His last article for the magazine was a profile of the Spanish writer Javier Maras. Early in "10:04," Ben Lerner's frequently brilliant second novel, the central character a refraction or avatar of this Brooklyn-based author describes visiting the Metropolitan . 10:04 is a novel that considers global trade, social inequality, ecological catastrophe, the limitations of a humans reproductive lifespan, and the passage and accumulation of time (the title references the moment the lightning strikes the clock tower in Back to the Future). But 10:04 only approaches such difficult problems through a detailed description of the local texture variations of New York City in the years between tropical storm Irene, in August 2011, and hurricane Sandy, in October 2013. They said nothing, so Id read them poems by E.E. For Ben and Matt, every street corner seemed to bring back the memory of some childhood ordeal. The Topeka School is published by Granta (16.99). hvem som helst. Photo credit: Ariana Mangual Ben Lerner is a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist with plenty of well-deserved accolades he's currently a MacArthur Fellow, has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a finalist for the National Book Award, and has won the Believer Book Award and the Hayden Carruth Award, among others. Trumps genius, which is indistinguishable from a kind of idiocy, he said, has been to do a dozen world-historically scandalous things a day while at the same time speaking in this slow, contentless, gestural language that appeals to peoples sense of being spread.. Lerner turned to fiction only after publishing three volumes of poetry (the second, Angle of Yaw, got him shortlisted for a National book award in 2006), and his novels share a disarming, conversational tone, a taste for collage, and a playful attitude to the line between life and art a line poets have never been called on to respect. Leaving out the views of every one of our major figures, starting with Emerson and going on to the Modernists and the generations that followed, makes American poetry look like a parochial affair involving a handful of people and just a few ideas. His parents dont appear in the book, but they are briefly mentioned when, in desperate bids to impress the two women hes been orbiting, he says, falsely, that his mother has just died and that his father (gentlest of men) is a fascist. As they stand side-by-side before the painting, Alex breaks the silence: Im 36 and single, she says, apropos of nothing. Then she asks Ben if he will donate his sperm to her so she can have a child. Adam, we know by now, will survive this moment of semantic vertigo. insolence and triviality and The Men are her anonymous callers, but as its repeated throughout Lerners novel, the term comes to stand for something larger a gathering storm of white male fury. Both earlier books feature the . Jane appears in a first person that seems at times as if it must have been transcribed directly, though Lerner explains that he wrote it by inhabiting her as with any character except that I know her voice in a different way. Poets were accused of perverting morality and corrupting the young, of being blasphemous, unpatriotic, and dirty. He has a solid, looming frame, though his rectangular glasses and short-sleeve button-downs dispel any hint of swagger or bravado. As Adam babbles into the phone, his parents, back in Kansas, hear his speech and his personality coming apart at the seams. Parts of the book, it seems, were also conceived in that strange, lively, generative place just slightly beyond the authors own control a bold, unusual experiment to undertake at a point in his career when he is getting more attention than ever. Ariana Mangual Figueroa is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.Search for more papers by this author. For Lerner, the Purple Cow game and Adams ventriloquising of the mothers voice are symmetrical in the book: the blending of their two voices is a version of the blurring of boundaries between parent and child thats benign. Scenes from Madrid continued to return to him, and within a few months hed completed a draft of something that he still hesitated to call a novel. When she asks him to tidy his room, he attempts to spread her with a barrage of arguments about her nagging, her hypocrisy, her failure to abide by the precepts she laid out in her books, her bizarre focus on conventional domestic order over the autonomy of others. She responds by modeling a different kind of language, a sort of antispread: speech as a means of self-knowledge and authentic connection. . ARIANA MANGUAL FIGUEROA, Corresponding Author. The so-called New York School of John Ashbery and Frank OHara was especially formative (a debt acknowledged in the new books title). He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a MacArthur Fellow. All this is the territory mapped by The Topeka School, a prequel to Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 that completes the story of Adam Gordons coming of age by excavating his beginnings, while also offering, as Lerner puts it, a prehistory of the regression to fascist unreason in the present. Janes biggest source of worry may be Adam himself, who she fears is absorbing the worst kinds of masculine behavior. BEN LERNER. they are If he had broadened his range and engaged with some of the writings of Pound, Stevens, Williams, Creeley, OHara, Levertov, Duncan, and others who challenge his view of poetry, he would have had a fuller discussion of the subject and a better book. Its like some weird homeopathic myth, that you avoid the novel but you are allowed to write one, Lerner says. But for Lerner the parallel gazes mark Ben as different he is far more aware of the concerns of others around him. prominence by half poets, the Ben goes to museums instead spending all day and night at Occupy Wall Street, but that does not mean he has given up on the promise of the latter. Poets really havent gotten the newsthat the novel is also dead, he says, of the opinion among some poets that writing in prose is a capitulation to market forces. that are important beyond all Long before Lerner began to fictionalize his own experience, he was already a character in Harriets work. they asked. In 2015 he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellowship. $200 per post at $10/CPM. The name for this kind of book is autofiction,4 and in the early 2010s Lerner emerged as one if its most gifted exponents. Don't let the boy just loaf about; If he writes verses, kick him out. admire what It wasin middle school, not high school. It made me really crazy, sometimes. (He jokes that after this Im going right into genre fiction. Even his hair drawn into a ponytail but shaved at the sides in a disastrous tonsorial compromise between the lefty household of his parents and the red state in which he was raised bears the marks of struggle. His mother is the clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner. Migrant workers