Mean Free Path

By Ben Lerner

• finalist for the National Book Award for his second book • Publishers Weekly described Ben Lerner as “among the most promising young poets now writing.” • Lerner is barely 30, publishing his third book • BA and MFA from Brown University • former student of C.D. Wright • teaches poetry at University of Pittsburgh • at age 23, he was the youngest poet published by Copper Canyon Press • author of two previous books of poetry • Fulbright scholar to Spain

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Release date: Dec 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781619320741

Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner is the author of books of poetry and prose, as well as several collaborations with visual artists. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Book preview

DEDICATION

For the distances collapsed.

For the figure

failed to humanize

the scale. For the work,

the work did nothing but invite us

to relate it to

the wall.

For I was a shopper in a dark

aisle.

For the mode of address

equal to the war

was silence, but we went on

celebrating doubleness.

For the city was polluted

with light, and the world,

warming.

For I was a fraud

in a field of poppies.

For the rain made little

affective adjustments

to the architecture.

For the architecture was a long

lecture lost on me, negative

mnemonics reflecting

weather

and reflecting

reflecting.

For I felt nothing,

which was cool,

totally cool with me.

For my blood was cola.

For my authority was small

involuntary muscles

in my face.

For I had had some work done

on my face.

For I was afraid

to turn

left at intersections.

For I was in a turning lane.

For I was signaling,

despite myself,

the will to change.

For I could not throw my voice

away.

For I had overslept,

for I had dressed

in layers for the long

dream ahead, the recurring

dream of waking with

alternate endings

she’d walk me through.

For Ariana.

For Ari.

MEAN FREE PATH

I finished the reading and looked up

Changed in the familiar ways. Now for a quiet place

To begin the forgetting. The little delays

Between sensations, the audible absence of rain

Take the place of objects. I have some questions

But they can wait. Waiting is the answer

I was looking for. Any subject will do

So long as it recedes. Hearing the echo

Of your own blood in the shell but picturing

The ocean is what I meant by

[image: cover]

You startled me. I thought you were sleeping

In the traditional sense. I like looking

At anything under glass, especially

Glass. You called me. Like overheard

Dreams. I’m writing this one as a woman

Comfortable with failure. I promise I will never

But the predicate withered. If you are

Uncomfortable seeing this as portraiture

Close your eyes. No, you startled

Identical cities. How sad. Buy up the run

The unsigned copies are more valuable

I have read your essay about the new

Closure. My favorite parts I cannot follow

Surface effects. We moved

Reviews for Mean Free Path

[plenilune · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's the rare book of poetry that's addictive, but this one is. I read the entire book mostly in one afternoon. It is a page-turner, a rapid-fire feather-assault of words, textures, images. It is a complex construction, one that defies comprehension after one reading. I'll have to come back to this again, multiple times, to be able to offer any more than this, but I will, and I think I'll get it a little more each time.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Engagement with poetry consists in a reader encountering structured text and in some way responding to it. That moment of response, when textual meaning coalesces and response begins might be modelled by the mean free path of a particle, which in physics is the average distance it travels before colliding with another particle. Once that collision occurs, once meaning triggers response, everything is off again in different directions, reflected, refracted, repelled, reconstituted. Ben Lerner’s fractured semantics in these poems represents what that might be like, may be like, possibly, when set upon a page. As such these poems, as a whole or in parts, are either objects of such a process, or more tellingly, an attempt to jolt the reader into a similar participatory process, i.e. engagement.The temptation, naturally, is to take Lerner’s recurring words or imagines, even whole phrases, and seek to reconstruct a seamless semantic whole. Better to resist. Likewise, the reader may, even as they read, be thinking about Lerner’s process. Did he begin with a semantic whole and, as he says, “cut and paste” to create the result, frustrating though that may be? Should I, as a reader, be seeking to return the text to its original form if only to then fracture it again as he has done? Is that my task? No. I don’t think so. Our task is to engage with the finished object. And that is going to be, itself, a fractured process. Just go with it.One advantage of Lerner’s method, whatever it might be, is that he achieves a poetry that is (frustratingly?) non-reductive. I can’t in any easy or plausibly truthful way provide a single sentence that tells you what it is about. Though I could offer halting gestures. And so the fragmentation, the mean free path of meaning, results in a sensibly objective poetry, one that is exactly what it appears to be.Highly recommended.