finished / or continuous, will have been completed”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
December 31, 2025
Gift from my dad ♥️ Lerner’s brain-power + ability to negotiate the thin boundaries between the imagined & the real make me believe his words. The recurrence of lights as the dead’s speech, aliens walking among us, weeping cherries, the ancient force of song…so compelling, his prose poems had me in a trance while still feeling graspable and true
July 31, 2023
READING VLOG
Major thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts:
What this feels like:
a nitro-cold-brew-too-strong in the chrysalis of a Glass song or a Hadid building. In existential wonder and awe of the world. To find beauty not just in the blue light of the day, but in the blue light of our phones. In part a pandemic book, it is in parts a ways of showing that Lerner is a trying father. That he loves his children. But the mind is not at rest. No. It is a phantom limb reaching out for still some kind of understanding in the empty beauty of a beautiful sky, an understanding that seeps through every pore and follicle that it becomes part of you in that building-blocks-of-nature-kind-of-way.
Lerner is urgent. And so is the rest of the world. In its wars and in the ways we drag these meat sacks across roads and streets to make it somewhere, to meet someone halfway, to empathize.
"𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘦𝘮, 𝘴𝘩𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘮𝘴 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘦, 𝘴𝘢𝘺 𝘸𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘴 𝘸𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥.."
Though I've only read Lerner in singles (in magazines and one-shot publications), I'm much a fan of his 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘓𝘪𝘣 𝘌𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘺 days, but these felt at times too rambling, a cold-brew-too-much. But it was in his frenetic jumps and itches that mimics all the anxious ways we exist.
It's through our troubling times that Lerner is also looking at himself as role as poet, trying to understand the tightrope. That it is not just a rope but a ways to a means to an end to get from one end to another. The shuffling between the you and I is the very trapeze and mental somersault to land in the present tense, to make use and find beauty that grounds us. That make the day happen. That brings us to another. To make clockwork.
Major thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts:
What this feels like:
a nitro-cold-brew-too-strong in the chrysalis of a Glass song or a Hadid building. In existential wonder and awe of the world. To find beauty not just in the blue light of the day, but in the blue light of our phones. In part a pandemic book, it is in parts a ways of showing that Lerner is a trying father. That he loves his children. But the mind is not at rest. No. It is a phantom limb reaching out for still some kind of understanding in the empty beauty of a beautiful sky, an understanding that seeps through every pore and follicle that it becomes part of you in that building-blocks-of-nature-kind-of-way.
Lerner is urgent. And so is the rest of the world. In its wars and in the ways we drag these meat sacks across roads and streets to make it somewhere, to meet someone halfway, to empathize.
"𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘢𝘭 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘦𝘮, 𝘴𝘩𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘐. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘮𝘴 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘦, 𝘴𝘢𝘺 𝘸𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵𝘦𝘥, 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘴 𝘸𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥.."
Though I've only read Lerner in singles (in magazines and one-shot publications), I'm much a fan of his 𝘔𝘢𝘥 𝘓𝘪𝘣 𝘌𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘺 days, but these felt at times too rambling, a cold-brew-too-much. But it was in his frenetic jumps and itches that mimics all the anxious ways we exist.
It's through our troubling times that Lerner is also looking at himself as role as poet, trying to understand the tightrope. That it is not just a rope but a ways to a means to an end to get from one end to another. The shuffling between the you and I is the very trapeze and mental somersault to land in the present tense, to make use and find beauty that grounds us. That make the day happen. That brings us to another. To make clockwork.
July 8, 2023
I think I'm just too dumb for Ben Lerner
January 24, 2024
This book of poetry is perfect for people who prefer longer poems, in a narrative style that pushes the boundaries of language by splicing together memories, images, feelings, and forms. Lerner is amazing at his craft. The way he weaves a specific image through a poem, recalled later to excavate a larger theme, is truly artful. I particularly enjoyed the way he brings his childhood self into this book, like in the second poem titled “The Rose” in the collection.
However, longer poems (especially prose poems) can often lose me, especially in a book like this where really complex ideas and feelings are explored. I wanted to feel included and invested, but sometimes it was a struggle with “The Lights,” especially with how choppy the experimental language/form can sometimes be.
Lerner definitely attempted to balance his philosophical wonderings (and big scholarly vocab) with everyday images and language. Was it successful? I think the answer varies by reader. For me, this book didn’t feel as accessible as it maybe could have, with the amount of abstraction and technical language.
Nonetheless, the urgent yet tender-hearted concept of the book is so beautiful, and there are so many poetic gems inside these pages, moments where my heart and mind gave a collective “wow.” “Contre-Jour” and “No Art” are my favorites. I really enjoyed pondering the role light can play in our lives. Definitely happy I read it overall!
However, longer poems (especially prose poems) can often lose me, especially in a book like this where really complex ideas and feelings are explored. I wanted to feel included and invested, but sometimes it was a struggle with “The Lights,” especially with how choppy the experimental language/form can sometimes be.
Lerner definitely attempted to balance his philosophical wonderings (and big scholarly vocab) with everyday images and language. Was it successful? I think the answer varies by reader. For me, this book didn’t feel as accessible as it maybe could have, with the amount of abstraction and technical language.
Nonetheless, the urgent yet tender-hearted concept of the book is so beautiful, and there are so many poetic gems inside these pages, moments where my heart and mind gave a collective “wow.” “Contre-Jour” and “No Art” are my favorites. I really enjoyed pondering the role light can play in our lives. Definitely happy I read it overall!
August 16, 2023
Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Strauss & Giroux for providing me an e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!
Ben Lerner, a prolific author of both poetry and prose, takes on the contemporary moment in a "formally ambitious" new work of prose-poetry.
I can't claim to be an expert on poetry. So, I'm going to talk about how this book made me feel. Reading The Lights felt like floating in the ocean on a warm day. It was deeply sensual--not in the erotic sense but in the senses sense. The language had beautiful repetition and made great use of multiple entendres that squeezed more meaning out of a few words than many authors can do with an entire paragraph. Something I noticed in The Topeka School (his beautiful 2019 Pulitzer Prize nominee, a 5-star read for me personally) is Lerner's compassionate authorial voice, and that was particularly apparent in this new work. It was generous, but still explored the darkness within himself and others. In terms of constructive comments, I agree with some other reviewers that the switch between more traditional free verse poetry and prose poetry was sometimes jarring, though it didn't completely take me out of the mood. He also used names of people in his life as if the reader knew them, which lent an air of familiarity but sometimes made me confused as to the person's relationship to him. Overall, this was a magical read that left me feeling pleasantly strange. 4 out of 5 songs.
Ben Lerner, a prolific author of both poetry and prose, takes on the contemporary moment in a "formally ambitious" new work of prose-poetry.
I can't claim to be an expert on poetry. So, I'm going to talk about how this book made me feel. Reading The Lights felt like floating in the ocean on a warm day. It was deeply sensual--not in the erotic sense but in the senses sense. The language had beautiful repetition and made great use of multiple entendres that squeezed more meaning out of a few words than many authors can do with an entire paragraph. Something I noticed in The Topeka School (his beautiful 2019 Pulitzer Prize nominee, a 5-star read for me personally) is Lerner's compassionate authorial voice, and that was particularly apparent in this new work. It was generous, but still explored the darkness within himself and others. In terms of constructive comments, I agree with some other reviewers that the switch between more traditional free verse poetry and prose poetry was sometimes jarring, though it didn't completely take me out of the mood. He also used names of people in his life as if the reader knew them, which lent an air of familiarity but sometimes made me confused as to the person's relationship to him. Overall, this was a magical read that left me feeling pleasantly strange. 4 out of 5 songs.
March 5, 2024
really moving. felt like the best of his novels, amplified w the possibilities and ambiguity of poetry. his novels are very poetic in their heady exploration of associations between everyday life + Big Ideas but ultimately still tied to character/narrator, even in the topeka school which explored diff perspectives. i liked that there were characters in this book but also it could be very ambiguous who was speaking, and ultimately it didn't matter, which feels like it gets around critiques of his novels for being self centered or whatever. i guess this book is interested in art traditions (from classical paintings to whitman) and making those weird and material (like literally paint, or in the like historical materialism, grounded in (economic??) reality sense - i loved the poem with the gold bars moving underground) while also hoping that art can be transcendent, collective, corporate with all the baggage of that last word. most of all, it's also about being a dad. there's one poem in particular that i felt gestured toward how biological family is a fucked up construct or whatever (prob more, but i'm too lazy to even find the one) so by being a dad, i mean being a dad to your literal daughters, but also being connected to others, biologically related or not. the penultimate poem "the son" is so moving - looking at it just now i realized "take the bridges" is a reference to both whitman and actions. what a nice dad
June 21, 2025
I've read all three of Lerner's novels now, and also had this feeling there, but I think it is so evident here just how seamlessly Lerner's work enters into the world. When I read books I love, I tend to feel still inside the book's world once I've finished it. I've felt that way with House of Leaves, with This Blinding Absence of Light, with In the Dream House, all some of my favorites. But with Lerner, I feel like I'm not stuck inside his world, but that I'm already living in it. I feel like I carry his work with me, as it reframes the world not in warping it but in showing me what was already there. His work begets action. And I'm meeting him on Thursday!!!!!!
January 22, 2024
Still not sure that dense, immersive prose works alongside short verse... but maybe that's the point. Both hold their merits, and I want to read through this again to better recognize and associate with the patterns (political, cultural, personal). Probably not for everyone, but it held my attention with its earnestness.
January 4, 2024
SO MANY EXCELLENT poets hit a vein of prosperity with books of prose and the next thing we know, they are no longer publishing much poetry: Patricia Lockwood, Eula Biss, Lucy Ives, Anne Boyer. I am glad to see this is not the case (yet) for Ben Lerner. He has published three novels to considerable acclaim, and his essays and stories show up in the New Yorker and Harpers, yet here he gives us a generous (100+ pages) volume of new poems. You go, Mr. Lerner.
Really good new poems, too. Lerner likes to stretch out, and the longer poems tend to be the stronger ones--"The Lights," "The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also," "Rotation," and my particular favorite, "Untitled (Triptych)," in which we wander through the Met with Lerner as he awaits test results (as to whether is wife is pregnant, I think), making one dazzling unexpected connection after another.
That Lerner's success in prose has potentially enlarged the audience for his poetry may have prompted the thoughts about connection and accessibility that occur in the volume's closing poems ("The Rose, "The Son," "No Art") and may even account for the recurring invocations of Whitman, who certainly sought connection and at least occasionally tried to be accessible. The volume's real secret sharer is a different New York poet, though--Ashbery.
The whoops-what-happened jumps in syntax, the juxtaposition of precise technical vocabulary with the throwaway phrase of the week, the oblique strategies of the prose poems--none of this comes from Whitman, no, nor from Brooklyn's other laureate Hart Crane, but from good old J.A. And I for one am thankful. You go, Mr. Lerner--you go.
Really good new poems, too. Lerner likes to stretch out, and the longer poems tend to be the stronger ones--"The Lights," "The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also," "Rotation," and my particular favorite, "Untitled (Triptych)," in which we wander through the Met with Lerner as he awaits test results (as to whether is wife is pregnant, I think), making one dazzling unexpected connection after another.
That Lerner's success in prose has potentially enlarged the audience for his poetry may have prompted the thoughts about connection and accessibility that occur in the volume's closing poems ("The Rose, "The Son," "No Art") and may even account for the recurring invocations of Whitman, who certainly sought connection and at least occasionally tried to be accessible. The volume's real secret sharer is a different New York poet, though--Ashbery.
The whoops-what-happened jumps in syntax, the juxtaposition of precise technical vocabulary with the throwaway phrase of the week, the oblique strategies of the prose poems--none of this comes from Whitman, no, nor from Brooklyn's other laureate Hart Crane, but from good old J.A. And I for one am thankful. You go, Mr. Lerner--you go.
December 28, 2023
I'd like to get to 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station one day (only read Topeka School) but decided to dabble in this. Some fantastic writing here but found myself less enchanted by the longer form poetry - would almost rather they be fleshed out into short stories? - but such is the challenge, I guess.
July 30, 2024
Lerner is obviously deft with language, and there's a lot of good ideas in here, but I find the politics of guilt at the thematic core of the work to be uninteresting, even grating. There's too much superego here—there's really no need to apoligize for being an artist.
November 3, 2024
kniha roku
November 18, 2025
This is a tougghhh one!
I say this because this little book of poetry was equal parts intriguing and confusing/boring.
