Ben Lerner
The Lights
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2023

T

he Lights is Ben Lerner’s return to verse form, after a trilogy of celebrated novels. Before the novels, Lerner published a trilogy of poetry books, culminating in Mean Free Path (2010). Since then, many readers, reviewers, and scholars have allowed themselves to think of Lerner as a novelist who once wrote poetry. This judgment corresponds to the market dominance of the novel form over poetry, the tendency of the former to displace the latter in contemporary literary culture, but in Lerner’s case it always jarred against the prominence of lyric poetry in each of his novels. In the most well-known of them, 10:04, the poet/novelist protagonist reads Walt Whitman and holds a residency in Marfa, Texas, where he composes Lerner’s long poem about reading Whitman and holding a residency in Marfa, Texas, “The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also.” The poem undergirds the novel like the crossbeams of the Brooklyn Bridge, or rather the novel “dissolves into a poem,” to borrow a phrase from 10:04 itself. First collected in No Art, which reprints the poetic trilogy alongside four newer poems, “The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also” resurfaces in The Lights. Lerner’s Whitman poem has traveled from poetry to novel back to poetry, and so has Lerner.

In a 2019 interview with Ocean Vuong, Lerner predicted that The Topeka School, published that year, would be his last novel. So far he has kept that promise. Readers of his poetry are now afforded the opportunity to think of him as a poet who once wrote novels. Yet that isn’t quite right either, particularly since many of the poems in The Lights are medium-length prose dramas with scenes, characters, and dialogue, some so long that they first appeared in the New Yorker labeled “Fiction.” Lerner’s poetry has learned something from Lerner’s fiction. The great longitudinal fissure between the poetry hemisphere and the fiction hemisphere is not so great in his case. Still, The Lights comes at a pivotal career moment for Lerner. It breaks the tie between poetry books and novels, and breaks it in poetry’s favor. It remains to readers to take up the formal challenge implicit in the arc of Lerner’s publishing career from the 2000s to the present and made explicit by the arrival of The Lights, namely, how to evaluate poems by a writer whose works flicker between prose and poetry. This problematic—how the formal integument of writing does, or does not, define the prose/poetry opposition—has been of persistent interest to Lerner.

Take Gold Custody, for example. A 2021 collaboration with artist Barbara Bloom, this book of longer-than-prose-poems and photographic montages contributes nine items to The Lights, spread throughout in roughly the same order as before, forming the spinal column of that book as it were. The first poem borrowed from Gold Custody begins:

Imagine a song, she said, that gives voice to people’s anger. These weren’t her actual words. The anger precedes the song, she continued, but the song precedes the people, the people are back-formed from their singing, which socializes feeling, expands the domain of the feelable. The voice must be sung into existence, so song precedes speech, clears the ground for it. Then how are we speaking now, I asked, although not in those words.

“The Stone” teaches the reader how to read The Lights. As in some previous work of his, Lerner signals an ineluctable delay between lyric voice (“the song”) and lyric subjectivity (“feeling”). Influenced by Allen Grossman’s readings of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane, and Michael Clune’s readings of John Keats’s odes, Lerner has long been fascinated by the incapacity of poetic language to actualize the literary and social values it nevertheless conveys. What Grossman says of Whitman and Crane or Clune of Keats, Lerner implies of himself. On this basis, the Lerner poem will be missing in action, locatable in some strange way on another plane of existence from the words on the page (“although not in those words”) or the voice hanging in the air (“The voice must be sung into existence”). That is how one could understand the use of prose for “The Stone” and the rest of the Gold Custody group, which collectively push the limits of the prose poem form. They are poems in prose, inferentially, because that is more honest clothing for actual poetry than the meretricious cuts of lineation.

“Auto-Tune,” a poem-poem that Lerner places immediately after “The Stone” in The Lights, gets at the same poetics of deferral through its discussion of the phase vocoder, Bede’s famous narrative of Cædmon (“His withdrawing…is the founding moment of English poetry,” writes Lerner), and environmental destruction in the Anthropocene. Cædmon comes up again and again in The Lights, though never by name: “it’s time / To write the first poem in English / Each line the last,” Lerner commands in “The Pistil.” Here again Lerner translates the critical intonations of Grossman’s The Long Schoolroom: Lessons in the Bitter Logic of the Poetic Principle into imaginative writing. (Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry, somewhat less comfortably, had attempted to retranslate in the other direction, from bitter poetry back toward didactic prose). “Auto-Tune” dreams “A dream in prose of poetry, a long dream of waking.” The poem’s lines are so long they verge on prose rhythm, but lineation relieves them nonetheless, lending a different edge to the “dream in prose of poetry” from the discussion of song in “The Stone.” If The Lights has a manifesto, it is “Auto-Tune.”

