April 9, 2026
In 1993, Keith Waldrop published his first and only novel, Light While There Is Light. The book, which New York Review Books will reissue in May with an introduction by Ben Lerner, features a narrator named Keith Waldrop, photos of Waldrop’s family of origin, and countless autobiographical anecdotes. The jacket copy calls it a “fictional memoir,” but Waldrop maintained it was a novel: “the fiction of a family that happens to resemble my family to the point that I have used some real names” but also includes “characters and details from elsewhere or nowhere.” Though he wrote more than twenty poetry collections and translated far more, Waldrop’s novel, such as it was, remained his personal favorite among his books. Lifting details from his own experience, he wrote, had allowed him “to concentrate on formal aspects” of the writing, rather than on primarily thematic or narrative ones.
This approach to novelization will sound familiar to readers of Lerner, Waldrop’s onetime student and lifelong devotee, who has made a career of troubling the notional border between fiction and memoir. When the two men met at Brown University nearly three decades ago, Lerner was an undergraduate and aspiring poet, Waldrop an esteemed professor of poetry and cult figure in the world of experimental writing. Both men hailed from Kansas, had powerful mothers, wrote disjunctive verse, and felt that living was a deeply textual project, one that entailed serving as author, reader, and character by turns. When Waldrop died in 2023 at the age of 90, Lerner memorialized him both onstage and in print—a tall order, given Waldrop’s titanic literary output and simultaneous disdain for hagiography.
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