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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…