One could come to the same conclusion by reading The Lights archaeologically. “Auto-Tune” was first published in BOMB back in 2010, making it the oldest poem in the book. Lerner has scarcely changed a word, just cleaning up an obvious error (“This the” in BOMB becomes “This is the” in The Lights) and deleting “It is” from the last line (“It is a dream in prose . . .” becomes “A dream in prose . . .”). It is a feature of The Lights, in fact, that all the poems in it previously appeared elsewhere, in books or magazines, in identical or closely similar form. This is a remarkable professional choice and calls for comment. To a reader who has been following Lerner’s career carefully, the book gives the impression of self-curation. More so than in the 2000s, when he was putting out books of poems at a clip of one every couple of years, Lerner reveals himself to be parsimonious with his own authorial labor. No poetic motion shall go wasted. All four poems in No Art that were new then, that is, those postdating the poetic trilogy, are recycled for The Lights, and in the same order as before. The two books share the same opening and closing poems, “Index of Themes” and “No Art” respectively, with not a single word changed. In No Art, “Index of Themes” indexes Lerner’s collected poetic corpus up to that point, 2016. Seven years on, the identical poem comes to introduce and frame the previously uncollected work in the reader’s hands: The Lights, one element in what one can only imagine will become a second poetic trilogy. “Index of Themes” may have suggested Lerner’s title, since the final stanza, most appropriately to this book, mentions “a serial work about lights.” If in drawing together No Art Lerner suggested how poetic form could compose a career, in The Lights the career decomposes back into constituent forms, prose and verse. “I completed my study of form // and forgot it.” “Poems about you, prose / poems.” These passages come from “Index of Themes,” but their point is sharpened in The Lights in view of the prominence in that book of uncomfortably long prose poetry and their subtextual reference to Lerner’s intervening novels. More cynically, you could say that The Lights supplants No Art as the summative statement of Lerner’s poetics, one book substituted for three.

Speaking of trilogies, The Lights bewrays an obsession with threes, from “Untitled (Triptych)” to the tripartite “Dilation,” “The Circuit,” and “The Rose,” (the second poem of that title). The last of these miniaturizes Lerner’s career to date in that part 1 is poetry, part 2 is prose, and part 3 returns to poetry. Each part of “The Rose” occupies a single page opening, a symmetry Lerner surely planned for. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. “The ideal is visible through its antithesis like small regions of warm blue underpainting,” muses the third movement of “Dilation,” evoking medieval and Renaissance overpainted triptychs. Or it is like one of those high-school math puzzles. Identify the next number in the series: poetry, prose, _____. Like Anne Carson, Lerner overtly writes toward an unknown and unnamable genre, but one that will—as in part 3 of “The Rose”—sound a whole lot like poetry to most readers. One passage in “Untitled (Triptych)” says as much, with an allusion back to “Auto-Tune” and Cædmon:

     Here I am
mitering two dreams: the dream of the poem,
then the dream of the poem of that dream,
the one you write on waking, publish in
a limited edition with abundant color plates, but
you can’t really join them, the dreams,
not without their collapsing into prose, so
you write two novels, waiting for results
it might be necessary to work back from.