The confusion/boring bits:
I felt like I had to put my brain into maximum overdrive just to sort of follow what he was saying in any given poem. I wasn't sure if this was because I'm dumb and Ben Lerner is just a smartypants, or if it's due to my ever-waning inability to engage with material that I find to any degree pretentious. The confusing aspect is that I'm not convinced that was Lerner's intent -- the pretension, I mean. Despite the overwhelming repository of the available vernacular within this man's brain, he still (somehow) came across as just some dude. I don't know. This was a head-scratcher for me. The unfortunate outcome of this in my case is that i couldn't really get into the poems. I'm sorry, but I just don't want to spend 30 minutes with each or your poems 😬
The intriguing bits:
There is a ton of creativity in this book. I found many of the ideas, metaphors/similes, connections of themes, etc to be fascinating. I also found the back-and-forth from free form to prose to have a kind of effect on me. The style stood out to me as well. Lerner is a master of looping a concept or word back later in the poem and twisting its meaning in some way or recontextualizing it so as to illuminate a concept or word's first usage in contrast to its now new usage. I don't know how to better explain that. I guess it felt like the poem was spinning a circle within itself, but every circle was a different color, or a different size or something. Anyway... certain elements in these poems really did stand out to me, so much so that I think it will be worth revisiting sometime for inspiration in my writing.
Due to my mixed feelings about this, I am leaving a mixed review and a mixed rating. It was fine overall haha
I say this because this little book of poetry was equal parts intriguing and confusing/boring.
The confusion/boring bits:
I felt like I had to put my brain into maximum overdrive just to sort of follow what he was saying in any given poem. I wasn't sure if this was because I'm dumb and Ben Lerner is just a smartypants, or if it's due to my ever-waning inability to engage with material that I find to any degree pretentious. The confusing aspect is that I'm not convinced that was Lerner's intent -- the pretension, I mean. Despite the overwhelming repository of the available vernacular within this man's brain, he still (somehow) came across as just some dude. I don't know. This was a head-scratcher for me. The unfortunate outcome of this in my case is that i couldn't really get into the poems. I'm sorry, but I just don't want to spend 30 minutes with each or your poems 😬
The intriguing bits:
There is a ton of creativity in this book. I found many of the ideas, metaphors/similes, connections of themes, etc to be fascinating. I also found the back-and-forth from free form to prose to have a kind of effect on me. The style stood out to me as well. Lerner is a master of looping a concept or word back later in the poem and twisting its meaning in some way or recontextualizing it so as to illuminate a concept or word's first usage in contrast to its now new usage. I don't know how to better explain that. I guess it felt like the poem was spinning a circle within itself, but every circle was a different color, or a different size or something. Anyway... certain elements in these poems really did stand out to me, so much so that I think it will be worth revisiting sometime for inspiration in my writing.
Due to my mixed feelings about this, I am leaving a mixed review and a mixed rating. It was fine overall haha
November 18, 2023
I'm not a big poetry guy but I loved this collection; it was unexpected, entrancing, and inspiring. I feel like it was written just for me (which is great for me, of course, but caveat emptor) and it spoke to me personally in this wonderful way -- while also challenging me and keeping me off balance. I found it more than erudite enough to feel enriching while still remaining accessible and pleasurable. I have foolishly ignored all the acclaimed Ben Lerner books of the past few years and now have to go read everything.
March 7, 2024
Fuck it, 5 stars. Lerner at it again, doing the same thing he usually does, only getting a little bit better at it each time. I’ve often wondered why repetition is so satisfying in music and so annoying in writing, or at least, how does one pull off repetition in writing? Well, here is an answer. These poems are all linked somehow, although it is unclear how, like there was a certain number of bolts of cloth that he cut many garments from but you can identify the cloth being similarly sourced: the language he uses is the cloth in this case. I really like the prose poems in this collection. Favorites include: “The Lights,” “Auto-Tune,” “The Rose,” “The Grove,” “The Theory,” and “The Chorus.”
Theory: this book is set in Centaur (99% sure) and so is Michael Palmer’s book ‘Codes Appearing,’ which this writing is reminiscent of. Coincidence?
Theory: this book is set in Centaur (99% sure) and so is Michael Palmer’s book ‘Codes Appearing,’ which this writing is reminiscent of. Coincidence?
June 28, 2024
I read Lerner's poetry a long time ago as an undergrad, didn't like it, too academic and soulless for me. Then I read all his novels, where he has space to develop characters and some sympathy for himself, and really enjoyed them. The Lights strikes a nice balance with the prose poems, some of which greatly resemble events in his novels, and is in general more enjoyable and less tedious than his early poetry. I like the use of recurring themes (light, language, stolen phrases, stone fruit, etc.), it's an intentional collection not a set of unrelated poems.
January 26, 2025
"I had her at the age that my father was / replaced by a man who resembled him / is a cliché, the words / the faces interchangeable / of the father. But soon they began to blur / together in my mind / because the thyme my girls / demanded spread, as a difference tends / and sameness."
lots to be said about artistic endeavors and family and sickness and health and simply surviving in here. all of these poems are completely connected and i love that i don't really know how because that's how life feels a lot of the time.
lots to be said about artistic endeavors and family and sickness and health and simply surviving in here. all of these poems are completely connected and i love that i don't really know how because that's how life feels a lot of the time.
March 27, 2024
"I have almost none of the characteristics of the well-made man Walt Whitman enumerates
All I have is a kind of supersensitivity to harbor lights and skylines, which come at me hard"
I'm a big fan of 10:04, one of Ben Lerner's fiction exercises, and I found many lines of poetry within this collection that hit me with the same force that much of 10:04's prose did — "Index of Themes", "Untitled (Triptych)", "The Media", and "The Chorus" were favorites. But I couldn't get behind the long form prose poems as a rule, especially since there were so many of them. I couldn't reconcile the dreamlike free association with palpable meaning, with two exceptions: "The Media", which had the internal structure of a phone call to give it some support and add in some reason to the rambliness, and "The Chorus", where I felt the themes of childlike worry and obsession were strong enough to justify the form. One thing I always appreciate about Ben Lerner, though, is that even when I disagree with something he says or seems to say — even when I detect pretentiousness in his approach or his argument — I never like the writing any less. He's a good vehicle for opening myself up to other perspectives.
