We have internalized the discontinuities of everyday experience. We can defrag our laptops, but we can’t defrag our minds, though we have a hard time distinguishing between thought and computer processes. Lerner has also internalized, in his poetry, the discontinuities and ambient noise of daily experience in post-millennial America. It doesn’t matter whether he collaged his own poetry, and it’s not necessary to figure out if he incorporated outside sources. He could have written a dense paragraph outlining the book’s concerns, printed out 10 copies, and cut and pasted them by hand into these poems. Or, as would be appropriate to the editorial and marketing voices that creep into his poetry, he could have worked from a promotional description of the book. Also, poetry by nature incorporates outside sources, be they literature, public announcements, recalled conversations, or pieces of pop ephemera. Mean Free Path suggests there is no distinction between more or less manual compositional procedures and the way we process information, except that most of the work we do by hand is data processing via keyboard. If we have reached a point where the Kindle seems like a reasonable replacement for a book, and we prefer searchable docs to paper documents, we have reached a point where “cut and paste” evokes a computer command instead of a pair of scissors and a bottle of glue. And as we look to our computers as all-in-one tools, our windows to the world are replaced by screens. In that console-mediated world, command and control are buttons to be pushed, not notions to be questioned. Even our options are reduced to key commands.
            So, Mean Free Path has a lot more to talk about than its own creation, or, more to the point, its structure is integral to its messages. And Lerner is not advancing a Luddite agenda, he is looking for a path to engagement with the literal world. At 31 years old, the former Fulbright Scholar is a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh writing department, an experienced editor of literary journals (he was a co-founder of No: a journal of the arts, and he is the recently appointed poetry editor of Critical Quarterly), and a lauded figure in American poetry. To put it mildly, Lerner is driven. His aim, with this book, is not only to create poetry relevant to contemporary culture, but to write a viable love poem based on fractured lyric. While he’s at it, he weaves in an elegy for the loss of a friend, meditates on the Doppler effect as a metaphor for cross-fading spans of attention within a perpetually distracted virtual and actual landscape, comments on the everyday invasions of privacy, public discourse and civil rights on the part of the American military-industrial complex and the Department of Defense, and apologizes to his wife for being so distracted all the time.ⁱⁱⁱ
            Take this passage, which concludes one of the “Doppler Elegies”:

                                I’m on the other line
                   in a cluster of eight poems
                                all winter. The tenses disagreed

                   for Ari. Sorry if I’ve seemed
                                distant, it’s been a difficult
                   period, striking as many keys
                   with the flat of the hand
                   as possible, then leaning the head
                   against the window, unable to recall
                                April, like overheard speech
                   at the time of writing
                                soaked into its length

What was a phone line becomes a metastructural reference, and the “line” also calls out to a noose. Lerner rhymes his wife’s name with “sorry,” apologizing for a “difficult period” that immediately becomes an ornery punctuation mark, though “period” is followed by a comma, which then leads to a fit of keyboard pounding and a collapse onto a computer screen. It’s also a scene on a plane flight, in which he’s frantically writing a letter on a laptop and leans his head against the window while he short circuits on memory and input. Meanwhile, the form he’s contrived, in which particular lines are always indented 13 spaces, dramatizes and aestheticizes the Doppler effect (lines slide left and right, reference and register different sources, phase from spoken to written language, fade out).