n ntrv th Bn Lrnr l Rr Contemporary Literature, Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 218-238 (Article) Pblhd b nvrt f nn Pr DOI: 10.1353/cli.2013.0021 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cli/summary/v054/54.2.rogers.html Access provided by Boston College (21 Dec 2014 13:44 GMT) BEN LERNER Courtesy of Coffee House Press an interview with BEN LERNER Conducted by Gayle Rogers ne of the most important and prodigious young writers in America today, Ben Lerner is an omniv- orous reader whose work situates itself in relation O to a host of antecedents, many of them notably opposed to theories of writing as the expression or revelation of a singular, coherent interiority. Perhaps the clearest line extends, as Marjorie Perloff might trace it, from the early modernism of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams to Objectivism, through the Black Mountain poets and Language poetry, and to current figures such as John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, and those whom Stephen Burt has termed “elliptical” poets. If there is or was a tradition of the American avant-garde, Lerner would seem to belong to it, and the theories of referen- tiality and unoriginality posited by Ron Silliman or Allen Gross- man that he cites in this interview seem explicatory. But this genealogy is partial. One is likely to find, in Lerner’s poetry and prose alike, traces of or allusions to Leo Tolstoy, Ludwig Witt- genstein, or Walt Whitman; or quotations from Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, or Jacques Derrida colliding with cliche´s from TV melodrama; or oblique citations of theories of images and simulacra, not as explanatory or exegetical concepts, but as fig- ures for the acts of poesis and consumption. His writing contin- ually changes shape, employing masks, borrowing and recycling language with both innovative and self-alienating flair, and emphasizing process over product, composing over composi- tion, and limits over ideals of transcendence. Lerner is a multi- Contemporary Literature 54, 2 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/13/0002-0219 ᭧ 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 220 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE form talent who crosses genres, modes, and media to represent a leading edge of contemporary writing, and he has already found success in both academic and literary “prize cultures.” All of this—the intra- and extratextual—is complexly woven together in Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Called by Lorin Stein “one of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation” and praised ubiq- uitously en route to winning multiple awards, the book takes its title from one of Ashbery’s opaque poems in The Tennis Court Oath (1962). Ashbery himself sees Atocha as “[a]n extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life”; indeed, its fusion of poetic and novelistic materials reveals much about the relationship between these and other genres in our day. Leaving the Atocha Station is the first-person narrative of Adam Gordon, a sort of untrustworthy alter ego of Lerner. He is a habitual liar, a drug-addled poet who thinks of himself as a fraud, a vain and fragile womanizer, and perhaps most impor- tantly for the novel itself, a character who steals others’ experi- ences and language and relates them as if they were his own. Adam spends a year in Madrid on a prestigious fellowship, working on his “project,” which is to be (we are told) an epic poem about Franco, fascism, and the Spanish Civil War. He fre- quently claims to have progressed from one “phase” of his proj- ect to the next, but little evidence supports that assertion. He can’t keep track of which lies about himself—that his mother died, that his father is a fascist—he has told to which of his two girlfriends. But the external plot—Adam’s time in Madrid—is more a set- ting for the bigger concerns that the novel takes up, which are the relationships among language, experience, art, mediation, authorship, and the spectacle of violence. The novel culminates with Adam’s witnessing the bombing of the Atocha Station in Madrid, on March 11, 2004, an event that he wants to “feel,” to experience as presence, but only absorbs secondhand through newspapers, others’ responses, and afterimages. The major event of Leaving the Atocha Station becomes a nonevent; most of the novel takes place when nothing happens, when Adam drifts or escapes into gaps between conventional communications and 222 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE the question”); another riffs, in part, on Lerner’s own authorship, beginning with “The author gratefully acknowledges the object world,” and concluding with the Library of Congress title infor- mation for The Lichtenberg Figures broken into poetic lines (but with the Dewey decimal number changed