In the version published earlier in Harper’s, Lerner had “Lana Turner or The Paris Review” for “a limited edition with abundant color plates,” so that in revision he has nudged the line from particularity to generality and across artistic media. At the time that he composed “Untitled (Triptych),” which appeared in 2015, Lerner had written two novels. Including the poem in The Lights without emending “two novels” to “three novels,” even amid other touch-ups, suggests an act of self-historicization, a moment caught in amber that cannot be messed with. But equally, Lerner draws forward that understanding past the career moment on which it had been commenting in 2015. The quoted passage intimates that Lerner understood then, and understands now, his oscillation between the two major forms of contemporary literature to be not so much the prodigious accomplishment that it is as a form of genre desperation: “you write two novels, waiting . . .” Waiting for a form that could redeem the poetry/prose antinomy. “The problem is how to deliver the news / in a form that dissolves it into feeling,” he writes, a few pages later, and this use of dissolves connects, chronologically and thematically, to the novel that dissolves into a poem in 10:04. “Untitled (Triptych)” is precisely as long and just as resonant as “The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also,” with lines of a similar length. Placement of the two poems in The Lights is symmetrical, with approximately the same number of pages and poems preceding “The Dark” toward the beginning of the book as succeed “Untitled” toward the end. From these and other indications, I venture that Lerner wrote “Untitled” and “The Dark” as companion pieces or mirror images of one another, circa 2014. “Untitled” is a miniaturized novel in verse, this time shorn of the surrounding novel. It has a close cousin in the shorter and slightly earlier “Rotation,” also included in The Lights.

In effect—and perhaps inevitably—The Lights readies Lerner’s poetry for those many new readers that his novels have won him, readers not necessarily enrolled in the internecine debates in poetry-writing circles about accessibility, avant-gardism, and lyric form. The recycling of the No Art poems as well as the use of character vignettes in the Gold Custody pieces in prose express an intention to address a newfound public. Most telling in this regard is “The Readers,” a Paris Review poem that meditates on (Lerner’s) children as a new obligatory readership that pressurizes poetry:

     the voice that is
mine only in part must be kept
safe from them. They are too trivial
my offices, too intimate, it isn’t labor
I cannot bring my daughters to work

or not bring them
here. They have learned to pause
at the end of lines . . .

The risk associated with addressing neophyte readers reverberates backwards and forwards through the book’s many discussions of poetic voice, labor, and authorial status (“my offices”), catalyzing the whole project. “The Readers,” in other words, is another manifesto. It articulates the rhetorical quandary that Lerner identified, in a December 2022 appearance at Harvard University, as the problem inspiring The Lights. That is the appearance of the writer’s own children as prospective readers of his work. The wry title “The Readers” in tandem with the conclusion of “Untitled (Triptych)” (“a friend of my / daughters’ is how I think of you, reading / a poem you’re on both sides of”) denominate readers of The Lights into Lerner’s family, a gesture of intimacy/patronage whose simultaneous aggression is not lost on him.

“The Camperdown Elm,” another Paris Review poem, similarly attempts to see poetry and poetry writing through a child’s eyes. It plays the same dissonant chord of violence underneath domesticity:

I place a firefly in each cup
I place them in the branches of
And ask it to watch over her

. . .

     slow

Pulse of it, the intervals
Shorter on warm nights, it won’t
Kill you, the pathetic fallacy
My August fallacy, so that fall
So that September has a flaw
In the glass of it, where it catches, is
Damaged lightly and released.

The almost obnoxiously Keatsian imagery (elm, autumn, nighttime) belies the closing inversion, whereby scene and season themselves become trapped, like fireflies, in glass or in a child’s hands. For Keats’s “thou hast thy music too,” said of autumn, Lerner substitutes “September has a flaw / In the glass of it,” maybe the loveliest lines in The Lights. Poetry has a flaw in the glass of it. Fireflies are something of a signature image for Lerner’s thought about the affordances of artistic form. Their crushed abdomens supplied glowing mush for eyeblack in his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures. (In a 2014 interview with Tao Lin, Lerner incidentally mentioned that that image came to him in a “recurring dream.”) One live firefly crashes an outdoor opera in The Hatred of Poetry. In “The Camperdown Elm,” Lerner indulges in the pathetic fallacy and then puts the pathetic fallacy itself under glass, another specimen in preparation for a more scientific—and therefore brutal—taxonomy of forms. The poem achieves all this through simple language, language a young daughter could understand. It is not a poem you have to puzzle over much.

So Lerner’s poetic voice has become ever more inviting, ever more willing to defuse the difficult surface effects of the avant-garde styles in which he was trained. Readers coming to his poetry for the first time now nevertheless will be challenged. The title poem, another triptych, draws forward into The Lights a trick Lerner had perfected in Mean Free Path, whereby the line break frequently marks an otherwise unannounced break in sense:

I think it is ok to want that, that wrong desire
must have its place in your art, that the trails
ice probably, and we are alone
and we are not alone with being
Out for the first time since the pandemic, we fought
about the dog and who is allowed to use the word
“Palestine,” and then almost made up about how
the insolubility, how every problem
scales, and I made my joke
which is not a joke, about the leaked footage
our only hope. Is the work
to get outside the logic of solution or to work
as if there were one, ones

among us. I’m sure they are almost all military.

