Ordinary Unhappiness, Anahid Nersessian on The Lights by Ben Lerner.
“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 title The Lights seems to refer to what Lerner calls “sources / of lift,” those unexpected instants when someone … or something … leavens without eliminating the difficult immensity of being alive. It doesn’t always work.”
[…]“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.”
[…]“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.”
“I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees
In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away
[By any measure], Ben Lerner
