The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance. No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organised my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."
Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of two internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Stationand 10:04. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path.Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn Colleg
Praise for The Hatred of Poetry: "Loathing rains down on poetry,
from people who have never read a page of it as well as from people
who have devoted their lives to reading and writing it . . . Mr.
Lerner skates across this frozen lake of pique with delicate skill
. . . The book achieves its goal in the most circuitous of ways: by
its (lovely) last sentence, Mr. Lerner might get you longing for
the satisfactions of the thing you're conditioned to loathe."
--Jeff Gordinier, New York Times "The Hatred of Poetry does a
brilliant job showing how poets 'strategically disappoint' our
assumptions about what the medium should do . . . Engaging . . .
Superbly written . . . [Lerner's] granular, giddy analysis of
Scottish bard William Topaz McGonagall, 'widely acclaimed as the
worst poet in history, ' fascinates as the negative expression of a
Parnassian ideal. It's also comedic gold."
--Katy Waldman, Slate "The Hatred of Poetry is one of the best
denunciations of the genre of lyric poetry I have read--and one of
the more intriguing defenses . . . it offers two for the price of
one, and this is its insight."
--Meghan O'Rourke, Bookforum "Lerner is a fine critic, with a lucid
style and quicksilver mind . . . But perhaps most remarkable is
just how entertaining, how witty and passionate and funny, The
Hatred of Poetry is . . . Reading it is less like overhearing a
professor's lecture than like listening to a professor entertain a
crowd of students over pints after class."
--Anthony Domestico, The Christian Science Monitor "Lerner is able
to trace not just the many roots and motivations of the collective
disdain for poetry (from Plato first defriending it, to the Italian
Futurists trying to explode it), but also its function as a crucial
fuel to push it forward."
--Michael Andor Brodeur, The Boston Globe "An important essay . . .
it doubles as a self-conscious ars poetica from a major American
writer."
--Jonathon Sturgeon, Flavorwire "With this book-length essay,
novelist and poet Lerner demonstrates that hating on poetry is
reserved not only for critics--it is also the national pastime of
poets."
--Jeremy Spencer, Library Journal "Mr. Lerner's essay becomes most
interesting when he ventures into more contemporary territory,
attacking with polemic zeal what he sees as confused critical
assaults on modern poetry . . . Mr. Lerner shows if we constantly
think poetry is an embarrassing failure, then that means that we
still, somewhere, have faith that it can succeed."
--The Economist "Perhaps The Hatred of Poetry is most compelling
when reflecting on how poetry shapes our childhoods. Adults are
eager, Lerner asserts, to return to that time of nursery rhymes,
when language was rich in possibility, when meaning was still
something to be discovered."
--Ben Purkert, The Rumpus "In lucid and luminous prose, poet and
novelist Lerner (10:04) explores why many people share his aversion
to poetry, which he attributes, paradoxically, to the deeply held
belief that poetry ought to have tremendous cultural value. . .
Lerner's brief, elegant treatise on what poetry might do and why
readers might need it is the perfect length for a commute or a
classroom assignment, clearing a space for both private
contemplation and lively discussion." --Publishers Weekly (starred
review) "Lerner argues with the tenacity and the wildness of the
vital writer and critic that he is. Each sentence of The Hatred of
Poetry vibrates with uncommon and graceful lucidity; each page
brings the deep pleasures of crisp thought, especially the kind
that remains devoted to complexity rather than to its
diminishment." --Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts Praise for
Ben Lerner: "Just how many singular reading experiences can one
novelist serve up? . . . Lerner obviously loves playing with
language, stretching sentences out, folding them in on themselves,
and making readers laugh out loud with the unexpected turns his
paragraphs take . . . Let Lerner's language sweep you off your
feet." --NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Maureen Corrigan "This
is only Lerner's second novel (and he is only thirty-five), and yet
to talk about mere 'promise, ' as is customary with the young,
seems insufficient. Even if he writes nothing else for the rest of
his life, this is a book that belongs to the future." --Giles
Harvey, The New York Review of Books "Reading Ben Lerner gives me
the tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I
encounter a writer of true originality. He is a courageous,
immensely intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a
delight to read." --Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot
"Ben Lerner is a novelist, poetry, and critic exploring the
contemporary relevance of art and the artist to modern culture with
humor, compassion, and intelligence . . . Lerner makes seamless
shifts between fiction and nonfiction, prose and lyric verse,
memoir and cultural criticism, conveying the way in which politics,
art, and economics intertwine with everyday experience."
