And so the novel became this way of thinking about some of the ideas that had concerned me, both in poems and in thinking about poetry, but letting them spread out in to a world with these different characters. And, in Leaving the Atocha Station, I had written some academic criticism and kind of soured on that and I had written a book of poems but it had really exhausted me with thinking about the line. The novelistic frame got built up around it. There’s a weird way in which the novels had a relation to poetry: with 10:04 I wrote that long poem, the one that’s excerpted in the book, before I wrote the novel – but I had no idea that it was going to have a life in the novel. This seems like a solid place to begin a conversation that will, in its course, tread ground far, far less firm.īoth of your novels so far have started life as poems: do you feel at all like the novel-writing instinct has usurped the poem-writing instinct? With this, only his second full-length book of fiction - and those having been released across the short span of as many years - Lerner is, despite having three books of verse to his name, already more widely known as a novelist than a poet. In many ways it’s a further examination of the ideas the author dealt with so deftly in his first book of narrative prose – those of poetry, relationships, time and the tenuous construction of the Self in the face of the super-thin membrane that separates it from reality and reality from itself in the wake of events – using the “I” as a weapon to explore its own fragility. It’s also the 13th day of Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, being released in the UK to the same kind of near-univocal acclaim it received in the US.

When I ask him what the atmosphere is like right now, whether it’s strange to see the city, under heavy police presence, in such a militarised state, he points out that even now it’s practically hands-off compared to policing in New York on any given day.

It’s the 13th of January 2015 – six days after the attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo – and Lerner has flown in to London today from Paris. I meet Ben Lerner at Shoreditch’s branch of the Ace Hotel where, as I order our coffee and explain to the author of 2013’s Leaving the Atocha Station the difference between a latte and a flat white, the Brooklyn-resident poet and novelist finds himself locked out of his hotel room for no less than the third time in less than twenty-four hours.

Atocha station ben lerner