^{Mean Free Path
by Ben Lerner
Copper Canyon Press
96 p.}

“I want this to be / Composed entirely of edges, a little path / for Ari.” This sentence appears midway through Mean Free Path, Ben Lerner’s third book of poems on Copper Canyon Press. It is a moment of clarity, candor, and self-consciousness that gives clues to the way the book works. Of course, by that point, the reader is well acquainted with, if not entirely oriented to, Lerner’s project. Let’s zoom out and have a look at what surrounds the sentence. Do not adjust your monitor:

                   Wait, I don’t want this to turn
                   Turn into a major novel. I want this to be
                   Composed entirely of edges, a little path
                   For Ari. All my teachers have been women
                   But not how you mean that. That’s why I speak
                   In a voice so soft it sounds like writing
                   Night writing. A structure of feeling
                   Broken by hand. I want the paper to have poor
                   Opacity, the verso just visible beneath

So goes one of 36 pieces in the fourth movement of Mean Free Path. Many of Lerner’s themes and preoccupations are present in this passage. Such is the case on every page, as Lerner seeks to deliver an experience of simultaneity, interruption and disjunction throughout the volume.ⁱ  As in his previous collection, the 2006 National Book Award finalist Angle of Yaw, Lerner slips in and out of multiple voices in pursuit of poetic forms and registers that can communicate through the static of contemporary accelerated culture.ⁱⁱ We are accustomed to a multi-tasking, hypermediated environment, where rounds of gunfire and applause are indistinguishable, and Lerner appears to make poetry that embraces our capricious attention spans. However, the increasingly rigorous nature of his forms is at odds with the notion that we can read a Lerner poem while checking email, G-chatting with grandparents, creating a PowerPoint presentation and intermittently hollering at the dog to Get off the damn couch.
            First of all, Mean Free Path is not made up of discrete poems with individual titles. It’s a book-length project composed of five sections, including a two-page “Dedication” followed by alternating movements, two each of “Mean Free Path” and “Doppler Elegies.” The two types of movements have unique, consistent structures. Each “Mean Free Path” is broken into 18 verse pairs of nine lines, and the first half of the first pair is 10 lines. The passage quoted above is the first half of one of these pairs. The “Doppler Elegies” movements each contain eight pieces of 27 lines (three nine-line stanzas). The overall structure refines and concentrates the formal concerns evident in the alternating verse/prose schemes of Angle of Yaw, as well as the disintegrating forms of his loose sonnet sequence, The Lichtenberg Figures (2004).
            Lerner’s primary line-to-line strategies are disjunction and repetition (with a difference). We get the impression that he started with a few cohesive poems, then copied, cut and pasted them into the forms of Mean Free Path, reappropriating his own material and possibly incorporating material from other sources. What we have, then, is a remix without an original. However, he could just as well have composed the book from front to back, recombining and exploring his motifs in real time, as he wrote. Ultimately, the difference between these two methods is not as great as it might seem, and this is part of what the book has to say.