--The MacArthur Foundation - 2016 Fellowship citation "One of the
most important American writers to emerge in the new century."
--Dan Katz, Textual Practice Praise for 10:04:
"Just how many singular reading experiences can one novelist serve
up? . . . 10:04 is a mind-blowing book; . . . Lerner obviously
loves playing with language, stretching sentences out, folding them
in on themselves, and making readers laugh out loud with the
unexpected turns his paragraphs take . . . 10:04 is a strange and
spectacular novel. Don't even worry about classifying it; just let
Lerner's language sweep you off your feet." --Maureen Corrigan,
NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross "Ingenious . . . Lerner packs so
much brilliance and humor into each episode. . . . This
brain-tickling book imbues real experiences with a feeling of
artistic possibility, leaving the observable world 'a little
changed, a little charged'." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"What is 10:04 by Ben Lerner? It is a book for people who like
great writing--"great," here, meaning frequently brilliant,
electrically hyper-conscious, extravagantly verbose, aggressively
sesquipedalian
throw-the-book-across-the-room-in-despair-that-you-will-never-invent-that-metaphor-because-he-just-did
writing . . . Nothing much happens, except for writing. But let me
tell you: The writing happens." --Derek Thompson, The Atlantic,
"Best Book I Read This Year" "[10:04] is a beautiful and original
novel . . . it signals a new direction in American fiction, perhaps
a fertile one." --Christian Lorentzen, Bookforum "[Lerner's]
concerns wrap around the modern moment with terrifying rightness .
. . 10:04 describes what it feels like to be alive." --John
Freeman, The Boston Globe
"Lerner is talented at noticing his mind's feints and twitches, and
thereby making the quotidian engaging . . . As I read 10:04 I began
to feel life itself take on the numinous significance, the
seriousness, or art." --Gabriel Roth, The Slate Book Review
"Lerner, with his keen poetic eye, manages to fill 10:04 with deft,
breathtaking observations and possibilities . . . If indeed, as
many postmodern critics tell us, there is no longer the prospect of
the certified masterpiece or the Great American Novel, Lerner has
created a meaningful substitute: a thinking text for our time."
--Christopher Bollen, Interview
"The boundaries between 10:04 and real life are porous, and it's
exciting. But none of it would matter if it weren't for Lerner's
excellent prose, which is galloping yet precise, his humorous,
complex scene-settings (including one of the best extended party
scenes I have ever read), his charming obsessions, and poingnant
world-view." --Halimah Marcus, Electric Literature "10:04, with its
slippery relationship between narrator and author, its beautifully
wrought sentences, and its intricate network of leitmotifs,
allusions, and recurring phrases--from a jar of instant coffee to
time travel, to the speech Ronald Reagan gave after the Challenger
exploded--demonstrates the pleasures and insights . . .
literariness can still afford." --Daniel Hack, Public Books "Lerner
writes rich, ruminative fiction . . . Like Whitman, and like W. G.
Seabld and Teju Cole, Ben Lerner is a courageous chronicler of
meditative ambulation, of the mind reflecting on its own vibrant
thinking processes before they congeal into inert thoughts."
--Steven G. Kellman, San Francisco Chronicle "Frequently brilliant
. . . Lerner writes with a poet's attention to language." --Hari
Kunzru, The New York Times Book Review
"Lerner's perceptiveness makes his writing not only engaging but
funny . . . Ben Lerner tells a story that moves and provokes."
--Maddie Crum, The Huffington Post "Reading Ben Lerner gives me the
tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I encounter a
writer of true originality. He is a courageous, immensely
intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a delight to
read. Anyone interested in serious contemporary literature should
read Ben Lerner, and 10:04 is the perfect place to start."
--Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot "Ben Lerner is a
brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something
truly new. 10:04 is a work of endless wit, pleasure, relevance, and
vitality." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
Praise for Leaving the Atocha Station
"A work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a
premonition, a comet from the future." --Geoff Dyer, The Observer
on Leaving the Atocha Station "Lerner's writing [is] beautiful,
funny, and revelatory." --Deb Olin Unferth, Bookforum on Leaving
the Atocha Station "[A] subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel
. . . There are wonderful sentences and jokes on almost every
page." --James Wood, The New Yorker on Leaving the Atocha Station
"One of the funniest (and truest) novels . . . by a writer of his
generation." --Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books on Leaving
the Atocha Station "Flip, hip, smart, and very funny . . . Reading
it was unlike any other novel-reading experience I've had for a
long time." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross on
Leaving the Atocha Station "Remarkable . . . a bildungsroman and
meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and
darkly comic voice." --Gary Sernovitz, The New York Times Book
Review on Leaving the Atocha Station "The overall narrative is
structured round [these] subtle, delicate moments: performances, as
Adam would call them, of intense experience. They're comic in that
obviously, Adam is an appalling poseur. But they're also beautiful
and touching and precise." --Jenny Turner, The Guardian on Leaving
the Atocha Station "Leaving the Atocha Station is a marvelous
novel, not least because of the magical way that it reverses the
postmodernist spell, transmuting a fraudulent figure into a fully
dimensional and compelling character." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street
Journal on Leaving the Atocha Station "An extraordinary novel about
the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life." --John
Ashbery on Leaving the Atocha Station "Utterly charming. Lerner's
self-hating, lying, overmedicated, brilliant fool of a hero is a
memorable character, and his voice speaks with a music distinctly
and hilariously all his own." --Paul Auster on Leaving the Atocha
Station "Last night I started Ben Lerner's novel Leaving the Atocha
Station. By page three it was clear I was either staying up all
night or putting the novel away until the weekend. I'm still angry
with myself for having slept." --Stacy Schiff on Leaving the Atocha
Station "A character-driven 'page-turner' and a concisely
definitive study of the 'actual' versus the 'virtual' as applied to
relationships, language, poetry, experience." --Tao Lin, The
Believer on Leaving the Atocha Station "Ben Lerner's Leaving the
Atocha Station is a slightly deranged, philosophically inclined
monologue in the Continental tradition running from Büchner's Lenz
to Thomas Bernhard and Javier Marías. The adoption of this mode by
a young American narrator--solipsistic, overmedicated, feckless yet
ambitious--ends up feeling like the most natural thing in the
world." --Benjamin Kunkel, New Statesman's Books of the Year 2011
on Leaving the Atocha Station Praise for Lichtenberg Figures "[A]
funny, nervy volume."--The New York Times Book Review
"Charged with wit and abstraction... An impressive debut."--Library
Journal
"Like the intricate patterns of 'captured lightning' to which the
book's title refers, the poems in Ben Lerner's The Lichtenberg
Figures make their mark in bursts of invention and surprise. The
languages of critical theory and television collide, often with
titillating and telling results: startling, gnomic ingots are
scattered throughout; clichés are ripped apart and reassembled
fresh and strange. While each of the poems in the book-length
sequence is composed of 14 lines, the governing unit is less the
sonnet than the sentence, and Lerner spring-loads one after another
in order to deliver his splendidly calibrated punch... This debut
is sharp, ambitious and impressive."--Boston Review
"Each [Lerner] sonnet [is] a nuclear explosion in a thimble."--New
Orleans Gambit Weekly, Top 10 Books of 2004
"One of poetry's achievements, if it's lucky, is to forge
connections among neurons by creating new pathways, memorable
patterns, and compelling figures. The Lichtenberg Figures is lucky.
