It was my way of being tough, of passing as a real man.. When I first met him in Brooklyn earlier this summer, he and his wife, Ariana Mangual, a professor of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, were about to buy a house in Kensington, not far from Brooklyn College, where Lerner teaches English and creative writing. Photo credit: Ariana Mangual Ben Lerner is a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist with plenty of well-deserved accolades he's currently a MacArthur Fellow, has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a finalist for the National Book Award, and has won the Believer Book Award and the Hayden Carruth Award, among others. Metaphor, the very soul of poetry, was demoted to a superfluous stylistic ornament. His novel " The Plains ," first . The video iscalled Personal by Steffani Jemison. There follows a very funny portrait of the artist as a young mansplainer: Then Ben pulled out all the stops to construct a major feminist case. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. Callow, lazy and insecure, Adam spends a lot of time in museums fretting over his inability to feel absorbed or transported by whats on the walls.5 He invests most of his creative energies not in composing the long, research-driven poem about the Spanish Civil War he has supposedly come to Spain to write (an instance of white male overreach if ever there was one) but in constructing a persona he hopes will make him alluring to the locals. He gazes at the painting alongside his best friend, a woman named Alex. He is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School, where he participated in debate and forensics, winning the 1997 National Forensic League National Tournament in International Extemporaneous Speaking. Jane figures out a way to handle the men who whisper obscenities at her by asking them repeatedly to speak louder, forcing them to inhabit and take responsibility for their own speech (at which point, spooked, they hang up). So, how much is Ben Lerner worth at the age of 43 years old? Siendo reputados psiclogos clnicos, ambos supieron reaccionar con humor y empata . all its rawness and They made no secret, for example, of the fact that they hadnt planned to have a second child, even if his arrival came as a welcome surprise. The dialogue opens with Ben Rampton and Constadina Charalambous, who introduce the concept of (in)securitisation from International Relations research and sketch potential connections and challenges to standard sociolinguistic theories and concepts. That this little-understood and often marginalized human activity has given the world some of the greatest works of literature, many of which have outlived the civilizations and the languages in which they were originally composed, is beyond dispute. She knew what she meant by the genuine and what a poem is and so would have Lerner and his readers had he quoted the longer version of Poetry that she tinkered with from 1919 to 1967 and not only republished from book to book, but allowed to be widely anthologized, instead of basing his own book on her final condensed version of the poem, which both her readers and fellow poets regarded as a big mistake. All this is the territory mapped by The Topeka School, a prequel to Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 that completes the story of Adam Gordons coming of age by excavating his beginnings, while also offering, as Lerner puts it, a prehistory of the regression to fascist unreason in the present. Hands that can grasp, eyes The novel has to respond intelligently tothis fact, which isthat when you seeakid, you no longer necessarily assume the kid was made bytwo people having sex, he says. January 30, 2020 Professor Ariana Mangual Figueroa draws on her own upbringing and experiences as a New York City teacher to study how schools and immigration policies impact young, bicultural students. It suddenly became much more real to him that he was in it, Harriet told me. The idea that Adam might try to describe anything more ambitious that he might somehow manage to produce an epic historical poem is clearly a nonstarter; just getting through a basic conversation in Spanish is often beyond his abilities. If he writes verses, kick him out. In the case of Moore it would be her extraordinary curiosity and openness to experience, her readiness to include even business documents and school books among the raw materials of a poem. Moore is pleased to encounter mention of real things in poems, not because a higher meaning can be imputed to them, but because they recall the delight we experience every time we notice something we failed to notice before, making such moments in our lives, and the lessons that can be drawn from them, useful. At the same time, The Topeka School makes it clear that Adams voice the supple, responsive, many-minded voice of the novel itself was in large part shaped by that of his mother. to discriminate against Lerner lives with his wife, Ariana Mangual, in Berkeley and teaches poetry and literature at California College of the Arts in Oakland. If we have a tradition in poetryand we doit goes back to the Transcendentalists and their empirical approach to experience, the idea that you eschew abstractions and begin with something concrete, what William Carlos Williams called no ideas but in things. After that, you are on your own. Its like some weird homeopathic myth, that you avoid the novel but you are allowed to write one, Lerner says. literalists of Which is, Weve learned our lesson, universality is impossible, so theres no point in even testing which parts of consciousness are shareable. And that was something I felt now more than ever that I needed to do.. Does she have a particular kind of poetry in mind, or is she condemning all poetry? derivative as to become Im going to rape you; Somebody should rape you; You were probably raped; If you werent so ugly, youd get raped. Jane suspects that Adam has been listening in on these calls and worries they may be doing lasting damage to his psyche. Lerner turned to fiction only after publishing three volumes of poetry (the second, Angle of Yaw, got him shortlisted for a National book award in 2006), and his novels share a disarming, conversational tone, a taste for collage, and a playful attitude to the line between life and art a line poets have never been called on to respect. perfect contempt for it, one Available Formats. holding on upside down or One morning at the Prado Museum hed seen a man burst into tears before an old painting. What Gombrowicz is objecting to, many readers would agree with. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); When asked about his home, Czesaw Miosz said that he came from another planet, another time, Charles Simic has been Poet Laureate of the United States. As a downside of this nervous condition, the octopus has a poor concept of its overall position in space. . . On my second day in Kansas, the Lerners took me to see Topeka, a half-hour drive from Lawrence, where Harriet and Stephen moved the year before the Menninger Foundation relocated to Houston in 2003. However, the pharmaceutical extract called pure poetry is a deadly bore. Ben Lerner in 1990 with his parents and grandmother, Rose Goldhor, in Topeka, Kan., reading a proclamation designating March 27 Dr. Ariana Mangual Figueroa is an Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Programs in Urban Education and Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. Over burgers at an old-style diner with red vinyl booths and checkered flooring, Ben was keen to stress his lasting affection for Topeka, where many of his closest friendships began. The book thus embodies a poignant reciprocity.10 The grown-up Adam foregrounds the fact that Janes voice is his creation or reconstruction. As it does for many people, parenthood not only brought back memories of his own childhood, but also gave Lerner new imaginative access to what that time must have been like for his mother and father. Rasmus Lund Nielsen 26.03.2022. Not so long ago, the big, ambitious social novel, the novel that wanted to tell us about the way we live now or the state of the nation the novel as exemplified by Don DeLillos Underworld (1997) or Jonathan Franzens The Corrections (2001) enjoyed a prestige and cultural centrality that, in recent years, have come to seem distinctly suspect. The novel opens in the fall of 1996, when Adam is a high-school senior and Bob Dole is about to be crushed by Bill Clinton at the polls a resounding confirmation, it seems at the time, that cultural conservatism is on the wane. Thus the poet is a tragic figure, because a poem is always a record of failure. Lerner agrees with Grossman. Poetry readings, with crowds sometimes numbering into hundreds, have been a staple of colleges and universities for the last fifty years, with those taking place in New York City listed in the magazine he works for. document.getElementById( "ak_js_3" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); 1963-2023 NYREV, Inc. All rights reserved. I met Lerner at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on a rainy afternoon in early December. He wanders thebridges and parks of New York City, watches Christian Marclays film The Clock, and goes to the Met andthe Museum of Natural History. Its also where the teenage Ben first learned to talk rings around people, becoming a state and national champion in competitive debate and holding his own against the other boys at parties where middle-class white kids strove to outdo each other in appropriating some version of rap culture with the superior quality of his freestyling. American poetry is a kind of do-it-yourself metaphysics. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 86 pp., $12.00 (paper). GSE's Dr. Ariana Mangual Figueroa conducts ethnographic research on how immigration status shapes the lives of students in early and middle childhood. His creative work now seems pleasantly bifurcated: he still writes poems for experimental collaborations with visual artists and intellectuals, while collecting mainstream accolades as a novelist. Do you have kids? he asks the cop. . (August 2018), Charles Wright in Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry, edited by Dennis ODriscoll (Copper Canyon, 2008), p. 6. For Lerner, the Purple Cow game and Adams ventriloquising of the mothers voice are symmetrical in the book: the blending of their two voices is a version of the blurring of boundaries between parent and child thats benign. Harriet said no, inaugurating a lengthy filial pressure campaign. Since I was always broke, I went. [4] they cannot afford to smoke. Lerner describes this section as the big psychological gamble at the core of the book, and its also the place where it becomes clearest that Lerners interest in language that conceals rather than reveals has never been only intellectual or artistic its also connected to intergenerational trauma. Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App. nor till the poets among us can ARIANA MANGUAL FIGUEROA, PhD, is an associate professor at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016; [email protected]. The fact/fiction divide is like a therapeutic frame, he says. If he had broadened his range and engaged with some of the writings of Pound, Stevens, Williams, Creeley, OHara, Levertov, Duncan, and others who challenge his view of poetry, he would have had a fuller discussion of the subject and a better book. The poet, by his very claim to being a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and an accusation. When I first met him in Brooklyn earlier this summer, he and his wife, Ariana Mangual, a professor of Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center, were about to buy a house in Kensington, not. all of us, that we do not Writing in the New Yorker, the critic James Wood described Adam as a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through atime of inflamed political certainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty. A few minutes earlier wed made a pit stop at the largest gas station Id 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. In The Topeka School, Lerners extraordinary new novel, the story of the chewing gum is recounted by Jane Gordon, a fictionalized version of the authors mother. August 29, 2022 Your story . In a way the trilogy culminates in the understanding that there are no grownups. The Australian writer Gerald Murnane was born in a suburb of Melbourne, in 1939, and has spent his entire life in Australia. The Topeka School is published by Granta (16.99). we cannot understand: the bat Please upgrade your browser. If poetry is of no interest to people, its because they were frightened off it in school and have not bothered to read any since, not because poets failed their ideal of poetry. Ariana Mangual Figueroa is an assistant professor of language education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 10 Seminary Place, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 USA; e-mail: amf@gse.rutgers.edu. The Mother Dance,11 her book on raising children, doesnt stint on anecdotes about her two sons and the intergenerational power struggles that were a defining feature of their household (although it does omit the story of the chewing gum, something Ben explicitly requested). At age 10, we learn, Ben announced that he wanted to get his ear pierced. As Lerner writes, of the octopus, andof his narrator, who is also named Ben: the octopus can detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate that information into a larger picture, cannot read the realistic fiction the world appears to be. My parents let me play even after Id had two concussions. The boys middle school scrolled by. His creation or reconstruction like some weird homeopathic myth, that you avoid the novel you... Plains, & quot ; the Plains, & quot ; first, inaugurating lengthy. Claim to being a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and an.... 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