All I have is a kind of supersensitivity to harbor lights and skylines, which come at me hard"
I'm a big fan of 10:04, one of Ben Lerner's fiction exercises, and I found many lines of poetry within this collection that hit me with the same force that much of 10:04's prose did — "Index of Themes", "Untitled (Triptych)", "The Media", and "The Chorus" were favorites. But I couldn't get behind the long form prose poems as a rule, especially since there were so many of them. I couldn't reconcile the dreamlike free association with palpable meaning, with two exceptions: "The Media", which had the internal structure of a phone call to give it some support and add in some reason to the rambliness, and "The Chorus", where I felt the themes of childlike worry and obsession were strong enough to justify the form. One thing I always appreciate about Ben Lerner, though, is that even when I disagree with something he says or seems to say — even when I detect pretentiousness in his approach or his argument — I never like the writing any less. He's a good vehicle for opening myself up to other perspectives.
October 28, 2025
Never heard of this guy but I saw it at the thrift store I work at and thought it looked cool. It was decent, not great but not bad at all. I appreciated the longer form poems in here. It’s definitely more interesting than reading adolescent diary entries about how hard it is to be young by people like RH Sin or Amanda Lovelace. Stand out in this collection was the poem Roses. It slapped it was unique, eloquent, and abstract enough to make me wonder how I was supposed to read it. Which I like. All in all, pretty decent.
December 29, 2023
Poems and prose poems. Continuity with his autofiction, but more intimate somehow. As a reader I felt confided in and implicated.
Read
August 27, 2025when ben lerner nails it, he motherfucking nails it. at other times, he makes me roll my eyes so incredibly hard. this one was a robust mix of both genius musings and pretentious whatevers
December 29, 2023
2023 was the year I fell in love with Ben Lerner.
I started the year reading his debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station
In the book, a young American named Adam Gordon lands a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Supposedly, he is working on composing "a long and research-driven poem, whatever that might mean" about the Spanish civil war. Actually, he has talked his way into the fellowship and is now halfheartedly trying to learn Spanish by reading the Quixote.
He is a self-described poseur, who —unlike that other famous fake Anna Delvey— is the product of an expensive education and great privilege back home in Kansas.
Antagonistic toward other wanna-be intellectual American expats in Madrid, he makes fun of the way they teach English to the children of the wealthy and how they speak Spanish with an affected peninsular lisp. And yet, he is himself doing what is a most American expat-lit thing to do: running off to Europe where he spends his days engaged in obsessive and performative self-branding and self-involved navel-gazing.
He says:
"I wondered … if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege."
His “experience of his experience” is the pulsing anxiety of the novel. The book opens in the Prado Museum, where Adam goes each morning to stand in front of a certain painting. Perhaps this is an homage to Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, but instead of a Tintoretto, the narrator Adam spends his mornings in front of Van der Weyden’s Descent. One morning, however, an interloper is standing in front of the picture. His picture. Growing irritated, Adam watches as this stranger breaks down in tears.
“Could the man be having a profound experience of art?” the protagonist wonders. And more importantly, “Was he capable of such a profound experience of art?”
This was my first Ben Lerner novel. I picked it up after seeing it on a list of books with translator protagonists.
Of course, Lerner’s protagonist is more of a pretend translator—again a poseur. he is not even very proficient at the language. But this is partly what makes the book so enjoyable. The novel has wonderful depictions of what it feels like to be a beginner in a language outside a classroom situation where a person does need to do a lot of pretending:
"She paused for a long moment and then began to speak: something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn't tell … I formed several stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand them than that I understood in chords."
Immersed in a different linguistic universe, if you stopped interactions with people every time you grew confused, you would never find people to communicate with since it would be constant communication breakdowns—so Lerner’s depictions of the way stories that flow through your mind when people are speaking above your abilities is original and fun to read.
In addition to showing what it can feel like to be a beginning language student learning by immersion, there was something else about Lerner’s novel that grabbed my attention— and this is what protagonist Adam Gordon refers to as his “so-called translations.”
I opened the Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto onto a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I first associated with it and/ or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the Spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (“Under the arc of the sky” became “Under the arc of the cielo,” which became “Under the arc of the cello”). I then braided fragments of the prose I kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (“Under the arc of the cello / I open the Lorca at random,” and so on).”
I loved this so much.
I recently read an interesting article in Lithub by Stephen Marche, “Winning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose,” about the loss of voice in American fiction. The argument goes that instead of “voice,” we now have “the pose.”
"The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure and its foremost subject is social anxiety and self-presentation. One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking.
Lerner is one of the three authors mentioned who exemplify this intensely self-orienting and sedated style of first-person storytelling—the other two were Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh."
In the case of this novel, the sedated voice makes sense since the protagonist was doing serious self-medicating.
++
In his new poetry collection, the same social anxiety and self-presentation seen in his debut novel Atocha Station was front and center as subject. The self as subject and the inner-workings of the mind. There is a wonderful stream-of-consciousness with fabulous juxtaposed images in both the lyric and prose poems.
From review in New York Times by Paris Review Poetry Editor Srikanth Reddy
The speaker of Lerner’s poems often sounds like a successful author living in New York today: He complains of poor reception in the medieval wing at the Met, worries that his therapist will take note of an unwanted erection and, on a writer’s retreat in Marfa, quips: “what I need/is a residency within the residency, then/I could return refreshed to this one.” Bemused, affable and almost ecstatically self-conscious, this literary persona is given to phrases like “among the most beautiful phrases/in” or “there is nothing more beautiful than” even as he marvels: “How pretentious/to be alive now.”
Oh that virgule — after the Latin word for twig, virgula—or Virgil.
I love the prose poem, The Grove, which first appeared in Harpers— love the way it braids in the birds into his session with his therapist. The two sitting in a park, he struggles to respond to her suggestion about starting a gratitude journal… and yet notices those singing birds.
We were sitting on a bench in Green-Wood Cemetery, sitting as far away from each other as possible. It was late April and I could just pick out the song of nearby warblers from the distant, constant sirens. But it’s important you make the list by hand, there’s something crucial about the physical contact with the paper, the embodied act of mark-making, she explained. And each sentence must start the same way—“I’m grateful for”—the repetition helps form a groove in your consciousness so that, when idle, your mind will gravitate toward an awareness of its blessings instead of the darker ruminations you’re describing. Males sing a slow, soft trill. It lasts about three seconds.
I thought about this for days…. I also loved this so much that I tried my own version—and failed, of course.
From Kamran Javadizadeh’s review in the New Yorker about the first lyric poem in the book:
“Index of Themes”:
Poems about night
and related poems. Paintings
about night,
sleep, death, and
the stars.
