SO MANY EXCELLENT poets hit a vein of prosperity with books of prose and the next thing we know, they are no longer publishing much poetry: Patricia Lockwood, Eula Biss, Lucy Ives, Anne Boyer. I am glad to see this is not the case (yet) for Ben Lerner. He has published three novels to considerable acclaim, and his essays and stories show up in the New Yorker and Harpers, yet here he gives us a generous (100+ pages) volume of new poems. You go, Mr. Lerner.
Really good new poems, too. Lerner likes to stretch out, and the longer poems tend to be the stronger ones--"The Lights," "The Dark Threw Patches Down upon Me Also," "Rotation," and my particular favorite, "Untitled (Triptych)," in which we wander through the Met with Lerner as he awaits test results (as to whether is wife is pregnant, I think), making one dazzling unexpected connection after another.
That Lerner's success in prose has potentially enlarged the audience for his poetry may have prompted the thoughts about connection and accessibility that occur in the volume's closing poems ("The Rose, "The Son," "No Art") and may even account for the recurring invocations of Whitman, who certainly sought connection and at least occasionally tried to be accessible. The volume's real secret sharer is a different New York poet, though--Ashbery.
The whoops-what-happened jumps in syntax, the juxtaposition of precise technical vocabulary with the throwaway phrase of the week, the oblique strategies of the prose poems--none of this comes from Whitman, no, nor from Brooklyn's other laureate Hart Crane, but from good old J.A. And I for one am thankful. You go, Mr. Lerner--you go.
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