Profundity Interrupted: giving poetry one more chance with Ben Lerner's The Lights, Granta Poetry, 2023
Swen Steinhäuser
I am reading Ben Lerner’s The Lights (Granta Poetry, 2023). Poetry isn’t usually my thing. Or at least it wasn’t until recently. Poetry was around in my youth, when it suited the image I sought to project of myself: reading Baudelaire and Rimbaud at night by the river, whilst smoking under the yellow glow of the streetlights. You get the idea! But let’s not be unkind to the somber boy on the Schleuse. He wasn’t only trying to be cool. He had a genuine wish for something to lift him out of the emotional poverty of his surroundings. Back then, I seemed to have been infinitely at ease with not having much of a clue what was really going on in the poems that I was reading, in thrall to a vague sense of poetic intensity with which the gesture of my reading felt to be in touch. I clung onto vague impressions of mood and the occasional intelligible turn of phrase, collected fragments from an otherwise opaque whole, before badly appropriating them within my own teenage dabbling. As I got older, poetry almost entirely disappeared from the scene. My patience with its opacity running dry. Frustrated with feeling inadequate to the task of reading it properly, whatever that may have meant. Whilst more than at ease with the formal play of lyrical effects in other art forms, in the encounter with poetry I was quickly at a loss, more stubbornly hardwired to making sense, or forever uncertain as to when to hone in on and when to let go of it.
I know I am not the only one. A., for instance, who first told me about Lerner a couple of years ago - the blue cover of The Topeka School lying on the white, round table-top of his integrated kitchen-living space by the sea - has told me on several recent occasions of his absolute incapacity for poetry, repeatedly re-tested and repeatedly re-confirmed. Yes, he had looked at Lerner’s early volumes of poetry (No Art: Poems, Granta, 2023) shortly after reading the novels, A. told me the last time I saw him, but as per usual had been unable to make much headway. Although fascinated by what Lerner had to say about writing and reading poetry, whether in his essay (The Hatred of Poetry, Fitzcarraldo, 2016) or dispersed across the novels (Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, The Topeka School), when it came to an encounter with his actual published attempts at the form, A. felt, once again, forced into a swift capitulation.
I instantly recognised this dynamic as my own. The periodic pull of the idea of poetry and the great mental blockage baring all access. The amnesic return of a great enthusiasm and the returning pangs of bitter dejection. Yet as A. continued to speak to me at length of his great, unfathomable, by all accounts final exclusion from the literary form of the poetic, I realised, not without a faint stirring of excitement, that in spite of my own life-long struggle, I didn’t seem to feel quite as resigned, or in any case not yet, or perhaps, no longer. Chances were we merely stood on different points of the endlessly curving waves of oscillation between our hapless desires and brutal disappointments. Had I not only recently become once more embroiled in the question of the status of poetry in my life? Tempted, no doubt, if not challenged, by some favourable comment of Simon Critchley on Wallace Stevens, as well as seeing Frances from Conversations with Friends with a copy of Louise Glück in her hands, in that scene with Melissa in the bookshop I watched on BBC I-Player? Wallace Stevens worked well for some time, before the onset of a familiar blurring. Glück, on the other hand, was something of a revelation. A gateway into a possible future saturated with poetry as a new pleasure and task.
I avoided the common mistake of picking up an edition of collected works and purchased two slim, elegant, stand-alone collections that slipped neatly into the inside pocket of my coat, published by a local publisher, Manchester’s Carcanet Press. In The Wild Iris, as well as Glück’s more recent, now last, Winter Recipes from the Collective, I found a large number of poems that no longer presented themselves to me as mere obstacles and occasions of great consternation, but which opened up gently towards light sensations of pleasure, feeling and sense. Above all, I felt, whether mistakenly or not, the poems revealed to me something of the gesture that had produced them. Not since the summer of 98 and a collection of love poems I had written in the sparse, minimalist style of Wolf Wondratschek for Jenny K., was I tempted to appropriate the gesture. The mere thought of it, however speculative at this stage, an important shift in the potential pleasure of my reading.
