Ben Lerner Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media.
-
Objecting to the diagnosis of penis envy was a sure sign of penis envy.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.
-
Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
...no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility.
-
A face you know intimately is most disturbingly altered when it’s altered only slightly.
-
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.
-
I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.
-
I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
-
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.
-
...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.
-
Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?
-
Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.