Ben Lerner Quotes
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I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.
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Possessing a weapon has made me bashful. Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure. The ether of data engulfs the capitol. Possessing a weapon has made me forgetful. My oboe tars her cenotaph. The surface is in process. Coruscant skinks emerge in force. The moon spits on a copse of spruce. Plausible opposites stir in the brush. Jupiter spins in its ruts. The wind extends its every courtesy. I have never been here. Understand? You have never seen me.
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The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media.
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
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Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours.
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All I ask the haters – is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences, it might come to resemble love.
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There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.
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I will begin to remember our walk in the third person, as if I’d seen it from the Manhattan Bridge, but, at the time of writing, as I lean against the chain-link fence intended to stop jumpers, I am looking back at the totaled city in the second person plural. I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is.
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The problem is that if you're self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn't something lost - some kind of presence? You're distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.
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...it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol—especially men who had won international literary prizes—that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal.
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I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.
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Fiction doesn't appeal to me because it can describe physical appearances exhaustively or because it can offer access to the inner depths of an array of human characters - neither that kind of "realism" of bodily surfaces nor of individual psychologies seems particularly realistic to me.
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Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine.
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Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
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But these guys were also so pitiful—I pictured them sitting in their La-Z-Boys, working up the courage to make their obscene call, maybe jacking off after from all the excitement, if not during—I couldn’t really take them seriously, or only took them seriously as specimens of the ugly fragility of masculinity.
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Of course, if we’ve learned anything, it’s how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.
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I guess when I'm frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I've tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.
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If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical—the human world of violence and difference—and to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel called upon to sing, because of that transcendent impulse. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms.
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I promised to pass through a series of worlds with you,” I remembered from her vows.
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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased--the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.
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A face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly.
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Why reproduce if you believe the world is ending? Because the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love.