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
- 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