BEN LERNER PONDERS SENTENCES

Ben Lerner read Jan. 30 at Washburn University from Leaving the Atocha Station, which has gained recognition from The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Kansas City Star,  and many other reviewers. The novel from Coffee House Press centers around a character who is a Charlie Brown-like Language Poet. The self-deprecating humor makes for a good reading, as well as the syntax fandangos. The audience of 80 or so, including his parents, laughed often. Also engaging was the questions-and-answers, beginning with his former high school English teacher who asked him why he chose such long sentences for the narrative.  His answer was, greatly paraphrased: the opening 64-word sentence creates the ruminating pace he wanted for the interior voice of the protagonists. He said he was influenced by friend Cyrus Console's recent book Brief Under Water, written in expanded 19th-century formal prose about popular culture topics. The tension between the two, a clash between form and content, enlivens Console's project. Lerner also talked about the tension between the lone writer (like his hero) who finds identity(ies) within interactions with others, since language is essentially and completely social.Paradoxes abound. He also said he likes listening to his own voice on an answering machine, which processes sound to be like others hear it, and therefore quite Otherly. A poem is like that machine, transforming self into otherness. His novel has an illustration with the caption: "I tried hard to imagine my poem or any poems as machines that could make things happen" (52). Someone asked him  how much of the hero, a poet from Topeka on a fellowship to Spain, IS Ben Lerner. Lerner replied all the furniture in the novel's apartment is real, but the lives of his wife and himself do not take place in that apartment. The character's experiences are quite different. Recursive perspectives, the hero looking down on himself looking up at himself, is one of the mazes Lerner builds. His poem "Rotation," on Poetry Daily's website http://poems.com/poem.php?date=15372 (published in American Poetry Review Jan.Feb. 2012) continues the spirals.

AD ASTRA POETRY PROJECT #40: BENJAMIN S. LERNER (1979 - )

Ben Lerner, from Topeka, pursued academic study of poetry at Brown University. His writing is grounded in the 21st century—with all its nesting boxes of realities and simulations. In one poem he writes about a man watching himself on TV: “He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV.” The occurrence of wordplay like this unifies Lerner’s writings. Lerner creates highly populated mappings of urban throughways. These include quick trackings of lifetime trajectories, like Ronald Reagan’s biography, for example. Such a person’s identity in this poetry-scape is reduced to an icon—the movie star president—and so human experience is easily commodified. Lerner told a Jacket magazine interviewer that he is concerned with “commercialization of public space and speech.”

Another of Lerner’s concerns is extended poems with variations on a theme, such as his first book, The Lichtenberg Figures. This interest extends to prose poem sections of Angle of Yaw, a 2007 Kansas Notable Book. Here, Lerner also shows interest in technologically expanded sight. The term “angle of yaw” is a physics term for the tiny sideways shiftings of an object like a bullet or airplane as it moves forward through its line of travel. This only can be observed from perspective of great distance, possible through optical aids. The poet, then, becomes a voyeur with infinite personal interactions to sort. He lives in not the classical age of art nor the modern nor postmodern. His is a land of fast, flattened social interactions, a hyper-industrial age where any human experience, not just labor, can be sold on E-bay.

This prose poem objectively classifies contemporary art forms. Like a wheel stuck in snow, the narrator defines art in relationship to its public context. The poem progresses from static images, painting and sculpture, to more dynamic ones. The dictionary-like tone reinforces the theme of art’s removal from spiritual experience.

From ANGLE OF YAW

If it hangs from the wall, it's a painting. If it rests on the floor, it's a sculpture. If it's very big or very small, it's conceptual. If it forms part of the wall, if it forms part of the floor, it's architecture. If you have to buy a ticket, it's modern. If you are already inside it and you have to pay to get out of it, it's more modern. If you can be inside it without paying, it's a trap. If it moves, it's outmoded. If you have to look up, it's religious. If you have to look down, it's realistic. If it's been sold, it's site-specific. If, in order to see it, you have to pass through a metal detector, it's public.

Education: Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, where he graduated from Topeka High School in 1997. At Brown University he earned a BA in Political Theory (2001) and an MFA in Poetry (2003).
Career: Lerner has published two books of poetry from Copper Canyon Press: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004, Hayden Carruth Prize) and Angle of Yaw (2006), which was nominated for a National Book Award. He has taught at California College of the Arts, Oakland, and now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh writing program. Since 2003, he has co-published No: A Journal of the Arts, a semiannual magazine of poetry, art and criticism. He also edits poetry for Critical Quarterly.

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©2009 Denise Low AAPP 40 ©2006 Ben Lerner Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon)