Books
The Lights
by Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023
128 pp., $26.00 (hardcover)
According to the latest Times article on the qualitative merits of bot art, Ben Lerner has lent excerpts from his new poetry collection to a group of venture capitalists. Apparently, they needed help prompting their AI. This makes a certain amount of sense. What better test for such a machine than the unimaginable? Something abstractly concrete, definite action terminating in a dream. Non sequiturs abound in The Lights, though, being the airy, cerebral kind, you don’t scratch your head so much as shrug, or laugh:
Now a purpose for the arts comes into focus, leaving a bright halo around the body. The way psychoanalysis lacks an account of nut milks. How the term “labor” plays about the lips of humanists. I develop predictive technologies for complex scenarios. I slow down popular songs and play them over footage of sunflowers tracking east.
That is, unless what does not follow is the least shred of context. Plenty occurs to Lerner and, like a caffeinated teenager, he can’t resist telling you—“I’m studying implicit race bias in toddlers. I’m tracking the advent
