Ben Lerner Quotes
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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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The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media.
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I imagined the passengers could see me, imagined I was a passenger that could see me looking up at myself looking down.
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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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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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But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame.
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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 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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Of course, if we’ve learned anything, it’s how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.
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I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
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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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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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I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn's boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism.
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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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When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.
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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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...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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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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Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
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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.
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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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A face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly.