10:04

by Ben Lerner

It was impossible, as at most openings, to look at the art; indeed, the opening as a form, insofar as I understood it, was a ritual destruction of the conditions of viewing for the artifacts it was meant to celebrate.

So much of the most important personal news I’d received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone

Would someone this hopelessly cosmopollitan even be able to.notice such a thing? I wouldn't think that in his world anything different would be conceivable

(I had wanted to arrive by 10:04 to see lightning strike the courthouse clock tower in Back to the Future,

“Why reproduce if you believe the world is ending?” “Because the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love.

Let me allow the preposterousness of what I’m saying to sink in: I think I became a poet because of Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan.