First, let me say that I like Ben Lerner a lot. I like that his name sounds like "learn," which is a good thing to do, it's good to be open-minded, I genuinely believe this. His 2023 volume of poems, "The Lights," is a mixture of prose and poetry, if that's your thing. I know that prose can be poetry so don't give me shit about that, thanks.

These are poems about the intersections of politics, identity (specifically white identity), middle age, domestic life, and the embarrassment of being a successful poet in New. York. City. Coming from a writer like Ben Lerner, that means lots of apologizing. And working as he does in Brooklyn and hailing as he does from Kansas, Ben has lots of apologizing to do, because the only thing less compelling than a white guy from Brooklyn is a white guy who moved to Brooklyn from Kansas. Ben all but says, “I’m sorry that you’re reading this book. Don’t take it personally.”

But Ben has balls, I think. "The Lights" is definitely sort of like a kind of political book and Ben definitely raises some nerve-striking topics, even if he doesn’t squeeze the nerves very hard. Ben is direct but then evasive, which is how I would be if I were a successful white poet from Kansas living in Brooklyn. As Ben says at one point, "you campaign in conventional verse, but govern in avant-garde pieties..." This is a smart observation.

I liked the following lines and they seemed true to me:

"At least the white poets might be trying to escape, using
the interplanetary to scale
down difference under the sign of encounter and
late in a way of thinking, risk budgets
the steal, the debates about face
coverings, deepfakes, we would scan
the heavens, discover what we've projected there
among the drones, weather events, secret programs… "

Translation: if you’re gonna be a white poet, you gotta be a white poet. You just gotta do it.

In one poem, Ben regrets the phoniness of his father's Yiddishisms, which turned out to be fake ("they were just his private nonsense formulations"). His father’s invented proverbs from the Old Country had given Ben a connection to Ukrainian Judaism, to a glorious historical particularity, to a legit non-Reformed ethnicity, and to a post-Putin political relevance that lends you as a poet meaning and cache and material (oh, material) in this twenty-first century after the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Christ our Lord, amen.

Racial, ethnic, religious, and political identities aside: there’s some good stuff about middle age here, although I have no idea if it’s actually about middle age, really. That’s just how I read it because like Woody Allen in Annie Hall I just turned 40.

Of course, being middle-aged costs you cultural capital, even if it generally earns you more actual capital than a younger person has (or at least it used to). Which is to say, being middle-aged is great, it's relaxing, except that you know that you’re gestating all your future failures. And so Ben writes: “Maybe I have fallen/ behind, am falling, but/ I think of myself as having/ people, a small people/ in a failed state….” I like that.

Ben, who according to Wikipedia did his undergraduate studies in political theory, knows how to use political words well (“failed state”), which is fun. But the more specific his political musings get, the less effective the poetry becomes. The direct references to Sarah Palin and the January 6 Capitol insurrection don't add much to the poems, except to remind us that Sarah Palin existed once and the insurrection happened (unless you think it didn't, which is fine I guess).

I like Ben. But maybe I’m resentful of Ben because I am like him a rural Midwesterner who needs cities and who wants to be heard but doesn’t want Brooklyn or the Midwest or much of anything, really.

My favorite poem in the collection is called "Dilation,” which reads:

"My role in the slaughter doesn't disqualify the beauty I find in all
forms of sheltered flame, little votive polis,
that I eat while others starve does not refute the promise of
dimming houselights, weird fullness of the instant
before music... "

Apologetic but lovely.

Somewhere else (I don’t remember where, I didn’t write it down), Ben writes: “The ideal is visible through its antithesis like the small regions of warm/ blue underpainting and this is its late/ July realization, I'm sorry/ I know you were expecting more/ I'm not going to lecture the neighbor kid with the hydrant key/ about conserving water for posterity”

Again, Ben is apologizing. Apology is the mode for white liberals during and after the Trump presidency, just as lecture was their mode during the W. Bush presidency. The point, I suppose, is that Lerner isn't going to lecture us because he knows he's in no position to lecture, and at least he refuses to, which is the point here and I suppose I feel ambivalent about whether he should even be allowed to make that point, because everyone these days is so ambivalent (or the opposite of ambivalent, fiery with certainty) about who gets to make which point when and where and how and whatever. Ben concludes:

“I believe there is a form of apology both corporate and incantatory/ that could convene the future it begs for leniency,/ inherited dream you can put anything in: antithetical blue, predicate/ green”

Boom, I guess.

Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m genuinely sorry.