On definitions and poetry - Marjorie Perloff in TLS:

‘One of Ben Lerner’s collections of poems, Angle of Yaw (2006), which is included in the Granta volume No Art, contains the following mock definition poem: IF IT HANGS FROM THE WALL, it’s a painting. If it rests on the floor, it’s a sculpture. If it’s very big or very small, it’s conceptual. If it forms part of the wall, if it forms part of the floor, it’s architecture. If you have to buy a ticket, it’s modern. If you are already inside it and you have to pay to get out of it, it’s more modern. If you can be inside it without paying, it’s a trap. If it moves, it’s outmoded. If you have to look up, it’s religious. If you have to look down, it’s realistic. If it’s been sold, it’s site-specific. If, in order to see it, you have to pass through a metal detector, it’s public.
These conditionals nicely encapsulate Lerner’s sharp eye and ear for the cultural follies and excesses of our moment – a moment when responses to the question “What is art?” have become increasingly absurd.’

(…)
‘The Lights, Lerner’s first poetry collection in a decade, contains thirty-six poems, ten of them written in prose: some of these, like “The Chorus”, could just as well be called short short stories. Whatever the label, the prose poems represent Lerner at his most engaging: indeed, the trappings of lyric – lineation, rhythm, elaborate sound structure, apostrophe – have never seemed intrinsic to his work. The prose poems display a gift for context, layering, juxtaposition and repetition that recalls the Apollinaire of “Lundi Rue Christine”: the reader is positioned to overhear a conversation whose absurd motifs make us feel we are there – in the wine bar or hospital waiting room or subway train where things are really happening.’

(…)

‘This oblique poem gives us relatively little information, but its terse allusions and the incantatory repetition of its thirteen-line stanzas sent me to Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941, a book written with the conviction that if Lenin had not died so suddenly and prematurely, a genuinely proletarian communism in Russia might have had a chance. But that is, as Ben Lerner knows, a big if, and his poem is not sentimental about the available possibilities. If he can write more poems in this vein, avoiding the sometimes too easy pastiche and parody of moeurs contemporains at which he excels, he has a real future as a poet.’

Read the review here.

I was always a bit suspicious of Lerner.
Too self-aware, too hip, too ironic in way that gives irony such a bad name, (some people with too much cultural capital become ironic because they just have too much cultural capital, this is not what irony should be) but this review convinced me to read Lerner.

Also, because I tend to like clever parodies of moeurs contemporaines. What else is there, but the better satire.