A voice-mail lyric for a discipline in crisis: on Ben Lerner’s ‘The Media’

On 13 April 2020, Ben Lerner published a new prose-poem entitled ‘The Media’ in The New Yorker. It begins by self-reflexively narrating an audio recording on the speaker’s phone while he walks through the Long Meadow of Prospect Park to collect his daughter. Recounting various acts of gesture, silent communication, and teaching (on the bus home, ‘Marcela pulls the yellow stop-request cord, but never hard enough, so you have to help without her knowing’), the speaker lives through an unnamed crisis and repeats various voicemails and bit-parts of conversations on the status of a friend, recovering from an attempted suicide. The title refers not only to the new forms of communication technology that we have been using to keep in touch during the pandemic, but to the ‘delicate venation of an insect’s wing’, and it is with the forensic attention of the entomologist that Lerner has addressed our moment. Literary works that come to feel somehow representative of living during a particular crisis moment in history are sometimes unnoticed during their own time; others feel ready to be analysed now. This is one of those poems. The tremors of lockdown and its after-shocks are everywhere, and hauntingly recounted: the speaker waits by a fountain, ‘which they’ve shut off until the spring, when it will again give sensuous expression to our freedom’, and negotiates with an unnamed interlocutor or interlocuters through a succession of recorded messages, trying to find the time to speak after he has put his daughters ‘down’ to bed. More importantly for us in the academy and its humanities departments as we anxiously wait for the enrolment numbers in the autumn, Lerner (a Professor at Brooklyn College) doesn’t need to remind us that ‘the discipline is in crisis’; it’s ‘good work if you can get it, and you can’t, nobody can.’ This article, of around 3,000 words, will use ‘The Media’ as an exemplar work of what has been called the ‘Voicemail Genre’ of new lyric poetry. On the one hand the genre is concerned with the perennial problems of the lyrical ‘I’ who moves across time and space, who desires to get it all down somehow, whether the medium is pen and paper or voicemail, and who is no longer identical to the person who left it; and on the other, how the lyric functions at a time of enforced distance and technological unease, and what it might mean to understand these fragmentary storages of speech as a kind of lyrical address to the absent other.