Life of a Poet - Ben Lerner

I thought I'd put forward another more contemporary poet - one who's only been writing (publishing) for the last 6 years. Ben Lerner is an Amercan poet born in Topeka, Kansas. His first book of poetry is called The Lichtenberg Figures.

His poetry will probably be considered to us on this site as being rather odd. He seems much more up on the whole "modern poetry" thing, if I'm allowed to be stereotypical for a second... incomplete phrases, strange grammar, yo-yo's between being completely obscure and almost oddly transparent. In my opinion, he seems to work to evoke a certain feeling, rather than trying to use words to make something conventionally beautiful. I can't decide if I like the poems, but they kind of stick around in my head, so that has to mean something. Here are a couple of examples:

The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays.
Did you mean 'this could go on forever' in a good way?
Up in the fragrant rafters, moths seek out a finer dust.
Please feel free to cue or cut

the lights. Along the order of magnitudes, a glyph,
portable, narrow-Damn. I've lost it. But its shadow. Cast
in the long run. As the dark touches us up.
Earlier you asked if I would enter the data like a room, well,

either the sun has begun to burn
its manuscripts or I'm an idiot, an idiot
with my eleven semi-precious rings. Real snow
on the stage. Fake blood on the snow. Could this go

on forever in a good way? A brain left lace from age or lightning.

The chicken is a little dry and/or you've ruined my life.

�© Ben Lerner, 2006

THE ROSE has a minutely serrate margin, like a poem. There ends analogy. A dying process. At the border of the cornea and sclera, a momentary wavering. Excluded from beatific vision, but not condemned to further punishment. In the dream she told me she felt fine. Like dust. To what shall we liken analogy, if not to hypermetropia. These carpets are the color of migraine. Note to self: change your life. I assume the palmate antlers of hoofed mammals have so often been likened to candelabra I'm not even going to try. Boy, you got trouble in your head. Every time, he says, breasts are described in the poems of men, a woman undergoes mastectomy. I said he says to gain some credibility, which is a privileged form of distance. This one goes out to my paternal Grandma Elsie, short for Elsewhere, whom I never met. This one goes out to Grandma Rosie, who couldn't remember her first cancer by the time she died of being ready. Her ashes are on a shelf in Cambridge. Awaiting scattering. Note to self: don't publish this. Besides the half-dead and their families, everybody in the home was from the Indies. Carpets the color of. We administered music and morphine. For ninety-four years, she had performed her gender admirably. Anyway, this isn't a time or a place. But the day she died some punk nearly hit me with his bike, parked it, and got all in my face. Boy, you got trouble in your head. I started to cry. Like a woman, he said. As if to give me strength.

© Ben Lerner

"This to me sounds more like a brainstorm for poem ideas"

I can definitely see that. Particularly the second poem, the prose one. I do like the sense of frustration behind it, though: he's a poet, and wants to write poems, but everything's been done before and every analogy feels over-romanticized to him. I also like his self conscious "Notes to self."

That said, it's not the sort of pretty, coherent stuff that we're much more familiar with.

Haha! Really! That's pretty funny, actually. You'd think it would be more "modern" to write about banning cigarettes in bars...

Random!....... notes to self, there ends the analogy..trying to decipher what this is about can only hurt your head

Writing like this (is it poetry? the 2nd one anyway) where a mishmash of random thoughts are set down on paper can only confuse and we walk away thinking, is this clever or not? Maybe its clever though I haven't got the foggiest of what it means therefore it is as I'm too dumb to work it out.

Ha.... in conclusion I walk away with nothing as I have no F N idea what its about. And in my book thats not a good reason to think its good...

The end

I know what you mean, Nicko. I like some parts, but overall there's a nagging feeling that it's just... nothing.

But then! There's the suspiciously pretentious part of me that is just worrying that I'm missing something. Nobody every wants to be the one lacking the urbanity to SEE something invisible to the plebian hordes. Therein lies some of the irony of a good amount of modern art, in my opinion. With art forms relegated to extreme subjectivity, I always wonder whether something is said to be good or deep just because nobody wants to be the one who doesn't get it. A classic case of the Emperor with No Clothes.

I don't like it.

Art shouldn't need instructions to be liked. (The help of context is occasionally allowed.)

Good on him for writing like he does- it is different, edgy, interesting, challenging. There are some shining lines in there that speak of a beautiful vision and an ironic soul.

But at the end of the day, those are two poems that I simply did not like.

An interesting note on structure: The first poem of his I posted was part of book which was billed as "a collection of sonnets." Looking at the layout, there are indeed four quatrains and a closing couplet, though they don't follow iambic pentameter and rhyme. What do you think of those being called sonnets?

Eh, I think the definition probably isn't something hard and fast. What we're generally USED to are Shakespearean sonnets, or something of the like.

Iambic would be tough to explain. It has to do with where we place the emphasis on words. Like how we would say BLANKet instead of blanKET. Languages like French generally have that stress and lifting on the second syllable, English and other Germanic languages generally put it on the first. So we get HAPpy, FRIENDly, CURtain, CLOset, etc. (I'm pretty sure half those words have roots in the Romance languages, but shhhh, that's how we say them.)

So "iambic" refers to that beat of stressed and unstressed syllables. Penta means that there are 10 syllables. I have a sonnet on here that I wrote years ago. The first line goes

beCAUSE the WORDS hung HEAVy IN the AIR... de dah de dah de dah de dah de dah. Of course it's not that obviously stressed when you say it, so you run into some grey areas.

I'm sure that helped not at all. Haha!

Ha, well yes. But you still kind of "say" the sounds in your head, if not aloud.

I think it might be, in part, a mnemonic device. I can remember lines of Shakespeare easy as anything, and I think it's due to his strong use of the iambic style. There's a rhythm that just kind of catches you and sticks. I think lots of epic poems used similar devices to aid in ease of recollection for those bards who would recite hours of poetry.

Finally got around to the reading the 2 poems by Mr. Lerner that you posted, Sibs. Indeed edgy and I'm not sure what the heck he's talking about... but it accurately expresses the way (at least) my brain functions. It's filled with images that express feelings and thoughts. Representations. Random nerve firings.
Pretty interesting stuff, but it's borderline genius, borderline nonsensical insanity. Such is the way of modern writers...

"The chicken is a little dry and/or you've ruined my life." That really stuck with me from the first poem, maybe because it's the last line.

The second hunk of writing (poem, really?) struck me in a lot of ways. Although the poem itself is erratic, there are a lot of awesome descriptions and expressions. It seems the idea is about loss and how our lives are much more than what's transparent. Someone could hit you with a bike and you break down crying because your emotions were already running high with the loss of your grandmother, but how can the biker know that? Situational bias is interesting.

Can't say I'm about to hop on the Ben Lerner band wagon, but he's not bad.

I read some of his works and the one that Britt posted, Mad Lib Elegy is really the only one that made sense to me. Would anyone have a thought as to why each verse ends with the [line omitted in memory of _______]. Is that intentional? Did he omit the name of a person, is the reader to fill in the blank?