And skillful. And, especially for a first volume, brilliant in its
flashes."--Rain Taxi
"We have here a twenty-four-year-old poet whose ludic genius is
unintimidated by the ludicrous. He romps in the English language,
sometimes shooting down cliché after cliché through syllepsis such
as we haven't seen since Alexander Pope."--Beloit Poetry
Journal
"The Lichtenberg Figures, Ben Lerner's first book, is a series of
brilliantly contrived poetic crash tests... The Lichtenberg Figures
is at once highly literary and highly personal, formally subtle and
shockingly frank. Dark, hilarious, obscene--it is a reading
experience nearly impossible to forget. And the book's exploration
of the very possibility of forgetting is one of its notable
accomplishments... The most memorable part of this audacious and
accomplished first book might be its exploration of memory
itself."--New Orleans Review
"Lerner captures the surreality of modern culture better than
anyone... The beauty of language and image reminds us why we crave
this vision."--Pleiades
"Ben Lerner's brilliance has a toothy gleam. Indeed that's the only
reason to read this book. That, and... that it's also very funny...
This brash young voice [spins] literary talk back on itself,
spoofing it all to smithereens."--Poetry Flash Praise for Angle of
Yaw
"The poems in Angle of Yaw compact layers of thought into a
language of emergency. The juxtapositions are as striking as they
are in commercial media except the upshot is to exacerbate instead
of conceal differences. The words are not easy on the ear, but the
pressure to listen is unmistakable. The sights are not welcome to
the eye, as it is our 'radical emotional incapacitation' being
shown. Violence absorbs the background. No offhanded commentary, no
prophesies, no reassurances are given here. Instead, a sane voice
orbiting the failed authority of a culture. Instead, the radiant
sanity of dissent." --National Book Award judges' citation
"Employing the language of aphorism, advertising, parable, personal
essay, political tirade, journalism and journal, the collage-like
poems of Lerner's second collection express the ennui of American
life in an era when even war feels like a television event. Two
sequences of untitled prose poems weave public and private
discourse, yielding often absurd yet frighteningly accurate
observations... this collection places Lerner among the most
promising young poets now writing" --Publishers Weekly "[Lerner's]
prose poems can dazzle; they achieve reciprocity between theory and
poetry, enlisting and rewarding a reader who wants a crack at
critiquing our cultural codes."--Book Forum "Lerner's second book,
Angle of Yaw, is a stunner... I have spent a good week, a very good
week, re-reading and mining this remarkable volume, but I... don't
expect to exhaust its riches."--Beloit Poetry Journal "Lerner's
free verse flows easily from a personally logical structure into
publicly proclaimed metaphysic. Words become vehicles to launch the
reader into an alternate consciousness... The modern world provides
Lerner with countless opportunities to search out mankind's psyche
with the clinical scalpel of prose poetry."--Home News Tribune
Praise for Mean Free Path "Lerner seems to have engineered a form
that enacts a balance between the recuperative and the mournful, a
kind of hobbling of thought and sentiment whereby he invites a
phrase into the poem only to have enjambment cut off the engagement
before it is fully expressed. Often the phrase will reverberate in
later lines and stanzas, a kind of poetic afterlife or Doppler
effect."--Boston Review
"[Lerner's new book] is sure to be among the best collections
published in 2010. The world of Mean Free Path is fragmented and
recursive... The poems are charged with the full force of Lerner's
monumental talent, which begins with the finely chiseled line and
extends to the architecture of the book entire. Images and phrases
suddenly break off, disappear, and then later resurface in new
contexts, colliding with or collapsing into one another,
recombining to make themselves and the whole world new again,
albeit through a process that bears an uncanny (and unsettling)
resemblance to endlessly flipping through TV channels in the deep
ditch of insomniac night."-- Poetry Foundation
"In his third collection, [Ben Lerner] continues and deepens his
exploration of how contemporary mass culture taints language,
testing the border where words transition from expressing real
feeling to being so overused they mean almost nothing... Lerner
keeps refining his techniques and remains a younger poet whose work
deserves attention."--Publishers Weekly
"Lerner maintains a continuity of voice that proposes a flexible
integrity of being that is formed by, and exists through,
interruption and collision. Gaps, stutters, and redirections do not
interrupt us, they constitute what we are."--The Constant
Critic
"Lerner seeks to deliver an experience of simultaneity,
interruption and disjunction throughout [Mean Free Path]."--Fanzine
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