The trick feels borrowed from autofiction, the genre in which Lerner’s novels are often categorized: “The Lights” thematizes its own making, generates itself by describing the thing it will have become. “Do you remember me / from the world?” the poem goes on to ask, before concluding:
It was important to part
yesterday
in a serial work about lights
so that distance could enter the voice
and address you
tonight.
Poems about you, prose
poems.
Intimacy, in this view, requires not only some initial state of contact but also a subsequent separation. For a poem to address someone—for it to be experienced—that person must be truly other.
More from Kamran Javadizadeh’s review
The flickering between worlds—call it reënchantment—that Lerner seeks is, after all, not merely a game. We might want very badly to be in the presence of people who are gone. We might want to share a world with our parents or children. We might, for any number of reasons, want that world to be unlike this one. In one part of the astonishing title poem from “The Lights,” Lerner walks through Paris with a friend who is mourning his mother. Throughout the poem flutter phrases that seem to have been occasioned by sightings of U.F.O.s. Here the central metaphor of the book, the potential for contact between worlds, approaches the literal—and prompts a new worry in his friend:
if they do make contact and the dead missed it
my mom missed it, he said, a break
in all human understanding she wasn’t here for and I
was like: One, they might have ways
of ministering to the dead and two
and two, there are deep resources in the culture for trying to
understand.
If this consolation works, it does so by suspending our understanding of what counts as knowledge. What if the fiction, in other words, was not the fantasy of contact, the terror felt by the boy who thought the dome might fall, but instead the naïve belief that worlds could be held apart? That is the extravagant claim, made without apology or embarrassment, in the final section of the poem: “that they are here / among us, that they love us / that we invited them / in without our knowledge / into our knowledge.” This is a speculative mode—and an exceedingly lovely one—that reads “the lights” not as evidence of what’s out there but of what’s already here, beside us:
that they have arts
that they are known to our pets
that if you put a pet down
they are beside it without judgment
that they smell vaguely of burning paper
that to meet them would be to remember meeting them
as children, that they are
children, that the work of children is
in us, that they are part of our sexual life
that they are reading this
This poet, who has dreamed himself awake, need not choose between the safety of the familiar and the thrill of the alien. To live in the world, his poem tells us, is already to know more than we can say. ♦
New Yorker Review
I started the year reading his debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station
In the book, a young American named Adam Gordon lands a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Supposedly, he is working on composing "a long and research-driven poem, whatever that might mean" about the Spanish civil war. Actually, he has talked his way into the fellowship and is now halfheartedly trying to learn Spanish by reading the Quixote.
He is a self-described poseur, who —unlike that other famous fake Anna Delvey— is the product of an expensive education and great privilege back home in Kansas.
Antagonistic toward other wanna-be intellectual American expats in Madrid, he makes fun of the way they teach English to the children of the wealthy and how they speak Spanish with an affected peninsular lisp. And yet, he is himself doing what is a most American expat-lit thing to do: running off to Europe where he spends his days engaged in obsessive and performative self-branding and self-involved navel-gazing.
He says:
"I wondered … if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege."
His “experience of his experience” is the pulsing anxiety of the novel. The book opens in the Prado Museum, where Adam goes each morning to stand in front of a certain painting. Perhaps this is an homage to Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, but instead of a Tintoretto, the narrator Adam spends his mornings in front of Van der Weyden’s Descent. One morning, however, an interloper is standing in front of the picture. His picture. Growing irritated, Adam watches as this stranger breaks down in tears.
“Could the man be having a profound experience of art?” the protagonist wonders. And more importantly, “Was he capable of such a profound experience of art?”
This was my first Ben Lerner novel. I picked it up after seeing it on a list of books with translator protagonists.
Of course, Lerner’s protagonist is more of a pretend translator—again a poseur. he is not even very proficient at the language. But this is partly what makes the book so enjoyable. The novel has wonderful depictions of what it feels like to be a beginner in a language outside a classroom situation where a person does need to do a lot of pretending:
"She paused for a long moment and then began to speak: something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn't tell … I formed several stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand them than that I understood in chords."
Immersed in a different linguistic universe, if you stopped interactions with people every time you grew confused, you would never find people to communicate with since it would be constant communication breakdowns—so Lerner’s depictions of the way stories that flow through your mind when people are speaking above your abilities is original and fun to read.
In addition to showing what it can feel like to be a beginning language student learning by immersion, there was something else about Lerner’s novel that grabbed my attention— and this is what protagonist Adam Gordon refers to as his “so-called translations.”
I opened the Lorca more or less at random, transcribed the English recto onto a page of my first notebook, and began to make changes, replacing a word with whatever word I first associated with it and/ or scrambling the order of the lines, and then I made whatever changes these changes suggested to me. Or I looked up the Spanish word for the English word I wanted to replace, and then replaced that word with an English word that approximated its sound (“Under the arc of the sky” became “Under the arc of the cielo,” which became “Under the arc of the cello”). I then braided fragments of the prose I kept in my second notebook with the translations I had thus produced (“Under the arc of the cello / I open the Lorca at random,” and so on).”
I loved this so much.
I recently read an interesting article in Lithub by Stephen Marche, “Winning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose,” about the loss of voice in American fiction. The argument goes that instead of “voice,” we now have “the pose.”
"The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure and its foremost subject is social anxiety and self-presentation. One never loses oneself in the writing. Rather, one admires, at a slight remove, the precision of the undertaking.
Lerner is one of the three authors mentioned who exemplify this intensely self-orienting and sedated style of first-person storytelling—the other two were Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh."
In the case of this novel, the sedated voice makes sense since the protagonist was doing serious self-medicating.
++
In his new poetry collection, the same social anxiety and self-presentation seen in his debut novel Atocha Station was front and center as subject. The self as subject and the inner-workings of the mind. There is a wonderful stream-of-consciousness with fabulous juxtaposed images in both the lyric and prose poems.
From review in New York Times by Paris Review Poetry Editor Srikanth Reddy
The speaker of Lerner’s poems often sounds like a successful author living in New York today: He complains of poor reception in the medieval wing at the Met, worries that his therapist will take note of an unwanted erection and, on a writer’s retreat in Marfa, quips: “what I need/is a residency within the residency, then/I could return refreshed to this one.” Bemused, affable and almost ecstatically self-conscious, this literary persona is given to phrases like “among the most beautiful phrases/in” or “there is nothing more beautiful than” even as he marvels: “How pretentious/to be alive now.”
