In Lerners novel this New York is one of extreme luxury a place where a baby octopus is imported from Portugal and then delicately massaged to death and served for lunch but also constant insecurity, with a clear sense of an untenably unequal society. Employing a tactic known as the spread, he bombards the other side with more arguments than they can respond to in the allotted time, the rule being that a dropped argument, its quality notwithstanding, counts as an argument conceded. 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. Imaginary gardens with real toads in them is her definition of what a poem is, a fenced enclosure in which a bit of reality sits like an ugly creature or like Satan in Miltons Paradise Lost, as some critics have suggested. Long before Lerner began to fictionalize his own experience, he was already a character in Harriets work. Of course, poets and poetry have had enemies. Download Add to Lightbox. Heres the whole poem that she appended in the notes to the 1967 Complete Poems with the heading Original Version: I, too, dislike it: there are things Ls mere Lignende bog Farvel til Atocha En sjov og intelligent bog om kunstens og kunstnerens plads i vores senmoderne samfund. Neither of them objected to being used as models. Siendo reputados psiclogos clnicos, ambos supieron reaccionar con humor y empata . Lerner describes his first novel, a satire of the poetry world and serious young men, as "accidental". But 10:04 only approaches such difficult problems through a detailed description of the local texture variations of New York City in the years between tropical storm Irene, in August 2011, and hurricane Sandy, in October 2013. This novel is the first time Lerner has explicitly approached the subject of his parents and their enormous influence on him, but throughout the trilogy the impulse towards writing fiction, and ambivalence about that impulse, is tangled up in questions of parentage. As a teenager in Topeka in the mid-1990s, Adam Gordon serves as the books protagonist; but as a grown-up, a married man with two daughters, in present-day Brooklyn, he doubles as its narrator. Lightbox . One of the books plot arcs concerns Adams quest for victory in the extemporaneous-speech category at the national championships. ariana mangual ben lerner. (His daughters, along with his wife and father, were riding in a separate car. 1988)Torrey P. Poetry thus arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historicalthe human world of violence and differenceand to reach the transcendent or divine. He thought there would be all sorts of shameful, humiliating things in there. In his polemical essay Against Poets, the Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz made a claim that no one really gives a damn about poetry despite pretending that they do. Or was the man just having a nervous breakdown? While a feeling of impotence paralyzes anyone who becomes fixated on language and starts thinking about finding the right word not as an aesthetic problem, but as a theological one, its a false quandary. His mother is the clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner. She began to say something either about the moon, the effect of the moon on the water, or was using the full moon to excuse Miguel or the evenings general drama, though the moon wasnt full is a typically equivocal sentence. genuine. The social novel sets out to speak for others but often merely speaks over them. Without cake?2. In a casual tone, he told them hed had an accident: Some gum had fallen out of his mouth while he was going potty. with real toads in them, shall Perhaps thats unsurprising, since Lerner is the child of therapists, raised in Kansas where both his parents worked at the renowned Menninger Foundation, and where his mother, Harriet Lerner, wrote her bestselling books, beginning with The Dance of Anger. He is from United States. 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. ADDRESSES: Home Berkeley, CA. Lerner describes the narrator of thatbook as a neurotic version of myalready quite neurotic self. Share. 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. Suggested Retail Price: $90.00. make a distinction [PDF] Download Disney Frozen 2 The Magical Guide: Julia March *Read . 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. Asking poets to be literalists of the imagination means taking literally what one imagines, which poets have always done, as a peek at Greek myths and Dickinsons poems will immediately confirm. It got stuck! As though the whole thing had been an accident!. In a way, that was good for the book, because it produced some innovation, but it also at certain moments felt like maybe I should have just gone for broke and written this much more disturbing version., Now 40 and the father of two young girls with his wife Ariana Mangual Figueroa, a professor whose own research focuses on peoples use of language, he says he knew that if I was going to write something in relation to the other two books that was about the thinking that comes out of being a father or the feeling more than the thinking that the way to do it would be to write it in Topeka in the 90s. She is interested in how students, who are. 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. prominence by half poets, the A frame started to grow around them, and that frame became 10:04. Image 1 of 1. We had met to discuss his new book, The Topeka School, the third and most intricate in his acclaimed trilogy of novels featuring a Lerner-like character named Adam Gordon, and yet it wasnt easy to tell who was interviewing whom. Lerner has partly built this novel by reconstructing Contest of Words, a 2012 magazine essay about his youth in Topeka that set out some intriguing arguments about the deterioration of US political discourse and the roots of a frighteningly empty, unaccountable form of white male rage and violence. The competition for most critically acclaimed, least-read writer in America is intense, but Ben Lerner is surely in the running. