Ben Lerner's 'BAM Takeover'

As part of Brooklyn Academy of Music's "Eat, Drink & Be Merry" series, poet and novelist Ben Lerner joined the New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman on Tuesday night to discuss, among other topics, "the responsibility of the artist in these trying times." We're sad to have missed it, but grateful to Emily Temple who not only attended the event but also shared highlights from their discussion at Literary Hub. One of our favorite excerpts is Lerner's response to the difference between writing fiction and poetry: "Poetry just feels like much more of a push-pull relationship with material. And I never want the language to dissolve into what’s being narrated; it always feels like more thingly, which doesn’t mean that I don’t care about what the language is referring to, but I feel less in control of that." Why not start there?

It’s a different compositional speed for me; I can’t go to the next line unless I’ve basically solved the problem of the previous line. I’m not saying it always works, but I feel that way—whereas in prose I feel like I can write a paragraph where I know I’m just getting to the next thing, and that paragraph’s gonna be a problem later that I can fix. In in the language game of poetry it’s very hard to go on—I can’t go on until I feel like I have some resolution to the preceding line. I wish it were otherwise, actually, because it makes me really crazy. Fiction and non-fiction feel the same to me… so the different genres are all in one larger syntax, and sometimes what I feel able to do in one is based on what I did in the other, but the real answer is I don’t know. The best and worst thing about writing is that I don’t feel like you know how to do it by virtue of having done it.

On writing as sociology:

Maybe the [term] echo chamber is good, in the sense where you can kind of show all the Englishes in the English in order to produce a less sanitized image of the state of American English in a particular moment, an irreducibly plural thing. In a really traditional sense, [novels] are about the individual’s relation to the social, which is always mediated by language, and produces comic kinds of disconnects, or tragic kinds of disconnects— a good novel is producing, not in any universalizing way, one vector of what it’s like to be alive now. A rich texture of the present communicated in that book. I think it’s really good at that, the novel.

Continue at Literary Hub.