*
Reading Lerner’s poetry perhaps does something similar to me, albeit for different reasons. It invites me to figure it out alongside him. What poetry is, as genre, form, gesture, craft and event? What it still has to offer to a writer, a reader, a reader-writer, an amateur like me? And what might its offering be for the collective? What soft powers remain for poetry to gather us up into a small commons off the beaten track through the ‘experiment in the collectivisation of feeling’ that its always probable failure will have constituted nevertheless? To a large degree, the invitation will have issued, long in advance of reading the poems proper, from an encounter with Lerner’s prose. Overcome by that same sense of curiosity that had momentarily inspired A., however foolishly, to give poetry one last chance. Packed full of funny, intelligent, irreverent, at times despairing but always loving accounts of reading, writing, publishing and thinking about poetry in amongst the great mix of other events that make up its poet-narrator’s everyday, the novels can have that effect on you, luring your (renewed) interest in what possibilities of pleasure and purpose may lie beyond the more familiar grooves of prose. No more so perhaps than in Leaving the Atocha station, where we encounter the auto-fictional narrator on a prestigious poetry residency in Madrid, caught between the act of a youthful swagger and copious amounts of self-doubt.
But apart from the way Lerner’s discourse on poetry seeps into my reading of it - an inter-text which his work weaves to great effect, echoing a number of recurring themes, motifs and biographical details of people, places and events across the various books and genres - the poems themselves often leave me with the impression of retracing a self-conscious, unsettled, self-critical gesture. Like the insecure narrator of the novel, caught between conflicting modalities of pretending to be a poet and pretending not to be a poet, these poems have a searching quality about them, written in a subtly alienated voice, somewhat theatrical, subject to a tendency to double up in self-enquiry, doing something whilst observing what they are doing, projecting themselves and gazing back, ‘to be on both sides of the poem/ shuttling between the you and I’, a palpable showing of the uncertain gesture of composition in the final text.
But whereas the Lerner of Leaving the Atocha Station was ridden with doubt regarding his identity as poet before various lovers, publics and institutions, the Lerner of The Lights finds himself uncomfortably exposed before a different audience, questioned by the ‘gentle/ relentless pressure [that] has been placed/ on the page’ by the birth of his daughters, ‘readers’ that ‘love has brought into the world’.
‘… I paid someone to care for them, so I
could pattern these vowels and one
is eight and asking me each
night to read what I’ve made
in what they call my office
I am afraid
they will understand it or won’t, will see
something they should
not remember when I’m gone, the voice that is
mine only in part must be kept
safe from them. ...’
*
The poems of The Lights are framed under the heading of prose poems, a title which gathers poems of a variety of styles, from the prosaic to the cryptic, from poems with unpredictable, grammatically challenging line breaks to a series of long blocks of text spanning several pages. Perhaps poems only by an old name, comprised of narratives shot through with lyrical effects of discontinuity, echo, refrain, citation, shifts of context and points of view, modelled on overheard voicemails, speech acts both private and public, distracted, discontinuous and multilayered.
The prose poem, Lerner says, is a hybrid genre that can absorb other genres. It figures, it must be possible to approach it from either end.
Prose giving way to poetry.
Poetry giving way to prose.
When A. first told me about Lerner in his rented flat by the sea, he immediately caught my attention in describing this slippage. Yet when I read the novels soon after, I felt I must have misunderstood. What I hoped for from a merging of the two genres was more or less present, but thematised rather than actualised, in a style that struck me, for the most part and somewhat counterintuitively, as skilfully wedded to a deep sense of flow.
The auto-fictional narrator of Leaving the Atocha station proclaims just such a taste for the ‘sheer directionality of prose’, contrasting its receptive ease to the temporal drag of the lyric, which stands awkwardly within time’s linear unfolding, a thingly impediment to the smooth passage of our reading.
Flickering between remainders of fluidity and a thingly opacity of poetic encryption that comes to interrupt it, The Lights explores the very passage between the two forms and their equivalent modes of reading more akin to the way that I had first expected it from the novels. Still leaving me clueless in certain parts, this combination allows me to more readily accept the occasional need to slow down my reading, retracing a discontinuous sentence back up its dizzying break of line, to recover the flimsy remains of a running thread.
*
Because it’s not always clear whether Lerner’s poems pretend to be poems or pretend not to be poems, they carry the palpable trace of a certain mistrust in the form. Above all though, they question poetry’s claim to facilitate a profound experience of art, content with conveying what Lerner elsewhere calls a mere ‘echo of poetic possibility’, ‘a profound experience of the absence of profundity’. Throughout The Lights runs such a playfully sincere sense of profundity interrupted, by way of a formal unsettledness and recurring meta-commentary on the form, as well as that strange mixture of wry irreverence and what we might call ‘infinite patience (to the point of nonexistence)’ with the remainder of an echo of genuine poetic possibility – whatever it may be.