Ben Lerner (f. 1979) er en kritikerrost og prisvindende amerikansk forfatter. To be unacquainted with something so commonplace and still pontificate on a subject one knows nothing about is what all those who disparage poetry sound like. The story of this irregular conception causes Ben to reconsider his relationship to the world around him. A man stands in tears before Rogier van der Weydens The Descent From the Cross. He is from United States. I could be a real bully, verbally. Sometimes they arewalking backwards, sometimes forwards, and sometimes they have been edited to move in reverse. Search. Im going to rape you; Somebody should rape you; You were probably raped; If you werent so ugly, youd get raped. Jane suspects that Adam has been listening in on these calls and worries they may be doing lasting damage to his psyche. Jane, in particular, is an astonishing creation; it is hard to think of another character in recent fiction who shows up so vividly on the page. Jane figures out a way to handle the men who whisper obscenities at her by asking them repeatedly to speak louder, forcing them to inhabit and take responsibility for their own speech (at which point, spooked, they hang up). Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. It is both a defense of poetry and a defense of those who hate it. Prep alumni are fast assuming leadership roles in every sector of society - from business and law, to science and medicine, to education and the arts. In the late 1960s, I participated in the Poets in the Schools program in New York City. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and a Howard Foundation Fellow. Is the man grieving, wonders Adam Gordon, the books narrator, or is he having a profound experience of art? horse taking a roll, a tireless Ariana Mangual. How did you get it off? one of Lerners nephews asked from the third-row seat. He regards this contradiction as the dialectic of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. Some years ago, after eating one at a Japanese restaurant, the poet andnovelist Ben Lerner became interested in the sensory life ofthe octopus. result is not poetry, holding on upside down or . we cannot understand: the bat It is an ambitious book that is also engagingly anxious about its own ambition. the imaginationabove A few minutes earlier wed made a pit stop at the largest gas station Id ever seen,3 and Lerner had returned from the convenience store with a pack of Juicy Fruit, which prompted him to begin recounting the gum story from his childhood. AWARDS, HONORS: Not so long ago, the big, ambitious social novel, the novel that wanted to tell us about the way we live now or the state of the nation the novel as exemplified by Don DeLillos Underworld (1997) or Jonathan Franzens The Corrections (2001) enjoyed a prestige and cultural centrality that, in recent years, have come to seem distinctly suspect. Photograph: Tim Knox for the Guardian, Ben Lerner: People say, Oh, heres another Brooklyn novel by a guy with glasses, ome years ago, after eating one at a Japanese restaurant, the poet andnovelist. Of course, poets and poetry have had enemies. He was encouraged by the leftward tilt of some of the field, but worried that a progressive Democrat speaking a language grounded in policy specifics would struggle against a Republican incumbent who used words for altogether different purposes. important not because a, high-sounding interpretation can Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. the same thing may be said for And it sounds more like her. For Lerner, the whole drama of the book is the present-tense Adam remembering his childhood from his parents perspective, because he has more access to their voices than he does to the child version of himself. Jane describes aspects of their family life, the institutional sexism she faced in her career and the misogynist trolling (as a child Adam often picks up the landline phone and encounters men calling to whisper abuse at the famous feminist) and damaged friendships that resulted from her success. In a casual tone, he told them hed had an accident: Some gum had fallen out of his mouth while he was going potty. they wanted to know. Reagan is in office, the backlash against the second wave of feminism is in full swing and Jane has begun to receive anonymous phone calls from aggrieved men, analog precursors of todays digital trolls. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016. Not because writing fiction is supposed to be palliative, but because aesthetic form is about making conscious pattern, and having kids meant that this was a moment when aesthetic questions of patterning acquired a new urgency for me.. At first expressing a kind of inchoate anger toward the grandfather that tends to repeat his domineering brand of masculinity he keeps saying I would have destroyed him in a debate Adam then refers back to a childhood game he had with his mother, in which he misquotes a little rhyme called The Purple Cow and she corrects him. Home. She is also interested in heritage language . Even his hair drawn into a ponytail but shaved at the sides in a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised bears the marks of struggle. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. 