Ben Lerner, _Angle of Yaw_

HAVING READ AND enjoyed not only all three of Lerner's novels but also his book on poetry, I was beginning to feel self-conscious and negligent about not having read any of his poetry. I saw this in the Regulator Bookshop on a visit to Durham, NC, and decided, okay, this is the time.

Angle of Yaw is a National Book Award finalist, published 2006. Lerner is drawn to longer forms here. There are four poems in the collection, and the three shortest are all seven pages long ("Begetting Stadia" at the beginning, "Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan"at the end, and Didactic Elegy" in the center).  "Angle of Yaw" is ninety pages long--ninety prose poems in two block of forty-five, on either side of "Didactic Elegy."

Angle of Yaw must be doing well; the copy I bought is from the seventh printing. The success is merited but nonetheless surprising, because Lerner's poetry is no more down to Earth than NASA's Voyager Golden Record, the sleeve of which graces its cover. "History, screams Hamsun, the junior senator from Wisconsin, will vindicate my mustache"--not exactly Mary Oliver. He often juxtaposes lines in startlingly different registers, putting me in mind of Ashbery, and he can be mandarin.

For instance, "Didactic Elegy" is for those who died on 9/11, but it is also an analysis of the situation of the elegy as genre and poetry as an art in the early 21st century. That is, it seems designed to block or frustrate our reflexive response to the idea of a poem about 9/11, or any urge we may feel to admire the author for having appropriate feelings about a terrible public event, or any wish we may have to congratulate ourselves for reading a poem describing those appropriate emotions. It's a powerful thing, in a novel way, like Juliana Spahr's "This Connection with Everything with Lungs," but it avoids all the moves we'rte accustomed to calling "powerful."

 "Twenty-One Gun Salute ofr Ronald Reagan" is satirical, I would say, but without any of the more recognizable satirical moves. Twenty-one nine-line stanzas on what looks like a very formal but shifting pattern, with many of the lines (all of them, maybe?) sounding "found," as in "Jesus likes me," or "Let's add touches of ethnic instrumentation," or "mechanically separated chicken parts."  It's a long way from Pope's imitations of Horace, as satire goes. Still, it gets at something important about the Reagan era, even while not allowing itself to do anything the easy way, much as "Didactic Elegy" ends up feeling like an elegy wthout ever sounding like one.

The three relatively shorter poems are all excellent, but the prevailing tone of the book lies in the ninety prose poems of "Angle of YAw." They go down like gingersnaps. Poised, funny, original, observant, smart as bejeezus.