With three volumes of poetry, three novels, a book-length essay on poetry, and collaborations with artists resulting in four artists’ books, Ben Lerner has established himself as one of the most important writers of his generation in the United States today.
While his poetry and collaborations with artists have been enthusiastically received, the author’s widespread and international success derives principally from his novels, which have generated a considerable number of reviews and scholarly articles since the publication of Leaving the Atocha Station in 2011. These novels are not only notable in how they disturb conventional notions regarding the distinction between the “factual” and the “fictive,” history and fable, on both formal and thematic levels. They additionally rupture generic boundaries in the most material way, often incorporating into fictional contexts poems, essays, prose fragments, or in one instance a short story that have previously been published under the name “Ben Lerner,” thereby repurposing and re-using writing in ways which trouble many conceptions of authorship and identity, and breaking apart the closed space of “fiction” as such.
Similar tendencies can be seen throughout Lerner’s work, which, as noted, often takes the form of collaboration with other writers or visual artists, and foregrounds the inclusion of generically different forms of writing, or visual art in collision with text. Lerner does not only work in different genres, he forces us to rethink the manners in which genres are defined, and the purposes these definitions serve.
Similarly, his speculations on poetry as “virtual” aim to trouble the conception of the poem as a discrete, finished, and total object in a manner that looks back to the “serial poem” of Jack Spicer or Robert Duncan, while the interwoven dialogues between poetry and prose he has established between his works can even be seen to constitute a kind of serial, autobiographical prosimetrum, in a manner which might recall the ambitious life projects that emerged in the late 19th century and flourished with modernism (with Baudelaire, Benjamin, Rilke, Proust, and Woolf among others). At the same time, Lerner’s work regularly insists on the direct relation of what could seem to be formal or theoretical questions to sociality, friendship and therefore concrete constructions of community, and forms of activism or collective engagement.
While his poetry and collaborations with artists have been enthusiastically received, the author’s widespread and international success derives principally from his novels, which have generated a considerable number of reviews and scholarly articles since the publication of Leaving the Atocha Station in 2011. These novels are not only notable in how they disturb conventional notions regarding the distinction between the “factual” and the “fictive,” history and fable, on both formal and thematic levels. They additionally rupture generic boundaries in the most material way, often incorporating into fictional contexts poems, essays, prose fragments, or in one instance a short story that have previously been published under the name “Ben Lerner,” thereby repurposing and re-using writing in ways which trouble many conceptions of authorship and identity, and breaking apart the closed space of “fiction” as such.
Similar tendencies can be seen throughout Lerner’s work, which, as noted, often takes the form of collaboration with other writers or visual artists, and foregrounds the inclusion of generically different forms of writing, or visual art in collision with text. Lerner does not only work in different genres, he forces us to rethink the manners in which genres are defined, and the purposes these definitions serve.
Similarly, his speculations on poetry as “virtual” aim to trouble the conception of the poem as a discrete, finished, and total object in a manner that looks back to the “serial poem” of Jack Spicer or Robert Duncan, while the interwoven dialogues between poetry and prose he has established between his works can even be seen to constitute a kind of serial, autobiographical prosimetrum, in a manner which might recall the ambitious life projects that emerged in the late 19th century and flourished with modernism (with Baudelaire, Benjamin, Rilke, Proust, and Woolf among others). At the same time, Lerner’s work regularly insists on the direct relation of what could seem to be formal or theoretical questions to sociality, friendship and therefore concrete constructions of community, and forms of activism or collective engagement.
FictionLeaving the Atocha Station
(Coffee House Press, 2011) 10:04
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) The Topeka School
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) |
PoetryThe Lichtenberg Figures
(Copper Canyon Press, 2004) Angle of Yaw
(Copper Canyon Press, 2006) Mean Free Path
(Copper Canyon Press, 2010) The Hatred of Poetry
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) |
Artistic collaborationsBlossom (with Thomas Demand)
(Mack Books, 2015) The Polish Rider (with Anna Ostaya)
(Mack Books, 2018) The Snows of Venice (with AlexanderKluge)
(Spector Books, 2018) Gold Custody (with Barbara Bloom)
(Mack Books, 2021) |