10 04 ben lerner summary5/19/2023 We did not, as in other classes, catalogue literary epochs like distant names on a map, but asked how national, social and personal crises inflected literary innovations within the tradition. That was what made his class so captivating to a young writer like myself: he grounded the discussion with stakes rooted in our lived world. Although Hurricane Irene (category 3) was set to make landfall in a week, the crisis, Ben made clear, was language. Ben spoke to us as if we were his peers, a portion of the campus citizenry assembled to assess a crisis ahead of us-not his subordinate charges. Ten minutes into our first class I flipped open my schedule to double check that I had not, in fact, accidently stepped into a graduate course. I first encountered Ben Lerner as an undergraduate in one of his poetry workshops at Brooklyn College.
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