A poetics of abduction: Ben Lerner’s ‘The Lights’ and extraterrestrial intelligence

Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (2016) identifies the Challenger disaster of 1986, and in particular Ronald Reagan’s rhetorical consolation for the loss, as the catalyst for the young poet’s interest in verse, a story fictionalised in Lerner’s novel 10:04 (2014). In his long poem ‘The Lights’ (2023), he makes an oblique return to this period, working with tropes from the film and television of his childhood regarding benevolent visitation from alien worlds. Lerner busies the heavens of stellar poetry’s traditions by attending to the dead and to drones, to sympathetic signals and to radar ghost tracks, thereby establishing the attempt to read the skies as an ancient urge supplemented rather than marred by increasing signal interference in the US ‘rocket era’ and after. I argue that ‘The Lights’ interpolates the latest debates about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) and sightings such as ‘Oumuamua (2017), as well as philosophy’s recent contributions to discussion about the plausibility of extraterrestrial intelligence (EI). Crucially, I read Lerner as conflating Allen Grossman’s ‘virtual’ verse with the positing of alien beings, and suggest he figures poetry as not only a space of encounter, or an encounter with outer space, but itself a form of extraterrestrial abduction.