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click on download. Galleries. By Cressida Leyshon. . His goal, he says in an aside, is to trace a genealogy of his speech. In doing so, he uncovers a larger story about public speech in America and its debasement at the hands of people not unlike himself. Ben Lerner is an extraordinarily fine writer, the author of three much-admired collections of poetry and two marvelous novels. ARIANA MANGUAL FIGUEROA. In a crucial passage, Jane describes the moment when her speech began fragmenting under the emotional pressure, became a litany of non sequiturs, like how some of the poets you admire sound to me. rent a peloton bike los angeles Don't let the boy just loaf about; If he writes verses, kick him out. removing tiny seeds from mixtures. As a teenager, he excelled at competitive debate, and he remains a formidable talker fluent, composed and quick on his feet. Edmundson has a point, of course. Lerner had decided to devote his life to art, but had he ever had an aesthetic experience of comparable magnitude? Associate Professor of Urban Education, Graduate Center, CUNY. In Leaving the Atocha Station, his young poet agonizes about the incommensurability of language and experience. Its no news that words fail to do justice to what we see or feel; that we find ourselves struck dumb by too much beauty or horror. Hereflects on certain cultural totems of his childhood in the 1980s: the explosion of theChallenger spaceship, which killed seven astronauts; the movie Back to the Future; and how Peggy Noonan, Ronald Reagans speechwriter, introduced the budding poet to his first inklings of rhyme andmetre. BGER // ANMELDELSE - Ben Lerner er ikke hr. Reading it, however, with a 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. His parents dont appear in the book, but they are briefly mentioned when, in desperate bids to impress the two women hes been orbiting, he says, falsely, that his mother has just died and that his father (gentlest of men) is a fascist. admire what In 2018, he published two artist collaborations, The Polish Rider (with Anna Ostoya, Mack) and The Snows of Venice (with Alexander Kluge, Spector). He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and he is currently a MacArthur Fellow. Education: Brown University, B.A., 2001, M.F.A., 2003. Since 2003, he has co-published No: A Journal of the. they asked. Throngs of 20- and 30-somethings in oversized T-shirts and cuffed pants sat around beer-garden picnic tables, their eyes trained on a projection screen at the end of the room. And Ive always been interested in the 90s, right before Columbine, and the end of history discourse, and the advent of the Clinton dynasty.. The bitterness of poetic logic is particularly astringent, Lerner says, because we were taught at an early age that we are all poets simply by virtue of being human. Undoubtedly, his teacher in Topeka had been reading Emerson and Whitman, but Lerner further alleges that this belief is one of the underlying reasons why poetry is so often met with contempt rather than mere indifference and why it is periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed. 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. 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. Thus the poet is a tragic figure, because a poem is always a record of failure. Lerner agrees with Grossman. Join Facebook to connect with Arianna Nicolette Mangual and others you may know. It predates literacy and perhaps even the gods, who, some say, were invented by poets. He lives nearby and visits itoften with his young daughter. After I was done with love, I read them poems on other subjects and they not only paid attention, but started making perceptive remarks. Theres undeniably something contrived about a sonnet or an epic, but to claim that all poems possess this same artificial quality is an astonishingly stupid thing to say, especially coming from a writer justly venerated for his intellect. 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. unintelligible, that feels a flea, the base- Who in their right mind would choose a lifetime of poverty and ridicule? A man stands in tears before Rogier van der Weydens The Descent From the Cross. Ariana Mangual. Her age is 42. Scenes from Madrid continued to return to him, and within a few months hed completed a draft of something that he still hesitated to call a novel. Two years later, Granta put him on its list of Best Young American Novelists. If The Topeka School is making what sounds like a bold argument that the seeds of our contemporary malaise were present in the language games that Adam played as a teenager it is doing so tentatively, without the rhetorical bluster and aggression of its adolescent protagonist. Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing, Lucille Clifton once said. that actual poems are structurally foredoomed by a bitter logic that cannot be overcome by any level of virtuosity, [that] only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable us to experience, if not a genuine poemno such thinga place for the genuine, whatever that might mean. all of us, that we do not Is the man grieving, wonders Adam Gordon, the books narrator, or is he having a profound experience of art? Well, youre a broken condom! Matt would shout back. I asked Harriet if, like Jane Gordon, shed ever worried that Ben would turn out to be one of the Men. Now that I had their full attention, I asked them whether they would like to hear a love poem. It requires seeing her as somebody elses child. 