Photo: Martin Schoeller In 2024, Ben Lerner was asked if he wanted to interview one of his mentors, the poet Rosmarie Waldrop, for The Paris Review. “I was really ambivalent about it,” Lerner told me. “Rosmarie is amazing. She’s a hero of mine. But she’s not very easy to interview, in part because one of her remarkable characteristics is she doesn’t just bullshit.” That conversation was an origin point for his new book, Transcription , which can be loosely described as about an interview gone