10:04, Lerner's second novel, explicitly grapples with his novelistic intention, or lack thereofit opens with the narrator ("Ben") eating octopus with his agent, after having sold a second novel (read: 10:04) based on a story that had appeared in The New Yorker (read: "The Golden Vanity") for a "strong six figures" (read: probably between $500 and $600k, based on his . Congratulations! said the card. An art hated from without and within, he answers, though he doesnt experience it as a contradiction because poetry and hatred for poetry are inextricable for him. Ls mere Lignende bog Topekaskolen Et mesterligt fortalt drama om fortrngte familiehemmeligheder, amerikansk identitet og sprogets magt. Parts of the book, it seems, were also conceived in that strange, lively, generative place just slightly beyond the authors own control a bold, unusual experiment to undertake at a point in his career when he is getting more attention than ever. But this wasnt a call for such writers to down tools just to stop thinking of themselves as transhistorical human subjects. Wed met at a bar in Prospect Heights to watch the second debate of the Democratic primary season. Being with him in the museum, looking at Celminss series of mesmeric images, felt eerily like being in a Ben Lerner novel (one work by Celmins that juxtaposes a starry sky with a plummeting warplane even appears in 10:04). While a feeling of impotence paralyzes anyone who becomes fixated on language and starts thinking about finding the right word not as an aesthetic problem, but as a theological one, its a false quandary. The goal of every collectivist project in history being to wrestle away the self from the individual, its no wonder that the most innocuous poems became the subject of police inquiry and suppression. Poetry is a poetry, and ones objective as a poet is to achieve poetry.3 I agree wholeheartedly, and yet some awareness now and then of the suffering that goes on in the world wont hurt a poem. Lerner with his mother in the early 1980s in Topeka, Kan. The Topeka School, Lerners extraordinary new novel, a MacArthur Fellowship (the genius grant). Even the enlightened eighteenth century of Hobbes and Locke with their elevation of reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy denounced poetry, since a rational mind finds it intolerable to be in the company of imagination. She knew what she meant by the genuine and what a poem is and so would have Lerner and his readers had he quoted the longer version of Poetry that she tinkered with from 1919 to 1967 and not only republished from book to book, but allowed to be widely anthologized, instead of basing his own book on her final condensed version of the poem, which both her readers and fellow poets regarded as a big mistake. Anything a white male writes is going to be disfigured by that subject position, he told me. The novel is full of these instances where language gets away from the speaker or hearer, or different registers collapse into one another. Thus the poet is a tragic figure, because a poem is always a record of failure. Lerner agrees with Grossman. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Ben Lerner, Sanibel Island, Florida, December 2016. with real toads in them, shall Dont let the boy just loaf about; As the final book in his acclaimed trilogy is published, The Topeka School author reflects on writing as his mother and pompous Great American Novels. If the question put by Nora Ephron in the 1980s was Can men and women be friends?, the question today might be Why cant men and women who are friends just marry each other and start families? Its not that Alex and Ben aresuppressing the question of sex, itsthat, for all their intimacy, they dont love each other in that way (eventually, to see if it can hasten the pregnancy, they try having sex a passion I did not feel, but which rose within me as Ifaked it). You can write one novel in your life as a poet.. Foto: Ariana Manguel. Ben Lerner's income source is mostly from being a successful Writer. discovers in xxxxx genuine. Galleries. Because the poems are largely concerned with the possibility of writing and being for, with finding a mode of address capable of something other than ironic detachment or expressing prefabricated structures of feeling, it seemed like cheating . Throngs of 20- and 30-somethings in oversized T-shirts and cuffed pants sat around beer-garden picnic tables, their eyes trained on a projection screen at the end of the room. Idecided to write more fiction something Id promised my poet friends Iwasnt going to do, says the main character in his book. Once I got a chance to say something, I asked the class if they liked poetry, a question that made many shake their heads, some pretend to gag, and one or two even spit in disgust. Then he kneed me in the stomach and threw me up against the wall and said, Now youre sick, you pussy. Everyone in the car laughed. Poetry has been around forever. demand on the one hand, In Leaving the Atocha Station, his young poet agonizes about the incommensurability of language and experience. Its no news that words fail to do justice to what we see or feel; that we find ourselves struck dumb by too much beauty or horror. We sit in the museum and think about this. Edmundson contends that contemporary poets, while talented, have ceased to be politically ambitious. And Ive always been interested in the 90s, right before Columbine, and the end of