Ben Lerner
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FollowAbout Ben Lerner
Known now mainly as a novelist, and he began as a poet — three books whose central subject is the failure of poems to do what they claim, written in a voice that is fluent, ironic and unable to stop qualifying itself.
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One is a sequence of prose sonnets built out of misremembered phrases; another works through Topeka and the language of the culture wars. His essay on why people hate poetry is the clearest statement of the project: the poem always falls short of the idea of the poem, and that gap is the subject.
Read next
- John Ashbery — The elder he has written about at length.
- Claudia Rankine — The essayistic contemporary poem.
- Joshua Clover — Theory and poem in one practice.
7 poems
04/28/2026 14:58h
The predictability of these rooms is, in a word, exquisite. These rooms in a word. The moon is predictably exquisite, as is the view of the moon through the word. Nevertheless, we were hoping for less. Less space, less light. We were hoping to pay more, to be made to pay in public. We desire a flat, affected tone. A beware of dog on keep off grass. The glass ceiling is exquisite. Is it made of glass? No, glass.
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04/28/2026 14:58h
There are starving children left on your plate.
There are injuries without brains.
Migrant workers spend 23 hours a day
removing tiny seeds from mixtures
they cannot afford to smoke
and cannot afford not to smoke.
Entire nations are ignorant of the basic facts
of hair removal and therefore resent
our efforts to depilate unsightly problem areas.
Imprisonment increases life expectancy.
Finish your children. Adopt an injury.
‘I'm going to my car. When I get back,
I'm shooting everybody.'
[line omitted in memory of_______]
70% of pound animals will be euthanized.
94% of pound animals would be euthanized
if given the choice. The mind may be trained
to relieve itself on paper. A pill
for your safety, a pill for her pleasure.
Neighbors are bothered by loud laughter
but not by loud weeping.
Massively multiplayer zombie-infection web-games
are all the rage among lifers.
The world is a rare case of selective asymmetry.
The capitol is redolent of burnt monk.
‘I'm going to my car. When I get back
I'm shooting everybody.'
[line omitted in memory of _______]
There are two kinds of people in the world:
those that condemn parking lots as monstrosities,
‘the ruines of a broken World,' and those
that respond to their majesty emotionally.
70% of the planet is covered in parking lots.
94% of a man's body is parking lot.
Particles of parking lot have been discovered
in the permanent shadows of the moon.
There is terror in sublimity.
If Americans experience sublimity
the terrorists have won.
‘I'm going to my car. When I get back
I'm shooting everybody.'
[line omitted in memory of _______]
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04/28/2026 14:58h
jumpsuits, they have changed
painting, I
behind the concertina wire
can't look at it anymore, that wall
across which shadows play
Sorry to be vague
at such an hour. Were you
When I called, I heard
my voice
anywhere near waking
in the background
Strange, reversible lines, I thought
he was dead. He is
better of it, pushing the glass
away. How many songs
can it hold, that thing
I've seen in windows, has it changed
singing, or
hooded figures
I didn't know
it had a camera, some features are
The blue of links, obscure
beneath the face, the green
We still don't have a word for
Simulated drowning in
embedded streams
a perfect world
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04/28/2026 14:58h
jumpsuits, they have changed
paintings, I
behind the concertina wire
can't look at it anymore, that wall
across which shadows play
Sorry to be vague
at such an hour. Were you
When I called, I heard
my voice
anywhere near waking
in the background
Strange, reversible lines, I thought
he was dead. He is
better of it, pushing the glass
away. How many songs
can it hold, that thing
I've seen in windows, has it changed
singing, or
hooded figures
I didn't know
it had a camera, some features are
The blue of links, obscure
beneath the face, the green
We still don't have a word for
Simulated drowning in
embedded streams
a perfect world
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04/28/2026 14:58h
By any measure, it was endless
winter. Emulsions with
Then circled the lake like
This is it. This April will be
Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose
early, erased for an hour
Silk-brush and ax
I'd like to think I'm a different person
latent image fading
around the edges and ears
Overall a tighter face
now. Is it so hard for you to understand
From the drop-down menu
In a cluster of eight poems, I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees
but could not
remember the dream
save for one brief shot
of a woman opening her eyes
Ari, pick up. I'm a different person
In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away
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04/28/2026 14:58h
By any measure, it was endless
winter. Emulsions with
Then circled the lake like
This is it. This April will be
Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose
early, erased for an hour
Silk-brush and ax
I'd like to think I'm a different person
latent image fading
around the edges and ears
Overall a tighter face
now. Is it so hard for you to understand
From the drop-down menu
In a cluster of eight poems, I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees
but could not
remember the dream
save for one brief shot
of a woman opening her eyes
Ari, pick up. I'm a different person
In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away
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04/28/2026 14:58h
The bird’s-eye view abstracted from the bird. Cover me, says the soldier on the screen, I’m going in. We have the sense of being convinced, but of what? And by whom? The public is a hypothetical hole, a realm of pure disappearance, from which celestial matter explodes. I believe I can speak for everyone, begins the president, when I say famous last words.
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