Ben Lerner & Alexander Kluge - A line from Lerner’s poem “The sky stops painting and turns to criticism” that Kluge was struck by some years ago became the starting point for their first joint book project. Step by step this gave rise to poems, stories, and conversations in which the heavens show their bewitching and threatening qualities

Ben Lerner and Alexander Kluge, The Snows of Venice, Spector Books, 2018.
Lerner: excerpt (Bomb Magazine)


Kluge: Sinking Ships and Sea Dramas




American author Ben Lerner and German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge come from two different generations but share a passion for producing unlikely constellations of historical and personal materials. A line from Lerner’s poem “The sky stops painting and turns to criticism” that Kluge was struck by some years ago became the starting point for their first joint book project.
Kluge responded to this celestial critique with a story about the technically controlled power of a squadron of bombers bossing the skies over Aleppo, which Lerner answered with a sonnet. Step by step this gave rise to poems, stories, and conversations in which the heavens show their bewitching and threatening qualities. This literary dialogue is published in The Snows of Venice. A series of twenty-one photographs that Gerhard Richter took in Venice in the 1970s augments the interplay of texts and the principle of interconnecting poetic horizons.


Step by step this dialogue gave rise to poems, stories and conversations in which the heavens reveal their bewitching and threatening qualities. A series of 21 photographs that Gerhard Richter took in Venice in the 1970s augments the interplay of texts and the principle of interconnecting poetic horizons, as well as images by Rebecca H. Quaytman and Thomas Demand.


Ben Lerner: Angels and Administration: An Interview with Alexander Kluge