Ordinary Unhappiness 

In the opening lines of the first poem in The Lights (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), Ben Lerner announces that he “belong[s] to no school of poetry.” If this statement functions partly as a reading guide for the work that follows, it’s distinguished by an overt refusal to provide direction or support. To say that Lerner belongs to no school is to suggest that his work lacks clear or formal stylistic markers, that no one writes quite like he does, that he participates in no single aesthetic trend or conversation. None of those things is exactly true, but the remark has an uneasy candor at its core. Lerner recognizes his poetry’s isolation; it is haunted, though never weakened, by its frustrated sociality.

The qualities of Lerner’s poetry, prose, and persona that have historically drawn praise are the same that have pushed less sympathetic readers and critics away. One of those critics, Jon Baskin, has a cameo in The Lights, when Lerner finds himself “clicking on things in bed, a review by a man named Baskin who says I have no feelings and hate art.” People who respond well to Lerner’s work approve of its openness and self-effacement, the wry disquiet that allows him, his speakers, or his protagonists to freely admit that their neuroticism often overcomes their passions, both animal and rational. People who don’t respond so well bristle, as Baskin does, at its built-in “critical distance,” its insistence on treating “social and political debates” as a legitimate pressure on aesthetic experience, and its embarrassment about participating in what Lerner has elsewhere called “white masculinity and its representational regimes.”

In other words, people either like or dislike Lerner for being a figure not of hysterical misery but of ordinary unhappiness—to borrow a distinction Freud makes in Studies on Hysteria (1895). Lerner’s fiction and poetry both offer portraits of the artist as a basically good man, raised by loving parents who happened to be therapists and himself a father of two young children about whose well-being he is perpetually apprehensive. “I had to look at my phone,” he writes in “The Media,” “because I was getting a lot of texts and wanted to make sure everything was ok with the girls.” The prose poem “The Rose” ends with a confession of infidelity—“What happened in Denver will never happen again”—but it comes in the form of a note found in the pocket of someone else’s coat, taken from a restaurant by mistake. Here, even the humdrum melodramas of adulthood belong to other, messier people.

The trouble with ordinary unhappiness is that it is no longer ordinary. Lerner is interested in formalizing the psychology of everyday experience, in particular the way currents of strong feeling rush alongside the high-functioning dissociative state colloquially known as autopilot. He is well aware that the “everyday” has become increasingly calamitous, with ecological crises charging every action with a meaning for which there is no historical precedent and therefore no readily available ethical or aesthetic framework. “I’m sure this happens in any long-term relationship,” writes the adulterous author of the aforementioned note, “but maybe it’s worse now, for our generation, because of climate change.” If the aim of this art is to map in language “the motion,” as John Ashbery put it, “by which a life / May be known and recognized,” it must confront what happens when life begins to take a shape whose patterns are warped or aborted by an anomalous present and the anticipation of an even worse future.

In The Lights, the pervasive unreliability of the world is visible on the page, where it takes many forms: the erratic caesurae that break up some of the lineated poems and the tube-like shapes into which others have been squeezed; the justified prose blocks of poems such as “The Media” or “The Theory” that crowd dizzyingly close to the book’s margins; the propulsive Whitmanian syntax of “Dilation”; and the semaphoric lines, flickering short and long, of “Contre-Jour.” Although the poems in this collection were written over 15 years, the book seems like it could be the record of a single, protracted day with each formal variation marking a shift from one uneasy mood to another. As always in Lerner’s poetry, there is a subtle but enveloping sense of disorientation or displacement masked by a rigorous commitment to plain speech. That first poem, “Index of Themes,” places at the beginning of the book what readers might expect to come at its end—namely, the index—and the poem itself plays with themes of precocity and uneven development:

                Poems
about stars and
how they are erased by street
lights,
            streets
in a poem about force
and the schools within it. We learned
all about night in college,
            how it applies,
night college under the stars where we
            made love
a subject. I completed my study of form
 
            and forgot it.

Having already said that it has no school in the sense of a shared method or style, the poem then free-associates to the more familiar, institutional sense of school, which in turn opens on the scene of college, the memory of having had to “apply” to it, and the heady confusion of intellectual and sexual discovery that makes that time of life so distinct. Yet, even as it builds itself around remembrance, the poem is pulled into a multidirectional temporality by the oblique repetition of the prefix fore-, which is audible, if not strictly visible, in the words force, form, and forgot. Fore- indicates anteriority, but in narrating recollections of a life’s earlier eras, this stanza also stretches into the present, to the time from which the poem looks back.

