Ben Lerner is the author of seven previous books of poetry and prose, as well as several collaborations with visual artists. The poems in The Lights are in conversation with—and often contain the seeds of—his acclaimed essays and novels Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School.
In 2011, he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie for the German translation of The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2015 he was also awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant.
Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Howard Foundation.
He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and lives in Brooklyn.
Selected poems
by Ben Lerner
Tonight I can’t remember why
everything is permitted or,
what amounts to the same thing,
forbidden. No art is total, even
theirs, even though it raises
towers or kills from the air,
there’s too much piety in despair
as if the silver leaves behind
the glass were politics
and the wind they move in
and the chance of scattered
storms. Those are still
my ways of making and
I know that I can call on you
until you’re real enough
to turn from. Maybe I have fallen
behind, am falling, but
I think of myself as having
people, a small people
in a failed state, and love
more avant-garde than shame
or the easy distances.
All my people are with me now
the way the light is.
Copyright © 2023 by Ben Lerner, The Lights, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Granta Poetry
No Art
Love brought these readers into the world
The cuplike structures
of their eyes were formed
inherited color, and love
and argument must be conducted differently now
that the sounds through the wall
are interpreted, and a gentle
relentless pressure has been placed
on the page. 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. 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, they want to know if I have met
Amanda Gorman, debate
if it has to rhyme and what rhyme is
is difference, segmentation, how emphasis falls
is brushed away. So I keep
two notebooks, one where I write
for them in the half
hour before pickup, while this one holds a place
or no place where it breaks, I’m not sure what
open. Desire they cannot know
and will, the sense of false position
for which I’ve been rewarded, this house, fantasy
I had at her age that my father was
replaced by a man who resembled him
is a cliché, the words
the faces interchangeable
of the father. But soon they began to blur
together in my mind
because the rhyme my girls
demanded spread, as difference tends
and sameness. So I read from the wrong one
what I’d been working on
and it was this, the changes I’ve made
were these, and the love I gave
received. Though it wasn’t a game or song
they played and sang along
Copyright © 2023 by Ben Lerner, The Lights, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Granta Poetry
The Readers
- Poetry Foundation Profile
- How To Be a Good Writer | Ben Lerner’s Advice to the Young Louisiana Channel
- Close Encounters: The world-bridging poetry of Ben Lerner The New Yorker