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. [4] He has used himself as an instrument for examining other things, while also aggressively disavowing the Great American Novelist position of white universality, which he considers at best pompous and pretentious, at worst a real political danger. Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App. Ben Lerner is a poet, critic and author of the novels Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) and 10:04 (2014). Menu. hvem som helst. Lerner describes his first novel, asatire of the poetry world and serious young men, as accidental. it, after all, a place for the ball fan, the statistician But the poem he sang upon waking, the legend goes, was not as good as the poem he sang in his dream. People complain that the spread divorces policy debate from the real world, that nobody save perhaps for auctioneers uses language in this maniacally accelerated fashion. One of the funniest recurring episodes in Leaving the Atocha Station is the narrators spur-of-the-moment lie (to impress a woman) that his mother is dead. Itshows different shots of East New York, a neighbourhood in Brooklyn. Ben's wife is known as Ariana Mangual who is an education professor at Rutgers University. Both earlier books feature the . Please upgrade your browser. Without Harriet and Stephen, Ben certainly could not have written The Topeka School, a book about inheritance, about the repetitions just beneath the threshold of consciousness. His parents discussed the project with him at length as he was writing it, going over their memories of his childhood and reading multiple drafts. perfect contempt for it, one Hunched over a glass of pale German beer, Lerner took in the debate proceedings with the dispassionate scrutiny of a veteran public speaker, remarking on niceties of technique or missed rhetorical opportunities. There are so many types of poems, ranging from the epic to the tiny haiku, that it took The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 1,554 pages to list and describe them all. 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). Sometimes they arewalking backwards, sometimes forwards, and sometimes they have been edited to move in reverse. And they did. 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. 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. ISBN: 9781452225395. I wanted to avoid the bad version of the critique of white male universality, Lerner continued. useful. The fact/fiction divide is like a therapeutic frame, he says. if it must, these things are Then he wrote some essays, some art criticism and a short story. The problem is that one can make that sort of complaint about the poets in any historical period and in every country of the world. Lerner (left) with brother, Matt, in Phoenix in the early 1980s. Thank Tyler Perry. New school year, new Associate Professor! August 29, 2022 Your story . He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. Its like some weird homeopathic myth, that you avoid the novel but you are allowed to write one, Lerner says. Adam takes the message on board, and is duly crowned national champion. There are injuries without brains. Lerner quotes George Packer in a New Yorker blog post asking whether it is too late to convince president-elect Obama not to have a poem written and read at the inauguration: For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings. How did you get it off? one of Lerners nephews asked from the third-row seat. Renting a two . Lerner wanted to be a lawyer until he discovered poetry in his midteens. (The acknowledgments page of the new novel is filled with their names.) This kid, who I think was later murdered, came up to me in the hall while I was going to the nurses office. He asked what Ben was doing; Ben said he was sick. it. In 10:04 the attempts of thirtysomethings in Brooklyn to live ethical lives is not taken as an object of derision but is treated rather earnestly. Anything a white male writes is going to be disfigured by that subject position, he told me. The Men are her anonymous callers, but as its repeated throughout Lerners novel, the term comes to stand for something larger a gathering storm of white male fury. The real parents only come into focus in the new book, but Adams confusion about the limits and dangers of his own power has been a constant through the trilogy and all three books, Lerner says, are about the risks and possibilities of ventriloquising. I dont have a full psychiatric account, Lerner says, for why, when I started writing fiction, it was suddenly about parents and parental mortality. Lerner, a white male poet from Kansas, even gave the name Ben to the narrator of his second novel, 10:04, in addition to endowing him with roughly his own biography. We were barreling down a stretch of highway toward Lawrence, a university town in northeastern Kansas, where Harriet and Stephen have lived for the past 17 years. they come knocking ending explained reddit ariana mangual ben lernergwinnett online campus. He has recently published a critically acclaimed novel and finds himself having to navigate the social blowback that comes from being mistaken for, or conflated with, his books far-from-appealing protagonist. Available Formats. they cannot afford to smoke. This reciprocity extends beyond the frame of the novel. 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. He quotes Allen Grossmans essay on Caedmon, the first English poet whose name we know, an illiterate cowherd who learned the art of song in a dream and awoke as a poet. 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