Oh that virgule — after the Latin word for twig, virgula—or Virgil.
I love the prose poem, The Grove, which first appeared in Harpers— love the way it braids in the birds into his session with his therapist. The two sitting in a park, he struggles to respond to her suggestion about starting a gratitude journal… and yet notices those singing birds.
We were sitting on a bench in Green-Wood Cemetery, sitting as far away from each other as possible. It was late April and I could just pick out the song of nearby warblers from the distant, constant sirens. But it’s important you make the list by hand, there’s something crucial about the physical contact with the paper, the embodied act of mark-making, she explained. And each sentence must start the same way—“I’m grateful for”—the repetition helps form a groove in your consciousness so that, when idle, your mind will gravitate toward an awareness of its blessings instead of the darker ruminations you’re describing. Males sing a slow, soft trill. It lasts about three seconds.
I thought about this for days…. I also loved this so much that I tried my own version—and failed, of course.
From Kamran Javadizadeh’s review in the New Yorker about the first lyric poem in the book:
“Index of Themes”:
Poems about night
and related poems. Paintings
about night,
sleep, death, and
the stars.
The trick feels borrowed from autofiction, the genre in which Lerner’s novels are often categorized: “The Lights” thematizes its own making, generates itself by describing the thing it will have become. “Do you remember me / from the world?” the poem goes on to ask, before concluding:
It was important to part
yesterday
in a serial work about lights
so that distance could enter the voice
and address you
tonight.
Poems about you, prose
poems.
Intimacy, in this view, requires not only some initial state of contact but also a subsequent separation. For a poem to address someone—for it to be experienced—that person must be truly other.
More from Kamran Javadizadeh’s review
The flickering between worlds—call it reënchantment—that Lerner seeks is, after all, not merely a game. We might want very badly to be in the presence of people who are gone. We might want to share a world with our parents or children. We might, for any number of reasons, want that world to be unlike this one. In one part of the astonishing title poem from “The Lights,” Lerner walks through Paris with a friend who is mourning his mother. Throughout the poem flutter phrases that seem to have been occasioned by sightings of U.F.O.s. Here the central metaphor of the book, the potential for contact between worlds, approaches the literal—and prompts a new worry in his friend:
if they do make contact and the dead missed it
my mom missed it, he said, a break
in all human understanding she wasn’t here for and I
was like: One, they might have ways
of ministering to the dead and two
and two, there are deep resources in the culture for trying to
understand.
If this consolation works, it does so by suspending our understanding of what counts as knowledge. What if the fiction, in other words, was not the fantasy of contact, the terror felt by the boy who thought the dome might fall, but instead the naïve belief that worlds could be held apart? That is the extravagant claim, made without apology or embarrassment, in the final section of the poem: “that they are here / among us, that they love us / that we invited them / in without our knowledge / into our knowledge.” This is a speculative mode—and an exceedingly lovely one—that reads “the lights” not as evidence of what’s out there but of what’s already here, beside us:
that they have arts
that they are known to our pets
that if you put a pet down
they are beside it without judgment
that they smell vaguely of burning paper
that to meet them would be to remember meeting them
as children, that they are
children, that the work of children is
in us, that they are part of our sexual life
that they are reading this
This poet, who has dreamed himself awake, need not choose between the safety of the familiar and the thrill of the alien. To live in the world, his poem tells us, is already to know more than we can say. ♦
New Yorker Review
January 15, 2025
Heir to John Ashbery, but a voice all his own. Absolutely stunning and vital work.
April 12, 2024
Ben Lerner and his unrelenting need to describe things as “vaguely erotic”. really good, verbose as fuck
Read
October 27, 2025você já deve ter sentido que há um espírito em ação no mundo, ou havia, e que torná-lo visível é a tarefa do artista.
September 15, 2023
A decade ago, I read Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. I felt that it fundamentally changed the way I thought of a novel. I have read every book he has published since, and I feel as if that initial sense of surprise, of newness, has narrowed into a claustrophobic series of themes that Lerner draws from. While many of these poems were quite good, like the Challenger explosion, I did not feel it achieved escape velocity from the themes he has treaded often.
Speaking of the Challenger explosion, here’s how my latest round of Ben Lerner Bingo went: he mentioned Hurricane Sandy again but omitted the spacecraft disaster that is nearly ubiquitous in his work. He did not use the phrase “unseasonably warm weather”, but wrote poetry about poetry about poetry. The Brooklyn bridge appeared. He visited the museum many times, but it is impossible to say whether he took psychedelics or not this time. Medical procedures were featured, and scientific terminology was misapplied. Historically he has pretended he was cool in high school - this time he revealed how uncool he was before high school. I do not recall seeing the name John Ashbery this time, but I might be mistaken. I think he mentioned Whitman three times. The failure of language is the free space. This is a real list I created before reading The Topeka School, so I find it interesting to consult, if a bit cynical.
But let’s dive into the poems themselves, because again, they ARE good, I think. The Light I found particularly enjoyable, as well as the Triptych poem. I had already read Gold Custody and wasn’t wholly enthusiastic about his long poems in that book - I found them exhausting. Breaking these up with shorter, structured poems - which I found more exciting, reduced this fatigue.
Lerner’s poetry is hyper-focused and vigilant in its attempts to measure itself against the world it is set in. There’s a powerful intellect guiding the poems, but often this can get in the way of enjoying them. It’s like the feeling of taking too much adderall recreationally. It almost feels non-human, alienated from itself and the world around it. The theme of light features prominently, but only as a scientific phenomenon and rarely about what the light touches. When he writes about climate catastrophe and Fukushima, it’s more of an intellectual position rather than one than relates to nature. There’s something deeply non-spiritual to his poems, which isn’t to say that poems should gesture towards that, but it seems absent of mysticism or feeling or humor.
At the end of Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, the philosopher speaks on his deathbed about how he wanted to create a philosophical work consisting entirely of jokes. But it would never work, since he was not funny. My biggest issue with Lerner now, having been overexposed, is that I feel he takes himself too seriously. Surely he’s aware of this. But I would love to see Ben Lerner attempt the most embarrassing gesture a human can offer the world: standup comedy. What would we learn about a Lerner trying a new lease on life? Is there a person behind the rigid intellectualizing? Another Lerner I would like to see is him taking off his glasses and trying to approach the world through sensation. Until then, I would unfortunately describe this collection of poems as standard faire, but this time with some meditations on the undesirable parts of COVID and some reflections on the duties, not the feelings, of fatherhood. No surprises.