This contrapuntal logic has implications for Lerner’s notion of poetic form, which, as in these lines, is marked as a kind of relic—a thing that has been “completed” and forgotten. This partly explains the formal variety of The Lights, which moves in and out of lineated free verse without warning or self-conscious justification, as if this very modern poetry recalls more archaic inheritances almost by accident. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Lerner doesn’t use a poem’s shape as shorthand for something else: he doesn’t dip into a conventional form to pantomime an outmoded but bravely unrelinquished lyric subjectivity nor do his prose blocks signal an anti-lyrical suppression. Form is coincidental, an object of perception like any other, sometimes bright and stable, at other times dim and scrappy.

In Disowned by Memory (1998), his great book on Wordsworth’s poetry of the 1790s, David Bromwich observes that “even if we accept a strong distinction between material objects and ideal objects, it is not clear where Wordsworth would place the objects of his poem along that continuum.” And then “He was capable of thinking the mind of man as concrete a thing as any human figure he encountered,” much like the character of the Wanderer in the 1814 poem The Excursion, of whom Wordsworth says “deep feelings had impressed / So vividly great objects that they lay / Upon his mind like substances.” This works well as a description of Lerner’s poetry, in which readers also find a lay philosophical treatment of the experience of perception and cognition. Considering the process of organ donation in “Untitled (Triptych),” Lerner writes

                                                it's corneas
I’d like to pass on to the future, not because
I’m so great at focusing or refracting light,
but just because I’d like to be the medium
waves enter en route to sentiment

This is often exactly where the poetry finds itself, suspended just before the translation of experience into feeling or, to use Lerner’s more loaded term, sentiment, the set of emotional templates into which we press our coarse and sloppy responses to the world until they become part of a story we can bear to tell.

“Untitled (Triptych)” is set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where, Lerner writes, he has “returned … to hide / from experience.” This setting is important not because it signifies cultural cachet but because the sheer amplitude and variety of its holdings allows the museum to function analogically for the space of the mind, whose great objects are organized, like so many precious artifacts, into rooms that spill open into one another. The poem drifts from thought to thought, from intensely personal inquiry—a wait for “test results” pertaining to an unborn second child frames it—to art-historical musings on how the representation of angels, halos, and donors changed over time to a frank acknowledgment of political obsolescence in the statement “I largely belong to the order marked / for destruction when the revolution / in perspective is achieved.” These scales collide in a tonal register that is at once hard to locate and piercingly, almost unendurably sad:

                                   You can exchange
the commission implies, bodies and paintings,
doing time for depicting it, suspend
sentences across lines, but you can’t control
donations, your tissues could end up
supporting a face you don’t believe in.
People can get paid to give sperm or eggs,
blood or plasma, but it’s illegal to sell
organs, otherwise the rich would commission
the unincarcerated poor, whereas now
the rich will commission anyone, even
servants, disciples, assistants, who are often
tasked with underpainting sky

A poem in The Lights is dedicated to the art critic John Berger, but it’s not this one. Still, in “Untitled (Triptych)” Berger’s presence is unmistakable because of the way the poem links art history to the critique of political economy. More to the point, though, in Lerner’s unexpected, risky, and ultimately profound inclusion of pregnancy and childrearing in this poem about “a lot of theoretical issues,” I also hear Berger’s defiant earthiness, an echo of his career-long argument that art belongs to life and not the other way around.

In an essay on the Giovanni Bellini painting Madonna del Prato (Madonna of the Meadow, c. 1505), Berger notes the Madonna’s lack of a halo and position in an open field: “she can now be approached from any direction, even from the back, and that means that she is part of nature which can be looked at from all sides, questioned, investigated,” no longer an untouchable divinity but a real person. In Lerner’s references to genetic tests, C-sections, cord blood banking, and due dates and to his daughter trying to eat the “wine-dark blossoms” growing around a chain-link fence somewhere in Brooklyn—where a parent “could manage” financially “for one, but not for two little angels”—there is a genuine “innovation in a minor tradition,” a deliberate, defiant break with the sterility of a masculinist Modernism and its forcible contamination by the stuff of living.

Lerner calls his innovations “small,” and in this book, modesty—tiny gestures, incremental shifts of mood—has an ethical charge. The title The Lights seems to refer to what Lerner calls “sources / of lift,” those unexpected instants when someone (a child, a partner, a friend) or something (a “crucial passage” in Bastien-Lepage’s 1879 painting Joan of Arc) leavens without eliminating the difficult immensity of being alive. It doesn’t always work. Painfully, several poems in The Lights refer to a friend’s suicide, replaying scenes of shared mirth, awkwardness, or despondence only to end up in the utterly true but always unsatisfying conclusion that “You just can’t blame yourself.”

