I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
Ben LernerIf I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben LernerI have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.
Ben LernerI’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
Ben LernerI've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
Ben LernerI don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
Ben Lerner