BL I’m just saying that the biggest embarrassment about prose is the dialogue. So a certain kind of comedy is inescapable for me in the scene of literature. It was late August, and Ben, together with his older brother, Matt, and their wives and children, were in town for a visit. I don’t know how that works in a performance that takes place in a gallery. “I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a kind of simulated castration thing, an attempt not to be a boy, a man, one of the Men,” says Jane, ever the analyst. ), Kathryn Hahn’s Funny, Sensual Portrayals of Female Desire, ‘I Want to Explore the Wonder of What It Is to Be a Black American’, Rosalía’s Incredible Journey From Flamenco to Megastardom, To Decode White Male Rage, First He Had to Write in His Mother’s Voice. Late on in “The Topeka School,” Adam, now a college freshman visiting New York, suffers a nervous breakdown during an Ashbery reading at the 92nd Street Y. It’s a frightening scene. And the denunciations that I’ve looked at—like this big one in Harper’s recently—all say something about poetry having abdicated its responsibility to speak to the masses and realize a more perfect union kind of thing. “ ‘It got stuck!’ As though the whole thing had been an accident!”. Were you just hanging out? AR I can only take Olson through [John] Weiners. His third poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010. and Subtraction. AR Well, I can’t speak about that—that would be obscene. It’s a real poem from the historical author inserted into the fiction. by Sina Najafi, Carroll Dunham’s Note to Self (Drawings 1979–2014) AR I’m glad you said so. I had this experience two weeks ago where someone, who doesn’t have the right to, called me Ari—I was completely undone by it. The character Adam Gordon will already be familiar to readers of “Leaving the Atocha Station” (2011), Lerner’s very funny debut novel, where he appears as a rudderless young poet on a fellowship in Madrid. AR Exactly, but that was Whitman’s practical problem as a poet, because in solving the problem of address, as he continued to expand Leaves of Grass, he ruined it more and more. BL Part of the interesting answer I hear you giving is: “The gallery is hailing me; the gallery is waving at me—or at least thinks it is.”. A few minutes earlier we’d made a pit stop at the largest gas station I’d ever seen,3 and Lerner had returned from the convenience store with a pack of Juicy Fruit, which prompted him to begin recounting the gum story from his childhood. He eats the octopus and feels like he dreams the octopus’s dreams. “My parents let me play even after I’d had two concussions.” The boys’ middle school scrolled by. There were these deer there, the only underprivileged creatures on the whole island. BL That’s really beautiful. Lerner had decided to devote his life to art, but had he ever had an aesthetic experience of comparable magnitude? I am convinced of the authenticity of the summonses she receives and the summonses she issues and when I read her I am reminded that all of this is a calling before it’s an identity or career. It is what Avital Ronell would call a paternity suit, and the GPS precision of its accuracies is delicious: you can’t put the book down. The social novel sets out to speak for others but often merely speaks over them. BL That’s true. BOMB's Oral History Project is dedicated to collecting, documenting, and preserving the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora. If Ben Lerner has an ethics, or a poetics, it’s this: he always tells from what angle he’s looking at something, and, increasingly, he tells from what angles he feels that the state—but also you—or whatever it is that looks through our world’s many viewfinders—might see him. It’s a poem. Like it’s not how language is processed and since it’s also the biggest investment in realism, it fails the most spectacularly. AR I’m just wondering if you’re a funny person, like in real life?

.

Does Home Depot Price Match, Canon Logo Png, Cardinal Meaning In Malayalam, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik Sheet Music Violin, Bioshock 2 Protector Trials Guide, No Bake Lemon Pie, Sweetened Condensed Milk, Tere Bin Nahi Lage Chords,