Ben Lerner is from Topeka, Kansas. His first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, is just out from Copper Canyon. He co-founded and co-edits No: a journal of the arts. Buy his book here. See some work here, here, here and here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? Language has always been primary in my experience, but that’s not necessarily a love affair. Long before particular poems mattered to me, I was enthralled by playground trash talking, by my older brother’s casuistry when we traded baseball cards. The summer before my senior year of high school, I attended a summer writing course at Brown University. Gale Nelson suggested I read Marjorie Welish’s The Windows Flew Open. The windows flew open. The book infuriated me, confused me, made my palms sweat. Was it love? 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I don’t know. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Some of my favorite books are works of political philosophy. Hobbes’ Leviathan is particularly important to me. With an array of rhetorical devices, Hobbes scares the reader into believing that ‘the passion to be reckoned upon is fear.’ He generates the anxiety he ostensibly observes, then uses that anxiety to validate a wide and wild range of political and epistemological claims. The ability to enact the experience one describes is, I think, a hallmark of a great writer. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Kafka, Walser, Hamsun, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Proust. Lichtenberg’s Waste Books. Mann is getting more important. Turgenev is getting more important. Sebald. Vallejo. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes. I read my favorite books of poetry many times (something I don’t tend to do with prose). I read every submission sent to No. I read my friends’ poems. I read what Aaron Kunin recommends. I can’t extricate my reading from my writing enough to relate them as separate terms. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? The gaps in my reading are enormous. I’m just getting started. I have read an improbably small amount of Shakespeare, for instance. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? Seven year olds probably have an easier time than most accepting poetry as a highly various practice without feeling compelled to pin down its essence. I wouldn’t try to explain what a poem is to your seven year old for fear of damaging that precious flexibility. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? I don’t believe excellence in one role constitutes excellence in the other, but I think that the poet, whether she likes it or not, always has to struggle against what Chuck D has called the ‘dumbassification’ of American culture, against the deadening of intellects upon which our empire depends. I don’t know if the poet has a role, but I have my hopes for the poem. I don’t see that, by the way, as justifying the automatic identification of experimental writing with radical left wing politics. As the example of many modernists indicates, formally brilliant writing does not an honorable politics make. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): I would prefer not to. 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? It’s a violent relationship. Violence is, after all, our global condition. I have a tendency to write in and about the violence of language, the language of violence. I don’t just mean that when bodies appear in my poems they tend to come to blows. I mean that I consider the poem a space in which rhetorical forms can be opposed or juxtaposed in a manner that makes their violence manifest. In kindergarten we memorized: Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me. The need for the saying disproves it.