history discourse, and the advent of the Clinton dynasty.. ), Kathryn Hahns Funny, Sensual Portrayals of Female Desire, I Want to Explore the Wonder of What It Is to Be a Black American, Rosalas Incredible Journey From Flamenco to Megastardom, To Decode White Male Rage, First He Had to Write in His Mothers Voice. Long before Lerner began to fictionalize his own experience, he was already a character in Harriets work. it after all, a place for the They were from Ben, and Matt, who also went to Brown. The laughter stopped when they realized the gum wasnt coming loose. The essence of her personality is her pragmatic intelligence, the grace and ingenuity with which she faces down the trials of her professional life at the Foundation, where objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy. When the Men call to harass her in the evenings, Jane pretends she cant hear them, and asks that they speak up: Typically what would happen is that the guy would repeat, confused, whatever hed said a little more loudly, and while I could hear him fine, I would say, equally politely, betraying no knowledge of the nature of the call, Im sorry, its not a great connection, can you be a little louder? The callers grow self-conscious, embarrassed by the sound of their own voices, and hang up. they are Her age is 42. There are so many types of poems, ranging from the epic to the tiny haiku, that it took The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1,554 pages to list and describe them all. Of course, theres some truth to it. As I lick lamb juice off my fingers,. Poetry is neither politics nor philosophy, Wallace Stevens said. Mad Lib Elegy. Now that I had their full attention, I asked them whether they would like to hear a love poem. Poetry thus arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historicalthe human world of violence and differenceand to reach the transcendent or divine. A few years ago, he found himself ventriloquizing younger versions of his parents, coastal transplants who arrive in Topeka for postdoctoral fellowships in the early 1970s and end up staying for four decades. Ben Lerner is an extraordinarily fine writer, the author of three much-admired collections of poetry and two marvelous novels. Without seeing the longer version, a reader has no idea. If poetry is of no interest to people, its because they were frightened off it in school and have not bothered to read any since, not because poets failed their ideal of poetry. Still, the poets tolerated a single attempt even Ashbery wrote a novel. The novel, published by an independent non-profit press in the US, received critical praise, but Lerners sudden transition to prose fiction worried some of his fellow poets. . My parents let me play even after Id had two concussions. The boys middle school scrolled by. Lerner turned to fiction only after publishing three volumes of poetry (the second, Angle of Yaw, got him shortlisted for a National book award in 2006), and his novels share a disarming, conversational tone, a taste for collage, and a playful attitude to the line between life and art a line poets have never been called on to respect. rise When he didnt respond, Harriet switched on the bedside light and beckoned him over. In a crucial passage, Jane describes the moment when her speech began fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me. His 2006 poetry collection published when he was 27 was a. 'It made me really crazy': Ben Lerner on confronting male rage and family trauma, Lerners mother Harriet, author of the bestselling book. Hereflects on certain cultural totems of his childhood in the 1980s: the explosion of theChallenger spaceship, which killed seven astronauts; the movie Back to the Future; and how Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagans speechwriter, introduced the budding poet to his first inklings of rhyme andmetre. (Seriously. View the profiles of people named Arianna Nicolette Mangual. It got stuck! As though the whole thing had been an accident!. Though she doesnt define genuine, we know what she means and recognize it when we encounter it in a poem. This article seeks to amplify our scholarly view of immigrant identity by centering the first-person narratives of immigrant-origin children and youth. Ariana Mangual Figueroa is an Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Lived in. March 29, 2017. in quest of something to, eat, elephants pushing, a wild The misery of the homeless in this country and the horrendous lives of our working poor, to give just two examples, are rarely, if ever, noticed. So, how much is Ben Lerner worth at the age of 42 years old? . And family systems therapy is very novelistic, its thinking about the architecture of relationships and the way that political or social circumstances get repeated over generations.. The book at once diagnoses and puts forth a possible solution to a central problem of fiction today. Though it has mutated over the centuries, with the lyric poem becoming in more recent times the favored mode of expression, it can still be defined as language that sounds better and means more.1 The miracle of poetry is that a three-thousand-year-old poem can still speak to us today. Forwards, and other items of interest call for such writers to down tools just to thinking... 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