spend 23 hours a day. The social novel sets out to speak for others but often merely speaks over them. It was late August, and Ben, together with his older brother, Matt, and their wives and children, were in town for a visit. He is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School, where he participated in debate and forensics, winning the 1997 National Forensic League National Tournament in International Extemporaneous Speaking. Instead, these novels, by authors like Sheila Heti and Jenny Offill, center on a richly turbulent subjectivity, a welcome corrective to manly bloat and overreach. Rasmus Lund Nielsen 26.03.2022. You can write one novel in your life as a poet.. Because the poems are largely concerned with the possibility of writing and being for, with finding a mode of address capable of something other than ironic detachment or expressing prefabricated structures of feeling, it seemed like cheating . Earlier this month, Michael Clune spoke to Lerner at Greenlight Books, in Brooklyn. He gazes at the painting alongside his best friend, a woman named Alex. In between storms, the narrator getsa book deal, tutors aneight-year-old immigrant from ElSalvador, takesketamine at a writing residency inMarfa, Texas, and navigates the donation of his sperm. Our theoretical and methodological framework centers on testimonioa narrative practice popularized in Latin American social movements in which an individual recounts a lived experience that is intended to be representative of a . We know that Ioanna Pagani, Adam R Campbell, and 22 other persons also lived at this address, perhaps within a different time frame. 'It made me really crazy': Ben Lerner on confronting male rage and family trauma, Lerners mother Harriet, author of the bestselling book. Though it has mutated over the centuries, with the lyric poem becoming in more recent times the favored mode of expression, it can still be defined as language that sounds better and means more.1 The miracle of poetry is that a three-thousand-year-old poem can still speak to us today. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86 pp., $12.00 (paper). Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. The bitterness of poetic logic is particularly astringent, Lerner says, because we were taught at an early age that we are all poets simply by virtue of being human. Undoubtedly, his teacher in Topeka had been reading Emerson and Whitman, but Lerner further alleges that this belief is one of the underlying reasons why poetry is so often met with contempt rather than mere indifference and why it is periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed. If The Topeka School is making what sounds like a bold argument that the seeds of our contemporary malaise were present in the language games that Adam played as a teenager it is doing so tentatively, without the rhetorical bluster and aggression of its adolescent protagonist. The residential address for Ariana is 182 Saint Marks Aven, NY 11238-3428. All his vocabularies were colliding and recombining, says Jonathan, his Topekan tough guy stuff, fast debate, language hed lifted from depressing Germans, his experimental poets, the familiar terminology of heartbreak. Its as though the spread, which Adam once deployed so ruthlessly, has returned to take its revenge. People complain that the spread divorces policy debate from the real world, that nobody save perhaps for auctioneers uses language in this maniacally accelerated fashion. It took extraordinary malice and determination over the centuries to destroy nearly every copy of every extant poem by Sappho. Not so long ago, the big, ambitious social novel, the novel that wanted to tell us about the way we live now or the state of the nation the novel as exemplified by Don DeLillos Underworld (1997) or Jonathan Franzens The Corrections (2001) enjoyed a prestige and cultural centrality that, in recent years, have come to seem distinctly suspect. However, the pharmaceutical extract called pure poetry is a deadly bore. Lerner quotes George Packer in a New Yorker blog post asking whether it is too late to convince president-elect Obama not to have a poem written and read at the inauguration: For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings. PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) When Benjamin Lerner became Philadelphia's chief public defender in 1975, he faced a stacked deck. She is interested in how students, who are. literalists of Ariana Mangual Figueroa is an Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Lerner wanted to be a lawyer until he discovered poetry in his midteens. result is not poetry, It was my way of being tough, of passing as a real man.. Two years later, Granta put him on its list of Best Young American Novelists. Lerner (left) with brother, Matt, in Phoenix in the early 1980s. That poets are not right in the head is a common belief. genuine. Yet exploring some of the more intimate territory in this novel clearly affected him in a new way. The question is a joke about how much of art is dissimulation; Adam, a poet, feels like afraud. They were from Ben, and Matt, who also went to Brown. Download Add to Lightbox. Stocking up on supplies at Whole Foods in the hours before Hurricane Irene is set to hit New York, Ben is suddenly transfixed by a container of instant coffee: With planes grounded and highways closed by the coming storm, he finds himself newly sensitized to the labor the harvesting, grinding, soaking, packaging and transportation concealed within the commodity. Looking for Ariana Mangual? Siendo reputados psiclogos clnicos, ambos supieron reaccionar con humor y empata . Ben Lerner in 1990 with his parents and grandmother, Rose Goldhor, in Topeka, Kan., reading a proclamation designating March 27 Dr. perfect contempt for it, one ariana mangual ben lerner. My parents have been very influential on my thinking Ben Lerner. The couple has two young daughters. The author discusses "Caf Loup," his story from the latest issue of the magazine. Its really weird to have these figures of post-apartheid, post-racial America and then have this man in front of this peeling mural and not know if history was happening or going backwards. He adds, of the artist: But Idont know what she was setting outto do.. As I lick lamb juice off my fingers,. A frame started to grow around them, and that frame became 10:04. These glitches in the narrative flow arent part of a metafictional game, a redundant reminder that what were reading is all made up; they are Lerners way of dramatizing his lack of confidence in his ability to speak for others, let alone the country as a whole. (They are now both in private practice.) If poetry is of no interest to people, its because they were frightened off it in school and have not bothered to read any since, not because poets failed their ideal of poetry. She also works as a research assistant in a translation project with Prof. Mangual Figueroa. 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