Now, it is also true, as many people know, that arbitrary encounters and accidents of connection often save lives, which is why people who lose a loved one to suicide can’t forget the call they didn’t return, the coffee date they were too busy or tired to make happen, the email they thought to send and didn’t. In Lerner’s novel The Topeka School (2019), an astonishing scene deals exactly with this impossible negotiation of our responsibility to others and the terrifying obscurity of its boundaries or limits. Adam Gordon, the novel’s protagonist, has been dumped by his college girlfriend and is on the phone to his parents violently ruminating about her betrayal. The setting is Adam’s dorm room, the narrator Adam’s father, Jonathan:

[H]e went on, less about Natalia now then about the pointlessness of everything, phrases from his college reading entering his voice, He kept saying “instrumental reason,” which seemed apt to me because I thought the music of his language was overwhelming its meaning. At one point, it was like he was speaking nonsense rhyme. All his vocabularies were colliding and recombining, his Topekan tough guy stuff, fast debate, language he’d lifted from depressing Germans, his experimental poets, the familiar terminology of heartbreak. And something approaching baby talk, regression. … [T]hen Jane said his name forcefully and he stopped, returned to himself (returned from where?): “What?” he asked. “I’m having trouble hearing you,” she said.

As Jane, Adam’s mother, insists that she can’t hear her son—even though the connection is “loud and clear”—her husband begins to understand that Jane is trying to maneuver Adam away from the open window of his room, and eventually she and Adam agree that he will call back from the pay phone in his dorm’s basement. It works: “He hung up the phone, collected his keys and cigarettes, and left his room on the ninth floor, its window open to the storm … Jane had talked us down.”

The phrase at the beginning of this paragraph—“he went on … about the pointlessness of everything”—is echoed in “The Curtain,” in which a despairing friend named John lists his trials—“I lost yet another job, Cora and I have broken up, for real this time, over the kid question, I’m certainly no comfort to my parents”—only to acknowledge “this sense of the irrelevance of it all given the political situation.” This same poem describes an attempt to take “gentle custody” of John, an attempt that the poem’s ominous past tense—excruciatingly audible in phrases such as “those tiny British cigarettes he always carried”—assures us has failed. The Topeka School shows a fantasy every parent wants to believe: it is possible to save your child’s life forever, even if a young adult mainlining Adorno is harder to safeguard than a toddler on the big-kid slide. In “The Curtain” and “The Media,” in which Lerner remembers another lost friend “drinking, but not too much,” readers see, dimly but unmistakably, what happens when someone gets too far out from the possibility of rescue, when “the rocking motion” by which “worlds end and are rebuilt” can no longer be sustained.

Sources of lift, then, are things that perpetuate that motion, that don’t struggle against but accept and then transform the ruination of worlds. If, in The Topeka School, Adam’s mother applies the delicate pressure necessary to contain her son, in “The Rose,” Lerner’s father buttresses a mind by humoring its misconceptions. The Rose of this poem is Lerner’s maternal grandmother who, confined to an assisted-living facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, becomes “convinced that the staff were sneaking into her room and subtly altering her paintings,” “taking the canvases out of the frames, adding another outline around the apples and pears, restoring the paintings to their places.”

My cousin would always argue with her: Are you crazy, who would do such a thing, nobody is touching your paintings. This went on for around a year. Until one day my dad—we were all in town for her ninetieth birthday—got up from his chair, walked to the wall, removed his glasses, inspected the artworks carefully, and said: Well, Rose, you are the one who really knows these paintings. You’ve had them for sixty years. So if you say they are being manipulated, I’m sure you’re right. But you have to admit, the staff is doing an excellent job. How carefully they’re reinserting the paper into the frame. No smudges on the glass. Rose thought for a moment. You’re right, she said, they are doing an excellent job. And she never complained about the staff again.

As usual, Lerner defuses the threat of sentimentality with a little austere wit—“I think this offers us a model of the art critic, if not an itinerary for art criticism, during a crisis in long-term care”—but the emotional power of the episode stands. Kindness, it turns out, does not mean trying to argue someone into sanity by exposing her delusions nor does it mean ignoring them. Instead, it might mean finding a way to enter unobtrusively into madness as if in a collaborative spirit and to make it non-catastrophic together.

This is also Lerner’s approach to writing a poetics of the present, a space “cordoned off by cops” and riven by crises social, political, economic, and ecological but also, nonetheless, all we’ve got. The madness of the world might not be malleable and yet there is no ethical choice but to try and reshape it. If Lerner’s language aspires to be a medium in which experience is, however briefly, suspended before it is shorn down into clarity or cliché, that language has no illusions about its power. It knows that poetry—like sex or parenting or friendship—is a discipline of barely getting by. We fuck up, we act like clowns, we cause pain without thinking or because we cannot control ourselves. But we also show up and repair what we must and save who we can.