The poem first appeared in the New York Review of Books, in precisely the same form as here. Lerner experiments with what scholars term the construction apo koinou. Thus “wrong desire” is held in common between two incompatible syntaxes, “I think it is ok to want that, that wrong desire” and “wrong desire / must have its place in your art.” The clause “Out for the first time” continues the previous line (“we are not alone with being”) but also begins an unrelated period, as the capital O indicates. In both cases, the line break is a hiccup dividing two construals. “The Lights” situates the same Lerneresque worries about “the work” of poetry in the unlikely interval between the sighting of an unidentified flying object and the provision of a mundane explanation for it (contrails, Russian aircraft, US military). That peculiar temporal suspension becomes an evocative metaphor for the expectancy that Lerner’s formal play broaches, an interstitial moment after cognition but prior to any of the rationalizations of recognition, after experience but before the analysis of experience, after one line but before the next. The discordant syntax of the poem (“her white dress stood out against the dark gray / sudden drop in pressure”) reperforms what its metastasizing images of lights, sky, and sculpture suggest on another level.

Likewise drawn forward from Mean Free Path, thus picking up where Lerner had left off in poetry, is an oblique affirmation of John Stuart Mill’s definition of poetry. “Eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard,” wrote Mill. “Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude… All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy.” Lerner activates this famous passage in “Meridian Response,” another New York Review of Books poem, which he places immediately after “The Lights”:

experiments in hearing
as: distortion as
music, ocean as traffic, wind in the trees like overheard
speech. The not yet audible sound of me clinging to belief.

In addition to the echoes of Mill, who equated poetry to overheard speech, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who theorized “seeing as,” Lerner picks up one thread of Mean Free Path. In a section of that fugue-like work, he likened April to “overheard speech” and imagined “interference heard as music.” The same phrase and the same simile from “Meridian Response” echoes in “The Son,” a poem from Gold Custody placed near the end of The Lights: “Wind in the poplars, overheard speech, traffic noise.” At worst, such repetitions turn merely repetitious. They suggest an author struggling to break out of a small set of compulsive thought-patterns and points of reference. But at best repetition of image and thought lends a deal of coherence to a book that lacks a single, unifying formal gesture, something no component of Lerner’s poetic trilogy lacked. Mostly, The Lights works. The many echoes between the poems are very carefully spaced (this being the real work of constructing the book, whose component poems all existed already).

The conversation about perception between Mean Free Path and The Lights goes, again, to the big question of form, of whether form is something to which you can return. If hearing distortion as music is or were humanly possible, then neither music nor distortion could sound the same again. Interpreted by the light of the hallucinatory lines “distortion as / music, ocean as traffic,” Lerner’s characteristic poetic moment would have the status of a crystalline melodic flourish piercing the pulverous atmosphere of a distorted musical composition, as if a snatch of Vivaldi had interrupted a Nirvana song. In a review of Mean Free Path for Jacket, David Gorin perceptively saw the interference passages in that book expressing the experiences of

a teenager in the 1980s and 90s . . . listening to punk, post-punk, grunge, industrial, and glitch, in which musicians deliberately interfered with the transmission of clean signals—using distorted guitars, feedback, lo-fi recordings, poorly-tuned instruments, and screamed or mumbled vocals drowned under a wash of sound—to project a dirty music.

Lerner was born in 1979. Of the musical genres Gorin lists, grunge is the best atmospheric fit for Lerner’s aesthetic. He is the Kurt Cobain of contemporary poetry. Since Mean Free Path, Lerner hasn’t stopped wondering how to use distortion to dirty up a poem. In some sense—a sense hidden from readers who know him only as a novelist, or, as at a recent lecture hosted by a discussion group from Boston College’s education school, not even as a novelist but as a cultural critic—Lerner’s novels themselves became fuel for that fire. At least, that is the implication of The Lights. But the result of the conflagration of available literary forms would be a new synthesis among them. To switch from a stationary to a mobile metaphor, Lerner writes toward a future in which poem and novel will have receded together in the rearview mirror of his literary vehicle, equally minuscule and now indistinguishable.