Quotes from Ben Lerner

It's like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.

The momentary sense of having traveled back in time.

Whenever I walked across the Manhattan Bridge, I remembered myself as having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. This is because you can see the latter from the former, and the latter is more beautiful. [...] But by the time I arrived in Brooklyn to meet Alex, I was starting to misremember crossing in the third person, as if I had somehow watched myself walking beneath the Brooklyn Bridge's Aeolian cables.

Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.

this vacuum at the heart of privilege

How many of his small gestures and postures in the present were embodied echoes of the past, repetitions just beneath the threshold of his consciousness? What would happen to the past if you brought those involuntary muscle memories under your control and edited them, edited them out?

Like any two men or man-children meeting in the playground or the marketplace they quickly, almost instantly, calculated who could take the other.

The psychiatrists—Eric was among the youngest—often put these kids on Haldol; more than one came to me exhibiting, as a result of the mysterious pill, "tardive dyskinesia"—involuntarily sticking out their tongues, clenching and unclenching their jaws, smacking their lips.)

Come hai intenzione di espandere il racconto, di preciso?», mi aveva chiesto l'agente, con uno sguardo distante negli occhi perché stava calcolando la mancia. «Mi proietterò in diversi futuri simultaneamente», avrei dovuto rispondere, «con un lieve tremolio della mano; mi imbarcherò in un percorso dall'ironia alla sincerità nella metropoli che sprofonda, come un aspirante Whitman della vulnerabile rete».

I wish all difficult poems were profound. Honk if you wish all difficult poems were profound.

The trauma was perpetual when you were left in it alone.

Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.

Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph.

they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering

And while he'd never had more than one in a six-week period, he thought he felt one coming on a hundred times a day: whenever he looked away from a light source to find his vision mottled, whenever part of his body fell asleep or felt slightly numb from an awkward posture, on the very rare occasions when he stuttered or grew briefly confused in his speech—terror arose within him. Each false alarm, because it caused anxiety, brought him closer to the real thing.

Poetry": What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.

Tears appreciate in this economy of pleasure.

fleeing into an imagined past

but these guys were also so pitiful—I pictured them sitting in their La-Z-Boys, working up the courage to make their obscene call, maybe jacking off after from all the excitement, if not during—I couldn't really take them seriously, or only took them seriously as specimens of the ugly fragility of masculinity.

Of course, if we've learned anything, it's how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be.)

The banner between sleep and waking had torn and now people and things were passing through it.

easier to imagine starting a family where we were known only as a couple—no memory of Rachel, no complicated preexisting social networks, no potentially difficult relations nearby. I wanted children badly, maybe in part to mark how different my second marriage was from the first.

At some difficult-to-determine point, among middle-class white boys in the Middle West, fights, instead of ending when a combatant hit the ground, took on new life there, the "boys will be boys" chivalry of boxing giving way to the archaic regression of overkill, a term that dates from 1946; every opponent must be spread; every offense, however minor, leads to holocaust.

This is one underlying reason why poetry is so often met with contempt rather than mere indifference and why it is periodically denounced as opposed to simply dismissed: Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and accusation.