Tao Lin interviews the poet and novelist, Ben Lerner for the Believer. After three poetry collections, Lerner just published a novel, Leaving Atocha Station (Muumuu House excerpts it here).
It turns out his poetical prowess is just one of Lerner’s many literary arts-based skills. His novel is about an American studying in Spain on a poetry fellowship, which is the perfect context to discuss poetry—its utility, its limitations, the frustrations that poets have regarding other poets and the “unbridgeable gap between what the poet wants the poem to do and what it can actually do.”
