Ben Lerner Interviewed by His Former Student, Ocean Vuong

At Literary Hub, read a conversation between poet and novelist, Ben Lerner, and poet and novelist Ocean Vuong. As an undergraduate, Vuong studied with Lerner at Brooklyn College. More recently, Lerner's newest novel, The Topeka School, has garnered much praise, and Vuong's debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, arrived on bookstore shelves last year to similar acclaim. In his introduction, Vuong explains: "I first encountered Ben Lerner as an undergraduate in one of his poetry workshops at Brooklyn College. Ten minutes into our first class I flipped open my schedule to double check that I had not, in fact, accidently stepped into a graduate course." Reading on from there: 

Ben spoke to us as if we were his peers, a portion of the campus citizenry assembled to assess a crisis ahead of us—not his subordinate charges. Although Hurricane Irene (category 3) was set to make landfall in a week, the crisis, Ben made clear, was language.

That was what made his class so captivating to a young writer like myself: he grounded the discussion with stakes rooted in our lived world. We did not, as in other classes, catalogue literary epochs like distant names on a map, but asked how national, social and personal crises inflected literary innovations within the tradition. We were all, it was soon evident, not receiving knowledge from a teacher but collectively thinking through strategies to process the culture around us, one where the shouts of spill-over protestors from Occupy Wall Street and those fighting tuition increases in the CUNY system echoed through our windows.

In other words, we were in a Ben Lerner novel—or rather, we began to ask of language what his protagonists ask of themselves: can art make the impossible thinkable and the unknowable felt?

Continue reading at Literary Hub.