Ben Lerner
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Lerner, 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.
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Notable 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…
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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.
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Notable 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,…
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A 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…
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Autofiction 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.
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Ben 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…
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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.
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Imagine 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…
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All 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…
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Folk 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…
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The 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.