MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER
MEAN FREE PATH
BOOKS BY BEN LERNER
Mean Free Path
Angle of Yaw
The Lichtenberg Figures
MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER
COPPER CANYON PRESS
PORT TOWNSEND, WASHINGTON
Copyright 2010 by Ben Lerner
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cover art: A long-exposure photograph of U.S. Peacekeeper III reentry vehicles splashing down during a test near the Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Image courtesy of the United States Army.
Copper Canyon Press is in residence at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington, under the auspices of Centrum. Centrum is a gathering place for artists and creative thinkers from around the world, students of all ages and backgrounds, and audiences seeking extraordinary cultural enrichment.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lerner, Ben, 1979-
Mean Free Path / Ben Lerner.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-55659-314-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3613.E68M43 2010
811'.6—dc22
2009043652
98765432 FIRST PRINTING
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Post Office Box 271
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
www.coppercanyonpress.org
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Critical Quaterly (UK), Jacket, jubilat, Lana Turner, Narrative, The Nation, New American Writing, The New Review of Literature, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and The Seattle Review, where some of these poems first appeared.
I would like to thank Geoffrey, Cyrus, Ed, and my parents for their attention to these poems.
Dedication
3
Mean Free Path
7
Doppler Elegies
27
Mean Free Path
37
Doppler Elegies
57
About the Author
69
MEAN FREE PATH
DEDICATION
MEAN FREE PATH
DOPPLER ELEGIES
MEAN FREE PATH
DOPPLER ELEGIES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Lerner’s first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, won the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, was a Lannan Literary Selection, and was named one of the 2004’s best books of poetry by Library Journal. His second book, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), was a finalist for the National Book Award and Northern California Book Award, among other honors. A former Fulbright Scholar in Spain, Lerner teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He was recently appointed poetry editor of Critical Quarterly.
The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts: “word” and “temple.” It also serves as pressmark for Copper Canyon Press.
Since 1972, Copper Canyon Press has fostered the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. The Press thrives with the generous patronage of readers, writers, booksellers, librarians, teachers, students, and funders—everyone who shares the belief that poetry is vital to language and living.
Major funding has been provided by:
Amazon.com
Anonymous
Beroz Ferrell & The Point, LLC
Golden Lasso
Lannan Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts
Cynthia Lovelace Sears and Frank Buxton
Washington State Arts Commission
For information and catalogs:
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Post Office Box 271
Port Townsend, Washington 98368
360-385-4925
www.coppercanyonpress.org
The poems have been typset in Adobe Garamond, designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe Systems. Headings are set in Gotham, a sans serif type designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Fere-Jones in 2000. Book design and composition by Phil Kovacevich. Printed on archival-quality paper at McNaughton & Gunn, Inc.
$16/POETRY
MEAN FREE PATH
BEN LERNER
In physics, the “mean free path” of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with an-other particle. The poems in Ben Lerner’s third collection are full of discrete collisions—stutters, rep-etitions, fragmentations, recombinations—that track how language breaks up or changes course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. Failures of communication articulate what escapes description. Lines are often out of order or belong to several possible orders simultaneously, inviting the reader to collaborate with the poem. Both a book of love poems and a book about the difficult possibility of writing love poems within a commercialized and militarized language, Mean Free Path is at once Lerner’s most personal and most formally adventurous work.
Unhinged in a manner of speaking
Crossed with stars, a rain that can be paused
So we know we’re dreaming on our feet
Like horses in the city. How sad. Maybe
No maybes. Take a position. Don’t call it
Night-vision green. Think of the children
Running with scissors through the long
Where were we? If seeing this as portraiture
Makes you uncomfortable, wake up
IN PRAISE OF BEN LERNER’S POETRY
“[Ben Lerner’s poems] compact layers of thought into a language of emergency. No offhand commentary, no prophecies, no reassurances . . . Instead, a sane voice orbiting the failed authority of a culture. Instead, the radiant sanity of dissent.”—from the National Book Award judges’ finalist citation for Angle of Yaw.
“Lerner [is] among the most promising young poets now writing.”—Publishers Weekly
“Sharp, ambitious, and impressive.”—Boston Review
COPPER CANYON PRESS
Cover art: U.S. Peacekeeper III reentry vehicles
Cover design: Phil Kovacevich
ISBN 978-1-55659-314-7
51600
9 781556 593147
