For me there's not a clear distinction between
the kind of critical and creative work, both
because like my novels and poems are probably
— I don't know how unusual it is, but they're
very — they're very inflected with critical
language and trying to be vehicles for critical
thought — but also because my criticism
is very personal. My name is Ben Lerner and
I'm a writer; I'm a poet and novelist and
kind of occasional critic, but I was a poet
first and poetry remains the core for me.
And No Art collects the three books of poems
I've published in the United States along
with a handful of new poems. I think poetry
is a space where you can make all the different
languages in the language collide and, you
know, I really love the — there is [Mikhail]
Bakhtin who used to celebrate the novel as
this form, he celebrated what he called the
heteroglossia of the novel, you know, that
you could have all these different kinds of
languages in the novel. And he thought of
that as really specifically novelistic as
opposed to the poem which he thought of as
univocal, right, there's like one smooth lyric
voice. The reality is that what I see as like
often disconcertingly univocal is a lot of
contemporary fiction — that I feel like
even if there's dialogue feels like it's in
one very managed voice. Whereas I think a
lot of different kinds of poets in different
ways are experimenting with poetry as a really
heteroglot space. I mean sometimes like literally
having more than one language in the poem,
or just showing the way that we're all tissues
of different kinds of discourse. Because each
of us has many voices, this is the way you
can produce an authentic image of what it
means to be, you know, to say I, that whenever
you say I you're — you end up speaking many
different languages at once. I think that's
one of the things that appeals most to me
about poetry, is the way it can pressurize
all those different kinds of language. I didn't
think I would ever write any fiction. I just
never even — I didn't write a line of something
I considered fiction until I wrote Leaving
the Atocha Station. But I think what happened
for me is that the novel became a form that
could assimilate all these other kinds of
writing. So my first novel contains poems
— both novels contain poems — contain
kind of repurposed language from essays I'd
written in addition to containing, you know,
kind of ‘pure fiction’ — whatever that
means. So I like having more than one genre
so I have different areas to experiment with,
but I also like the way one genre like the
novel can, you know, can absorb an array of
practices and other arts. I think for me each
genre becomes a laboratory for testing an
idea, and it's nice to have like more than
one space in which to test out an idea or
a set of linguistic possibilities. So like
in Mean Free Path for example, my third book
of poems, I'm trying to do this thing formally
where the lines in a particular stanza can
be read in more than one possible combination
— that the reader kind of articulates the
stanza into one or more set of possible meanings.
And you could use that kind of language of
the virtual and actual to say, you know, that's
a tactic for defeating actuality; the poem
never becomes a closed, finished artefact,
it's suspended in this state where there are
multiple, you know, possibilities of combination
and recombination. And one way to talk about
what I'm trying to do there is the resistance
to a kind of closure which would make the
poem kind of merely succumb to time, to just
being one kind of finished object. In The
Lichtenberg Figures, which is a book I wrote
when I was very young, you know — I mean
I started it when I was I guess like a junior
in college I think, maybe. And I was — it
was an early moment for me of having moved
kind of from Topeka, Kansas to this fancy
school on the East Coast, and I think part
of what's happening in that book is I'm kind
of experimenting with all the different kinds
of English that I was ex— you know around,
like what I'd grown up with, or the new language
of theory, or literary language that I was
starting to encounter. But one of the major
motifs in that book is the tremendous violence
of Topeka: a kind of masculine, unmotivated
violence that I would associate with something
like Columbine High School, you know, which
happened when I was in college, and which
felt inevitable as a kind of example of like
what — of this kind of nihilism that was
in American kind of suburbs. A lot of that
violence and the language of that violence
and that kind of frightening disassociation
is circulating through The Lichtenberg Figures.
In 10:04 and in recent poems that I've been
writing I've been trying to think about the
second person plural — which we don't, you
know, actually have in English — but that
idea of being able to address not just a single,
like, lyric beloved, but really to be able
to imagine kind of addressing a social body.
And it's not like I've figured out how to
do that, but I do think pronouns are really
interesting. Pronouns are sometimes spaces
of incredible intimacy and sometimes spaces
of great distance, you know, like a voice
just barely coming to you across, you know,
space and time. So for me the kind of — my,
like, wonder before pronouns is really kind
of a key element of my thinking about poetry.
No Art of anything that I've published represents
the greatest like span of time because it
has some very new poems in it and it has poems
I wrote when I was — I think I wrote the
first poem of The Lichtenberg Figures when
I was maybe nineteen or something. No Art
is also the name of a poem that's the last
poem in the book, and that poem is — that
poem basically claims — I mean that poem
is a kind of manifesto of the idea that love
and feeling are more important than a kind
of avant-garde proceduralism and that we have
to beware of kind of ironic detachment, like
it's a calling for a possibility of feeling
in poetry. So what — when you see the title
for the book it might sound merely critical,
but when you arrive at the end of the book
the title has a different kind of resonance;
it has that line about 'No art is total, not
even theirs' where their — where it's talking
about military technology at one point. So
I guess I’m saying that No Art starts as
sounding very critical and by the end of the
book it's kind of revalued, and I like the
idea of a title that's shifted across the
journey of the book, if that makes sense.
And I guess I'd also — I think of the — I
think of it as all like one work, you know,
that there's a relationship between the novels
and the poems both in the sense that I, like,
recycle language and cannibalise ideas, and
just in the sense that I think of the books
as talking to each other, that they kind of
form one long sentence. So I'm really happy
that this book exists in England where otherwise
there were just the novels.
