Notable Online: 9/27–10/3
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
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Posts Tagged: Ben Lerner
Notable San Francisco: 11/20–11/26
Literary events in and around the Bay Area this week!
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Notable NYC: 9/28–10/4
Literary events in and around NYC this week!
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Amy Fusselman
Amy Fusselman discusses her new book, IDIOPHONE!
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A Curious Swarm or Energy: Talking with Rachel B. Glaser
Rachel B. Glaser discusses her newest poetry collection, HAIRDO, her writing process, and the books and writers that have influenced her.
...moreNotable NYC: 6/10–6/16
Saturday 6/10: Katie Kitamura and others join AmpLit Fest. Pier i, West 70th Street, Noon, Free. Sunday 6/11: Hafizah Geter, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Lara Mimosa Montes, Cathy Linh Che, Lucas De Lima, and Carly Joy Miller join the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. DTUT, 8 p.m., free. Matt DiPentima, Etan Nchin, Iris Cohen, and Jen DeGregorio […]
...moreA Death Blow Can Be a Life Blow to Some
What does it mean to be carried away? To be captured, carried off, liberated? To lose control of oneself? Lerner doesn’t show concern for questions like these. More generally, The Hatred of Poetry takes little interest in the rarities of technique across a poet’s body of work and avoids questions about his or her sense […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Monica Youn
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Monica Youn about her new collection Blackacre, hypothetical tracts of land, Milton, and infertility.
...moreUs, as Humans, Feel Like Failures
It just means that we have a desire for our language to be able to perform in a different way than it performs, and we have a desire for a reconciliation between the individual and the social that poetry can’t fulfill, but can help made felt. For Lit Hub, Cody Delistraty interviews Ben Lerner on his […]
...moreThe Hope Whose Death It Announces
Poetry is defined by a failure to live up to the hype it generates, promising divine transcendence through a medium that is essentially human. This is the paradox Ben Lerner articulates in his dissertation on The Hatred of Poetry. At The New Republic, Ken Chen doesn’t buy it: You get the sense Lerner’s intellectualized peevishness […]
...moreLerner, too, Dislikes It
Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon gives us a write-up of Ben Lerner’s new monograph, The Hatred of Poetry: a loathful ode to that to which we are in debt. And, read Ben Purkert’s Rumpus review of The Hatred of Poetry here.
...moreNotable NYC: 6/4–6/10
Saturday 6/4: Marian Fontana, Ariel Stess, Kathleen Donohoe, and Amy Sohn join the Brooklyn Writers Space reading series. BookCourt, 7 p.m., free. Cat Fitzpatrick, Merritt Kopas, Allison Parrish, Thel Seraphim, Charles Theonia, and Paco Salas Pérez celebrate an evening of Transgender Poetry and also a new location for Spoonbill & Sugartown. Spoonbill & Sugartown Montrose […]
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The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner
Ben Purkert reviews The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner today in Rumpus Books.
...moreNotable NYC: 4/16–4/22
Saturday 4/16: Stefanie Lipsey, Ann Prodracky, and Melissa Thomas join the Oh, Bernice reading series. Astoria Bookshop, 7 p.m., free. Jibade-Khalil Huffman and Gabriela Jauregui join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 4/17: Greg Purcell, Ish Klein, and Karen Weiser read poetry. Berl’s Poetry Shop, 7 p.m., free. Desirée Alvarez, Helen Klein […]
...moreA Major Poet of Quiet
Keith Waldrop is a quiet major poet, a major poet of quiet. His accomplishment is difficult to describe because his work refuses, in Bartleby-like fashion, the twin traps of impassivity and affectation… Over at the Paris Review, Ben Lerner pens a great profile of poet Keith Waldrop.
...moreAutofiction and Empathy
Reading novels breaks down the boundary between “me” and “not me.” Over at the Atlantic, Nicholas Dames writes about a deeply worrying feeling that contemporary fiction isn’t living up to Cervantes’s standards, opting for nihilistic individualism rather than empathy.