to 911’.01). After spending a year in Spain on a Fulbright fellowship, Ler- ner published his second book of poems, Angle of Yaw (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A paradig- matic prose poem in this volume has a man in the crowd at a sports stadium watching his portable TV, which itself displays the image of him watching his portable TV. That image is cur- rently being broadcast on the stadium’s Jumbotron, and we are removed by several more layers of mediation from this imagined scene—reading about this image in a book, envisioning it through our own memories of such scenes that we’ve seen on TVs and/or Jumbotrons. These multiple levels of mediated per- ception and experience are both a topic of meditation and a motif throughout Angle of Yaw. Art and myths of experience continue to combine and conflate; flatness, aerial views, and “[t]he dis- placement of the horizontal plane by the vertical plane: the dis- placement of the God-term by the masses” prevail over presence and experience. “No street, no land, no sky—just scape,” he writes while looking back to Ashbery’s Parmigianino. Lerner’s meditation on 9/11 (or rather on images and depictions of 9/11) begins: It is difficult to differentiate between the collapse of the towers and the image of the towers collapsing. The influence of images is often stronger than the influence of events as the film of Pollock painting is more influential than Pollock’s paintings. To speak in poetry of the mediation of 9/11 is commonplace; to read these images through one of Pollock at work is a striking displacement of affect and a commentary on the nature of authorship and artistry that Lerner often interrogates. A prose poem in the form of a letter to Cyrus appears multiple times under erasure and hesitation, never articulated. Another poem states, “I just want to be held, but contingently, the way the mind holds a trauma that failed to take place.” The closing section, LERNER ⋅ 223 “Twenty-one Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan,” includes brilliant satirical invectives on “[a]n epistemology borrowed from game shows.” Angle of Yaw contains leftist political tirades, certainly, but they are neither one man’s venting nor an effort to collectiv- ize voices; if anything, these passages couch themselves in ques- tions of solipsism and in theories of how a “public” (for poetry, for politics) is constituted, how representation functions, and how the current state of the “umbilical cord of gold” (as Clement Greenberg called it) mediates between the realms of aesthetics and capitalism. Mean Free Path (2010), Lerner’s third book of poetry, is, among other things, both a love poem for his wife Ariana and an enact- ment of his theory about the impossibility of writing exactly such a poem—of elaborating or articulating romantic (and Romantic) expressivity in poetry, as in Robert Creeley’s “For Love.” The attempt and the failure, Lerner implies, are more full of affect than anything commonly poeticized could be. Mean Free Path draws attention to the reader’s never-complete process of assem- bly: the work of bricolage or collage is left to the reader, who is presented with neat nine-line, largely unpunctuated stanzas, two per page, separated by a glyph. This appearance of linearity and its negation are striking, as are the combinatory possibilities for many different lines, often subjects and predicates whose miss- ing halves, so to speak, are buried throughout the book, or nowhere: There are three hundred sixty-two thousand And that’s love. There are flecks of hope Eight hundred eighty ways to read each stanza Deep in traditional forms like flaws Visible when held against the light I did not walk here all the way from prose To make corrections in red pencil I came here tonight to open you up To interference heard as music More than his previous books, Lerner’s Mean Free Path seeks to denaturalize everything about the commonly understood poetic transaction—about creation, dissemination, reception, coher- ence, and comprehension—and about the interplay of material- 224 ⋅ CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE ity and “conceptual poetics.” Self-conscious lines such as “Noth- ing can be predicated” and “Several competing forms of closure” offer interwoven possibilities throughout this “little book for Ari / Built to sway,” rent by fissures, breaks, and partial braids. Lerner has also written a number of critical essays, including several for boundary 2, the journal of philosophy and cultural critique housed at the University of Pittsburgh, and for Critical Quarterly, for which Lerner serves as poetry editor. These works typically deal with twentieth-century and contemporary poets (some well-known, some forgotten), with critical history (both academic and avant-garde), and recently with art shows, such as Abstract Expressionist New York at MoMA in 2011.