The title of this book comes from the term in physics for the distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The lines with in the poems of the book feel like spaces between two points, bouncing off one another, clashing in meaning before bouncing off something else and coming back around. It's an interesting concept and I applaud Lerner for his chutzpah. But there comes a point where the poetry becomes like a physicist at a dinner party, too intent to prove that he's the smartest person in the room. I’m surprised at how much I like Ben Lerner’s poetry. First because it’s published by Copper Canyon, which I think of as slick and stodgy, and second because the science conceit in his work interests me not at all. But his writing, here and in his other books, strikes me as smart without toppling under theory, skillful without incessantly pointing to its own craftedness, and alive to our media-saturated political moment without making that the sole subject of the poetry. Reading this new book especially, I realize I like Lerner a lot like I like Ashbery. Both come across to me as brainy sad sacks who render pathos with a light brush, and while Lerner has a more sober, serious veneer, both finally appeal to me as high-order aesthetes whose gift is for turning the common events of our social experience into pleasing verbal objects. Maybe that’s where the science comes in—the cool objectivity, a sense of things stepped back from and framed like in a convex mirror or a photograph, with a connoisseur’s feel for the framing.
What do You think about Mean Free Path (2010)?
ben lerner tore it up in this.. damn..
—hahawizard
