"The Lights: Ben Lerner's Poetry of Alien Illumination"
"Between the 'I' who remembers the sleepless night and the 'I' who probably slept for hours is another blurry border, on both sides of which we find Ben Lerner. He tells the story in his fourth collection of poems, The Lights (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). 'All my favorite books,' Lerner writes, 'were about built spaces / shading into wilds, worlds, Narnia through the wardrobe / . . . Max's bedroom becoming jungle, Harold drawing the moon / into existence.' Those books, which he read as a child and which now he reads to his young daughters, suggest a model for the kind of book he wants to be writing."
via THE NEW YORKER |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Niki Herd on Language as Form
"My poems usually take several months, if not years, to write themselves but 'Lyric Sung in Third Person' will only take a few short months. I often think cinematically and the poem's draft is asking me to deviate from the conversational tone of my previous work. It's asking for a reflective and lyrical treatment. Here, I imagine a canvas filled with lineated images and caesuras in my attempt to engage the visual and kinetic energy of the page." |
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