...moreBen Lerner’s First Time
If you’re referring to a bomb as a daisy cutter it’s easier to distance yourself from the embodied reality of the consequence of a policy. The Paris Review talks with Ben Lerner about his first book of poems, The Lichtenberg Figures: his first inspirations in Marjorie Welish and wine, the anxiety and self-doubt of the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age.
...moreImagine That
Like every other year, in 2015 we wrestled with the knowledge of our constructed selves. But rather than eschew personhood as a postmodernist might, we considered just who we’ve been inventing: What do you write about when you no longer put stock in the idea—the narrative—that nature exists objectively and independently of our stories about […]
...moreAll This Craziness
It doesn’t seem right to write a novel set in the contemporary that isn’t shot through with all this craziness. For Electric Literature, John Freeman profiles Ben Lerner, MacArthur genius and author of books written by accident that revel in “privileged American self-involvement” and win both awards and the hearts of many.
...moreFolk Poets and Scrambled Eggs
I think that’s avant-garde—the meeting of need and language. Over at Lit Hub, contemporary poetic hero Ben Lerner sits down with contemporary poetic heroine Eileen Myles to talk about vernacular, supercilious labels, the trials and tribulations of a young poet after fame, and a mutual confusion over what a “folk poet” is.
...moreThe Problem with Poems
The fatal problem with poetry: poems. At the London Review of Books, Ben Lerner discusses the difficulty of memorizing Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” and how every failed poem is actually what makes poetry successful as a whole.
...moreLearning to Love
Maybe the best reading leads us to struggle with ourselves. Jennifer Audette writes about the messiness of learning to love the metafiction of Ben Lerner for the Fiction Writer’s Review: But then again, why do I need the narrator to experience wonder and emotions the way I think he should, the way I want him […]
...moreReading Between the Lines
Here is what I mean by meta-fiction: all these books, stories, and bodies of work contain made-up books and bodies of work. Some are based on real books. Some are making fun of real books, a little bit, gently. Some are invented entirely. And one, you can go out and buy. Hint: it’s not Don […]
...moreNotable NYC: 5/2–5/8
Saturday 5/2: Independent Bookstore Day: Events are being held throughout the day at your neighborhood bookstore. The following stores are hosting special events: WORD; Housing Works; McNally Jackson; Greenlight Bookstore; BookCourt; Community Bookstore; The Strand; BookCulture; Astoria Bookshop. Emma Straub, Jami Attenberg, and Angela Flournoy host Independent Bookstore Day Afterparty. Powerhouse Arena, 9 p.m., free. Andy […]
...moreThe Art of Literature
Literature often depends on the strategic disappointment of expectation. Sometimes, the effect of that is humorous; at other times, it’s unnerving: I consider it crucial to the composition of a novel. Laughter is physical; it involves the body of the reader in the book in a way that other responses don’t. It’s a tonal antidote […]
...moreWhen Poets Become Novelists
Ben Lerner talks with the Guardian about life in Brooklyn, octopuses, and poets: “Poets really haven’t gotten the news that the novel is also dead,” he says, of the opinion among some poets that writing in prose is a capitulation to market forces. Still, the poets tolerated a single attempt—even Ashbery wrote a novel. “It’s […]
...moreAn Inconvenient Fiction
Invoking his new play, Buzz, Benjamin Kunkel writes in the New Yorker about how “few imaginative writers have dealt with the present-day experience of global warming in a direct and concentrated way” and why this might be the case: If climate change has, to date, proved hard to write about, that’s because it exists for […]
...moreRe-Referencing the Self
When Tao Lin asked Ben Lerner about his new novel’s epigraph, Lerner touched on the merits of the parable: I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this […]
...moreWord of the Day: Atelier
(n.); artist’s studio or workshop; c. 1840, from the old French astelier (“carpenter’s workshop, woodpile”) “Part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain,” [Lerner] says, “how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself.” From “With Storms Outside, […]
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