I think New York is stifling Lerner’s writing, and that he would benefit from the distance. To look further inward, I think, requires looking more outward. I would have rated this more highly if this were my first encounter, and I will certainly continue to read his work. But I feel that he has established himself with a series of awards (which, gracefully for the bingo card he did not mention this time) that have allowed him to stop challenging himself and simply teach.
Speaking of the Challenger explosion, here’s how my latest round of Ben Lerner Bingo went: he mentioned Hurricane Sandy again but omitted the spacecraft disaster that is nearly ubiquitous in his work. He did not use the phrase “unseasonably warm weather”, but wrote poetry about poetry about poetry. The Brooklyn bridge appeared. He visited the museum many times, but it is impossible to say whether he took psychedelics or not this time. Medical procedures were featured, and scientific terminology was misapplied. Historically he has pretended he was cool in high school - this time he revealed how uncool he was before high school. I do not recall seeing the name John Ashbery this time, but I might be mistaken. I think he mentioned Whitman three times. The failure of language is the free space. This is a real list I created before reading The Topeka School, so I find it interesting to consult, if a bit cynical.
But let’s dive into the poems themselves, because again, they ARE good, I think. The Light I found particularly enjoyable, as well as the Triptych poem. I had already read Gold Custody and wasn’t wholly enthusiastic about his long poems in that book - I found them exhausting. Breaking these up with shorter, structured poems - which I found more exciting, reduced this fatigue.
Lerner’s poetry is hyper-focused and vigilant in its attempts to measure itself against the world it is set in. There’s a powerful intellect guiding the poems, but often this can get in the way of enjoying them. It’s like the feeling of taking too much adderall recreationally. It almost feels non-human, alienated from itself and the world around it. The theme of light features prominently, but only as a scientific phenomenon and rarely about what the light touches. When he writes about climate catastrophe and Fukushima, it’s more of an intellectual position rather than one than relates to nature. There’s something deeply non-spiritual to his poems, which isn’t to say that poems should gesture towards that, but it seems absent of mysticism or feeling or humor.
At the end of Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, the philosopher speaks on his deathbed about how he wanted to create a philosophical work consisting entirely of jokes. But it would never work, since he was not funny. My biggest issue with Lerner now, having been overexposed, is that I feel he takes himself too seriously. Surely he’s aware of this. But I would love to see Ben Lerner attempt the most embarrassing gesture a human can offer the world: standup comedy. What would we learn about a Lerner trying a new lease on life? Is there a person behind the rigid intellectualizing? Another Lerner I would like to see is him taking off his glasses and trying to approach the world through sensation. Until then, I would unfortunately describe this collection of poems as standard faire, but this time with some meditations on the undesirable parts of COVID and some reflections on the duties, not the feelings, of fatherhood. No surprises.
I think New York is stifling Lerner’s writing, and that he would benefit from the distance. To look further inward, I think, requires looking more outward. I would have rated this more highly if this were my first encounter, and I will certainly continue to read his work. But I feel that he has established himself with a series of awards (which, gracefully for the bingo card he did not mention this time) that have allowed him to stop challenging himself and simply teach.
December 31, 2023
4½. My dude can do no wrong. I'm not 100% sold on the situation of prose and poetry next to each other here; they don't necessarily function in the same way when leaked from Lerner's pen, and so some of the movements can be a little jarring. But in isolation, everything is so good that I don't really care. These prose pieces truly are astonishing.
But if you've ever seen a dendritic pattern in a frozen pond, lightning captured in hard plastic, or the delicate venation of an insect wing (the fourth vein of the wing is called the media), then you've probably felt that a spirit is at work in the world, or was, and that making it visible is the artist's task, or was.
But if you've ever seen a dendritic pattern in a frozen pond, lightning captured in hard plastic, or the delicate venation of an insect wing (the fourth vein of the wing is called the media), then you've probably felt that a spirit is at work in the world, or was, and that making it visible is the artist's task, or was.
January 3, 2024
First, let me say that I like Ben Lerner a lot. I like that his name sounds like "learn," which is a good thing to do, it's good to be open-minded, I genuinely believe this. His 2023 volume of poems, "The Lights," is a mixture of prose and poetry, if that's your thing. I know that prose can be poetry so don't give me shit about that, thanks.
These are poems about the intersections of politics, identity (specifically white identity), middle age, domestic life, and the embarrassment of being a successful poet in New. York. City. Coming from a writer like Ben Lerner, that means lots of apologizing. And working as he does in Brooklyn and hailing as he does from Kansas, Ben has lots of apologizing to do, because the only thing less compelling than a white guy from Brooklyn is a white guy who moved to Brooklyn from Kansas. Ben all but says, “I’m sorry that you’re reading this book. Don’t take it personally.”
But Ben has balls, I think. "The Lights" is definitely sort of like a kind of political book and Ben definitely raises some nerve-striking topics, even if he doesn’t squeeze the nerves very hard. Ben is direct but then evasive, which is how I would be if I were a successful white poet from Kansas living in Brooklyn. As Ben says at one point, "you campaign in conventional verse, but govern in avant-garde pieties..." This is a smart observation.
I liked the following lines and they seemed true to me:
"At least the white poets might be trying to escape, using
the interplanetary to scale
down difference under the sign of encounter and
late in a way of thinking, risk budgets
the steal, the debates about face
coverings, deepfakes, we would scan
the heavens, discover what we've projected there
among the drones, weather events, secret programs… "
Translation: if you’re gonna be a white poet, you gotta be a white poet. You just gotta do it.
In one poem, Ben regrets the phoniness of his father's Yiddishisms, which turned out to be fake ("they were just his private nonsense formulations"). His father’s invented proverbs from the Old Country had given Ben a connection to Ukrainian Judaism, to a glorious historical particularity, to a legit non-Reformed ethnicity, and to a post-Putin political relevance that lends you as a poet meaning and cache and material (oh, material) in this twenty-first century after the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ our Lord, amen.
Racial, ethnic, religious, and political identities aside: there’s some good stuff about middle age here, although I have no idea if it’s actually about middle age, really. That’s just how I read it because like Woody Allen in Annie Hall I just turned 40.
