I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
Ben LernerI don't think "I'm going to publish this as fiction" but I think "I'm going to tell this story to a friend" and then I start telling the story in my mind as the experience transpires as a way of pretending it's already happened.
Ben LernerShaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.
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 Lerner