Ben Lerner '01 MFA'03 and Elizabeth Robinson MA'87, both of whom studied creative writing as graduate students at Brown, read selections from their poetry on Wednesday in the McCormack Family Theater. The event was the first of the five-part "Writers on Writing" series, hosted by the Literary Arts Program.
Lerner has published two books of poetry, "The Lichtenberg Figures" and "Angle of Yaw," since he graduated in 2003 and is a co-founder and co-editor of "No: a journal of the arts." He read a selection of works, including part of a forthcoming book. Robinson, who co-edits Instance Press and EtherDome Chapbooks, has published eight books of poetry, including "Pure Descent," a winner of the National Poetry Series.
Lerner took the podium first. He opened with a few prose poems, which he read slowly and carefully, with child-like intonation and jarring pauses between words. From this odd vocal self-discipline emerged poems like polemics, biting diagnoses of the modern soul.
In one prose piece, Lerner paints a ghastly portrait of the video game world. The child-turned-gamer falls into delusion. He learns to see the world the way he sees his games: he thinks himself omnipotent. God is missing, and a child ascends to take the empty throne.
Lerner's prose poems seize on little details - video games, for example - and analyze them thoroughly. Through these small instances, he provides a gripping portrait of modern American culture.
Lerner also read a wide selection of verse pieces, which were more impressive than the prose. In his prose, Lerner describes a cultural chaos, but in his verse, he recreates that chaos with his language.
In Lerner's verse, one comes to see the English language as a strange, new, complicated thing. Through a haze of theoretical jargon, one catches only quick glimpses of meaning: slangy quips and short sarcastic jabs, enigmatic images, cliches turned inside out. One sees small shards of conversation floating in a vast linguistic mayhem.
There is a certain alchemy in all of Lerner's pieces. Brand names, slang, comfortable everyday language: these morph into a nightmare world, an American hell. In his prose, Lerner acts like Dante's Virgil - he leads us through the cultural inferno, takes us sightseeing in our own living room. In the verse pieces, the poet's voice recedes behind the words themselves, and the words become the central spectacle.
Lerner was a tough act to follow, and coming hard on his heels, Robinson came across as a little watery. Her words didn't carry the same bite.
But if Robinson felt watery, it was at least in part because listeners heard her quiet, fluid language immediately after Lerner's verbal pyrotechnics. Lerner's work is a loud polyphony; Robinson's is softer and more personal.
Robinson read a number of poems, mostly in verse. In many poems, she seems to ask herself, can I truly speak to, feel for, understand another? Where does the border between empathy and voyeurism lie, and am I condemned to a life on the wrong side?
In one poem, "Lemon Tree," she reflects on her own poetry. There may be too few images in my poems, Robinson considers. Then she pushes the thought aside.
Perhaps she should consider it more thoroughly. In her work, she digs deep into the human soul. Her poems brim with mystery, with the complexity of being. But it's hard to succumb to a poem, hard to step into a poet's world, when there's no vivid image to step in through.
