Thursday, June 9, 7:30 PM
Book Launch: Ben Lerner presents The Hatred of Poetry
In conversation with Michael Clune
Wine reception to follow

Ben Lerner, author of the highly acclaimed novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, is also a celebrated poet whose collection Angle of Yaw was shortlisted for the National Book Award, among other honors. Yet as he writes, "Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In his inventive and lucid book-length essay The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner uses this hatred as a starting place for his defense of the art, examining poetry's greatest and worst practitioners, and attempting to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. Lerner talks about his work with scholar and memoirist Michael W. Clune, followed by a wine reception to celebrate the book’s launch.