On April 3, the English Department at SUNY New Paltz hosted keynote speaker Ben Lerner, a renowned novelist, poet, essayist and literary critic. Lerner presented his keynote at 7:30 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building auditorium.
The symposium was co-sponsored by the English Department, the Honors Program and Graduate Professional and Interdisciplinary Studies. Additionally, the co-coordinators were Professor Mary Holland and Professor Kris Jansma. In the main lobby refreshments were served including coffee, tea, cookies and pastries. Outside the doors of the auditorium, Inquiring Minds Bookstore set a table with Lerner’s books for sale which he would sign after his speech if patrons so desired.
Lerner’s most recent collection of poetry “The Lights,” released in 2023, includes 26 poems that navigate concepts of a private life and the current political climate of America. Lerner eloquently read from various poems of his such as “Index of Themes,” “The Chorus” and “The Pistil.”
“I think the reason why it’s so fundamental for me is because that’s the way I know how to write, how to make different forms. Part of it’s just idiosyncratic, but that part to me is the richest conceptual thing,” Lerner said. “It’s the same words, but it’s a little different. When it returns with a difference across this interval of the page, it gives off a little spark, and that spark is the idea that the reconfiguration of social materials can produce a different world.”
In his novel, “10:04,” published in 2014, Lerner described how he took “a large passage from an essay [he] wrote about art vandalism, in addition to having recontextualized the story and recontextualizing the poem. A lot of the sources are things [he has] written before [he] had an imagination of their place in the form of the novel.” Whereas in his 2019 novel, “The Topeka School,” Lerner “pulls from another essay, but also takes several paragraphs from an essay [his] mom wrote. On every scale, it involves conversation with artists, named and unnamed, known and unknown.”
Throughout the years, Lerner has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh and Brooklyn College, where he is currently a professor in the English Department. Lerner has published three collections of poetry including “The Lichtenberg Figures” published in 2004, “Angle of Yaw” released in 2006 and “Mean Free Path” released in 2010. Other publications of Lerner’s include his 2011 novel “Leaving the Atocha Station” and his 2016 critique novel, “The Hatred of Poetry.”
“I think there’s always this moment with innovative writing, where it tries to be the new thing. The writing tries to be the Internet, or the writing tries to be the telephone or the TV or whatever,” Lerner said. “To me, that gets the power of writing wrong. The power of writing for me is its distance from those technologies that can depict in different ways how they change the structure of an experience.”
If you would like to learn more about Ben Lerner, visit https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ben-lerner.
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