[Wgcp-whc] Ben Lerner--minutes for session on 9/16

[Richard Deming]

Dear Friends,

 

The WGCP met last Friday (9/16) for our initial discussion of Ben Lerner’s most recent collection of poems, Mean Free Path.  From that discussion I have drawn a series of questions that will be sent to Lerner prior to his visit to our next session on Friday 9/30.  These questions are more like prompts that will give the conversation some shape at least in the beginning.  I will provide those questions below.  The session with Lerner will be from 3-5 and will meet in our usual room, #116 in the Whitney Humanities Center. Of course, the sessions are always open to any interested parties, so feel free to spread the word.  Also, Lerner will be reading on 9/29  at 7.00 in Linsley-Chittenden 317, 63 High Street as part of the Grad Poets Reading Series.  For any questions about the reading (“will it be gluten free?”), contact: sarah.stone at yale.edu, justin.sider at yale.edu for more information.

This and more info can also be found on our blog: http://wgcp.wordpress.com/

 

In terms of additional “Lerner links”:

 

A useful interview with Lerner (largely dealing with his new novel) is available here:

http://www.believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_lerner

 

And an illuminating reading of sections of Mean Free Path (with a Q and A) is here:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lerner.php

 

 

One last matter to mention—at the last session we toasted Jean-Jacques Poucel, who will soon be departing for the University of Köln for a fellowship that will keep him in Germany until July. This past session is the only one Jean-Jacques will make this year.  Jean-Jacques was a fellow founder of the WGCP back in 2003 and has been an ongoing convener of this group.  His presence, guidance, wit, and charm will be sorely missed.   Good luck Jean-Jacques!

 

Thus,

Richard Deming

 

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Throughout Mean Free Path, the concept of interference (and the term itself, perhaps) begins to destabilize in that so many variations of interference occur (from culture jamming to miscommunications to utterances overheard, white nose and so forth). How would you define interference and did that change in the course of working on the poems?  What values (positive as well as negative) adhere to that for your poetics? Or, to put this another way: how is interference different from resistance?

 

A broader question might deal with your sense of form (especially since poetic form as well as physical form are elements that are addressed throughout the poems, explicitly and implicitly).  What is form?  Or how did you arrive at the form of Mean Free Path?  This questions ranges from the specifics of your compositional practice as well as the largest sense of form.  In terms of poetic form, at some level is form a submission to larger structures of thought, feeling, ideology? Is this only true of the employing of traditional forms? How is it also true of breaking free of even more recent lines of thought (say, Language poetry)?

 

What role or function does beauty play in your sense of contemporary (and especially post-avant-garde) poetry?

 

One question that comes up frequently with our guests has to do with the density and frequency of allusions.  Mean Free Path is replete with literary artifacts, remnants, echoes.  How conscious of these (along with pop culture references) do you expect the reader to be?  Do you imagine a responsibility for the reader to hunt these down? If not, why not?

 

Tied to the previous question is one that has to do with the differences between the work on the page versus the work in the ear.  On the page, the patterning that you employ is immediately apparent and the reader instantly works that into his or her reading process from the very beginning.  In the space of a live reading, this patterning isn’t so evident—at least can’t be held all at once.  What are the differences for you between the page and the poetry reading?  Did you imagine people hearing this as you were writing the poems?

 

Mean Free Path seems to be attempting to represent the experience (we might call it the contemporary condition) of being caught between frequencies and caught in a self-conscious dilemma—aware of all the social forces acting upon and forming our subjectivities and yet only having our subjectivity as that which we can experience things. In what ways, is Mean Free Path creating a kind of moral vision—a claim that this is 1) how the world is and 2) this is how one must be in order to experience that world with eyes and ears wide open, as free as possible from illusions?
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