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But the speaker of The Lights turns out to be many speakers, one of whom cant help shaking his head at the literary pretensions of an earlier self:

I am trying to remember what it felt like to believedisjunction, non sequitur, injectionbetween sentences might constitutemeaningful struggle against the empiretyping away in my dorm.

The speaker of another poem, The Camperdown Elm, never left that dorm rooms story line; this alternate identity continues to make an art of discontinuity in the present:

Our children do not meanTheir numbers are up, the firefliesTo kill them when they cupAround the soft bodies, lightMusic softens featuresThe way a mild solventSoftens the acrylic, yellowing in time.

The multiple literary personalities of The Lights carry on an internal debate tournament about what poems ought to do or be. Part of me wants to say there is a mock-oratorical mode capable of vitalizing critical agency, Lerner writes, and part of me/wants to praise the maples winged samaras. Toward the books conclusion, he dreams up yet another kind of poem and struggle against empire to come:

All I need my song to one day say is you are my princess and my father and youre breathing glass, soft glass that links you, that rain outside of time is mist, is glass, and I want you to fan out and take the bridges.

Walt Whitman once claimed to contain multitudes. Lerners lucid dreamer wants a song that will mobilize those multitudes. Whitman makes multiple appearances throughout The Lights; in homage to the poet of internal contradictions, Lerner reads Crossing Brooklyn Ferry as an artwork that never quite closes the gap between heaven and earth: Its among the greatest poems and fails/because it wants to become real and can/only become prose. If only for a moment, Whitmans poem, like poetry writ large, wants to become real and can, when you read between Lerners lines.

Character is another word for typographical symbols like / or i. Symbol and character, verse and conversation, song and story coexist in the prose/poems of The Lights. Lerner populates his poetry with fictions like Emma, Rose, Marcela, Luca, Ari, Bob Lolly and Ben. Some of his speakers have no names and others, many. They tell stories, console one another and depart like visitors in a dream. A politician advises scientists to hit the body/with a tremendous, whether its ultraviolet/or just very powerful light; when you look into the box, a recovering meth addict explains of quantum physics, the cat is supposed to be alive or dead, not alive and dead; a child insists the book tucked under her pillow at bedtime will help me dream.

It takes a poet to invent characters who argue that the voice must be sung into existence. It takes a novelist to honor so many perspectives, histories and intimacies in one book. Which of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose? Charles Baudelaire asked over a century ago. The poet/novelist of The Lights enlarges Baudelaires experiments in prose poetry into a multistory dream house for contemporary American readers.

An oblique stroke divides life into either/or, but it can also conjoin things as an inclusive and: poet/novelist, symbol/character. The Lights" reminds us that we are one and many: princess and father, everyone in the dream and glass, soft glass bending in long meadows.

Princess/father/everyone/glass. You could go on like this forever.

Srikanth Reddy teaches at the University of Chicago and is poetry editor of The Paris Review. His most recent book is Underworld Lit.

Original post:

Book Review: The Lights, by Ben Lerner - The New York Times