This past week the poet and novelist Ben Lerner spoke with the students of SUNY New Paltz about his work.  Lerner is the poetry editor for Harpers, and the previous poetry editor for Critical Quarterly.  He is also currently a professor at Brooklyn College, and has taught at The University of Pittsburgh and California College of the Arts.  His latest book is The Lights (2023). 

Lerner discussed, in his terms, “the dramas of repurposing language and recontextualizing language.” (1)  I was first introduced to Lerner through his poetry book Angle of Yaw, published in 2006 by Copper Canyon Press.  The “angle of yaw” is the angle between the direction of travel and the direction of wind, specifically the rotation around the vertical axis (picture shaking your head no).  

I exist in a multiverse, and every world I walk in blends into the next, because as an artist, I carry the multiple worlds within me all of the time.  The conversation I overheard on the sidewalk, the museum pamphlet,  the bodega sign, the voice notes and details I took down while walking, the neuroscience article I read that was over my head, the children’s book rhyme that stuck in my memory…all are materials that spill out onto my desk when I sit down to work.  

We live in an age of specialization.  Most of us in one field are largely naive to another field.  The DaVinci days – when a learned person knew a good deal about everything – are over.  This leaves us with a lot of empty space around the intersection of fields, for taking what we’ve found in one field and playing with those ideas in another.

In my revisitation of Jung’s The Red Book, I found myself reading “The Dialectical Self-Concept:  Contradiction, Change, and Holism in East Asian Cultures.”  This paper discusses the differences of Westerners’ self-concept in relation to the self-concept of the East Asian.  

For example, in a study with students from the Shibaura Institute of Technology and University of Tokyo, “Japanese participants exhibited significantly greater simultaneous accessibility of contradictory self-knowledge than did Euro-Americans in both personality domains. These findings suggest that contradictory self-knowledge is more accessible or retrieved more efficiently from memory among members of dialectical than synthesis-oriented cultures.” (2)

Mental rigidity and an obstinance in considering another’s point of view will hamper growth and development.  This flexibility, this empathy – for others and also for ourselves – is necessary.

I am a big fan of paradox and contradiction in fiction, and I think this is because it feels more authentic.  As Lerner discussed in his lecture, we must decouple the authenticity from the rightness or wrongness of the characters.  I’m not interested in a “morally superior” character, I am interested in an authentic character.  In art, the morally superior character feels like a lazy construction.  I’m sure it has its place, but didactic fiction, or art in general, has never interested me.  

In Zen Buddhism, a koan provides a path to a deeper understanding of reality, by breaking down the habitual patterns of thought and logical lines of thinking.  The goal is to observe one’s true nature, or kensho (in Chinese:  jianxing).  

Toyoda explains, “According to Jung, the dissolution of the persona inevitably occurs in the process of individuation. This amounts to a collapse of the conscious attitude, and the person finds himself/herself tossed about by the unconscious. Sometimes a person tries to restore their shattered persona but in this regressive act they become smaller and more limited than before, or they may identify with archetypal images of the collective unconscious in place of the lost persona. In the latter case, they naturally become inflated, which can cause many problems. There is no short-cut in the individuation process. What is needed is a patient dialogue with the images from the unconscious and finding a new balance within the totality of the psyche.”

In “The Faces of Victor Serge” (New York Review, January 2023), Lerner spoke of the Russian writer’s use of the tension between the individual and the collective life.  The second person “you” moves from the general to the specific and back.  This recalibration creates a shift in the reader’s perspective.

One student asked Lerner his feelings about the term autofiction being used with regards to his work.  His response was that this term feels like something that lies on a spectrum, as opposed to a categorical description. (3)  And also…isn’t all writing?  The dreamlike quality carries over.  Our minds play with ideas in the same way.

Lerner said, emphatically, “The primary political function of the arts puts words into new context, that spark…The reconfiguration of social materials can produce a different world.”  (4)

Footnotes:

1)   Ben Lerner, “The I Who Is Not Me,” (English Graduate Symposium keynote address, The Coykendall Science Building Auditorium, SUNY New Paltz NY, April 3, 2025).

2)   Julie Spencer-Rodgers, Helen C. Boucher, Sumi C. Mori, Lei Wang, Kaiping Peng, “The Dialectical Self-Concept:  Contradiction, Change, and Holism in East Asian Cultures.”  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2009 Jan;35(1):29–44.

(3)  Sonoko Toyoda, “Persona,” International Association for Analytical Psychology.

4)   Ben Lerner, “The I Who Is Not Me,” (English Graduate Symposium keynote address, The Coykendall Science Building Auditorium, SUNY New Paltz NY, April 3, 2025).

5)  Ibid.