Of course, being middle-aged costs you cultural capital, even if it generally earns you more actual capital than a younger person has (or at least it used to). Which is to say, being middle-aged is great, it's relaxing, except that you know that you’re gestating all your future failures. And so Ben writes: “Maybe I have fallen/ behind, am falling, but/ I think of myself as having/ people, a small people/ in a failed state….” I like that.
Ben, who according to Wikipedia did his undergraduate studies in political theory, knows how to use political words well (“failed state”), which is fun. But the more specific his political musings get, the less effective the poetry becomes. The direct references to Sarah Palin and the January 6 Capitol insurrection don't add much to the poems, except to remind us that Sarah Palin existed once and the insurrection happened (unless you think it didn't, which is fine I guess).
I like Ben. But maybe I’m resentful of Ben because I am like him a rural Midwesterner who needs cities and who wants to be heard but doesn’t want Brooklyn or the Midwest or much of anything, really.
My favorite poem in the collection is called "Dilation,” which reads:
"My role in the slaughter doesn't disqualify the beauty I find in all
forms of sheltered flame, little votive polis,
that I eat while others starve does not refute the promise of
dimming houselights, weird fullness of the instant
before music... "
Apologetic but lovely.
Somewhere else (I don’t remember where, I didn’t write it down), Ben writes: “The ideal is visible through its antithesis like the small regions of warm/ blue underpainting and this is its late/ July realization, I'm sorry/ I know you were expecting more/ I'm not going to lecture the neighbor kid with the hydrant key/ about conserving water for posterity”
Again, Ben is apologizing. Apology is the mode for white liberals during and after the Trump presidency, just as lecture was their mode during the W. Bush presidency. The point, I suppose, is that Lerner isn't going to lecture us because he knows he's in no position to lecture, and at least he refuses to, which is the point here and I suppose I feel ambivalent about whether he should even be allowed to make that point, because everyone these days is so ambivalent (or the opposite of ambivalent, fiery with certainty) about who gets to make which point when and where and how and whatever. Ben concludes:
“I believe there is a form of apology both corporate and incantatory/ that could convene the future it begs for leniency,/ inherited dream you can put anything in: antithetical blue, predicate/ green”
Boom, I guess.
Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m genuinely sorry.
These are poems about the intersections of politics, identity (specifically white identity), middle age, domestic life, and the embarrassment of being a successful poet in New. York. City. Coming from a writer like Ben Lerner, that means lots of apologizing. And working as he does in Brooklyn and hailing as he does from Kansas, Ben has lots of apologizing to do, because the only thing less compelling than a white guy from Brooklyn is a white guy who moved to Brooklyn from Kansas. Ben all but says, “I’m sorry that you’re reading this book. Don’t take it personally.”
But Ben has balls, I think. "The Lights" is definitely sort of like a kind of political book and Ben definitely raises some nerve-striking topics, even if he doesn’t squeeze the nerves very hard. Ben is direct but then evasive, which is how I would be if I were a successful white poet from Kansas living in Brooklyn. As Ben says at one point, "you campaign in conventional verse, but govern in avant-garde pieties..." This is a smart observation.
I liked the following lines and they seemed true to me:
"At least the white poets might be trying to escape, using
the interplanetary to scale
down difference under the sign of encounter and
late in a way of thinking, risk budgets
the steal, the debates about face
coverings, deepfakes, we would scan
the heavens, discover what we've projected there
among the drones, weather events, secret programs… "
Translation: if you’re gonna be a white poet, you gotta be a white poet. You just gotta do it.
In one poem, Ben regrets the phoniness of his father's Yiddishisms, which turned out to be fake ("they were just his private nonsense formulations"). His father’s invented proverbs from the Old Country had given Ben a connection to Ukrainian Judaism, to a glorious historical particularity, to a legit non-Reformed ethnicity, and to a post-Putin political relevance that lends you as a poet meaning and cache and material (oh, material) in this twenty-first century after the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ our Lord, amen.
Racial, ethnic, religious, and political identities aside: there’s some good stuff about middle age here, although I have no idea if it’s actually about middle age, really. That’s just how I read it because like Woody Allen in Annie Hall I just turned 40.
Of course, being middle-aged costs you cultural capital, even if it generally earns you more actual capital than a younger person has (or at least it used to). Which is to say, being middle-aged is great, it's relaxing, except that you know that you’re gestating all your future failures. And so Ben writes: “Maybe I have fallen/ behind, am falling, but/ I think of myself as having/ people, a small people/ in a failed state….” I like that.
Ben, who according to Wikipedia did his undergraduate studies in political theory, knows how to use political words well (“failed state”), which is fun. But the more specific his political musings get, the less effective the poetry becomes. The direct references to Sarah Palin and the January 6 Capitol insurrection don't add much to the poems, except to remind us that Sarah Palin existed once and the insurrection happened (unless you think it didn't, which is fine I guess).
I like Ben. But maybe I’m resentful of Ben because I am like him a rural Midwesterner who needs cities and who wants to be heard but doesn’t want Brooklyn or the Midwest or much of anything, really.
My favorite poem in the collection is called "Dilation,” which reads:
"My role in the slaughter doesn't disqualify the beauty I find in all
forms of sheltered flame, little votive polis,
that I eat while others starve does not refute the promise of
dimming houselights, weird fullness of the instant
before music... "
Apologetic but lovely.
Somewhere else (I don’t remember where, I didn’t write it down), Ben writes: “The ideal is visible through its antithesis like the small regions of warm/ blue underpainting and this is its late/ July realization, I'm sorry/ I know you were expecting more/ I'm not going to lecture the neighbor kid with the hydrant key/ about conserving water for posterity”
Again, Ben is apologizing. Apology is the mode for white liberals during and after the Trump presidency, just as lecture was their mode during the W. Bush presidency. The point, I suppose, is that Lerner isn't going to lecture us because he knows he's in no position to lecture, and at least he refuses to, which is the point here and I suppose I feel ambivalent about whether he should even be allowed to make that point, because everyone these days is so ambivalent (or the opposite of ambivalent, fiery with certainty) about who gets to make which point when and where and how and whatever. Ben concludes:
“I believe there is a form of apology both corporate and incantatory/ that could convene the future it begs for leniency,/ inherited dream you can put anything in: antithetical blue, predicate/ green”
Boom, I guess.
Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m genuinely sorry.
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