Ben Lerner. Angle of Yaw. Copper Canyon, 2006.

Review by Elisa Gabbert

Though the words appear sparse on the page, Angle of Yaw is a dense book, dense with ideas and ambition. Of course, at 28, you don’t get to be on Copper Canyon Press, with your second book nominated for the National Book Award, without being ambitious. A graduate of Brown University, Ben Lerner won the Hayden Carruth award for his first book (The Lichtenberg Figures) in 2003, and co-founded and co-edits the well-endowed (hefty, glossy) No: A journal of the arts.

With Angle of Yaw, 125 pages of lined poetry and prose poems, Ben Lerner establishes himself as someone to be taken seriously. He largely eschews the methods of collage and the artful non sequitur so popular with many of his young contemporaries. (In one poem, the line “Non sequitur rendered lyric by a retrospective act of will” is dropped to the floor with a mock-innocent whistle.) More a thought poet than a language poet, Lerner prefers to engage in cognitive play, though he does so at the level of language. Not everyone thinks in sentences, but Lerner seems to. In this collection he dabbles in semiotics and semantics, but the subject matter also encompasses social criticism and criticism qua criticism, as well as technology, from children’s games to Jumbotrons. Lerner’s range of tones includes cheeky wit, intellectual curiosity, and barely concealed disgust. He trembles at turns with cynical anger, at turns with a composed terror of the future-that-is-now.

It’s a lot to take in—and that’s a good thing—but occasionally the book feels tonally problematic. The prose poems (grouped into two long sections both named “Angle of Yaw”) betray a perplexity at the world, through holes in their knowing irony. The lyrics, however, can come off as a little smug or preachy. In a poem on page 8, a group of “tomahawking redskin fans” are swiftly made into patriotic automatons: “Support your polis: chop the air.” (I longed for the levity of a final exclamation point there.)

This appears in the first section of the book, entitled “Begetting Stadia,” an examination of the concept of the collective in U.S. society, which so often involves a kind of sportsmanlike spectatorship. Americans like to watch, or, at least, don’t know how not to. We watch all the time. We watch what we’re not supposed to watch (“The woman attends the night game to watch the snow fall near the lights”), and we watch what we never before had the ability to—advances like aerial photography, medical imaging, and electron microscopes give us new ways of seeing. When Lerner writes, “The tree in your mind // is mine,” he points to the power problem inherent in vision—we want what we see. It creates the illusion of control, and a need to make that illusion real. Lerner suggests that when man achieved a view of the earth from above—from a blimp, or a spaceship—we began to play God. Or, we became God. An astronaut from China claims “the only man-made structure visible from the shuttle is the Great Wall.” (What about “the light from the Luxor Casino?” Lerner wonders.) “For visible from space read in the eyes of God.” But living like God, above the world, may not be so easy for us mortals: “Delivering supplies from the air is no problem. But to the air?”

How we see, for Lerner, is intimately connected to how we read, another theme of the book. The poem reprinted on the back cover (a starkly spooky sci-fi-ish cover) begins, “Reading is important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame. When the page is shifted to a vertical plane, it becomes an advertisement, decree, and/or image of a missing pet or child.” Like the complex formations of a marching band on a football field, visible in their entirety only via an overhead picture projected back to the fans in the stadium, vertical texts and images are meant to be received by groups, the multitudes, society. They are messages from the management, from above. Because we are always watching, we are also always reading, often inadvertently. “The average reader […] will process and even vocalize a text he believes himself to be composing, while in fact reading skywriting.” At worst, we regurgitate propaganda; at best, we commit unconscious plagiarism.

Lerner seems poignantly aware of this danger, if it can be called that, to the artist (the horror of committing the crime seems worse than falling victim to it); one poem proclaims, “Not having read the author in question is no defense against the charge of plagiarism.” And yet heavy appropriation—draping one’s self with one’s influences—is another mark of the current poetic landscape. For example, Jenny Boully’s [one love affair]* plunders any number of texts (to wonderful effect). Boully quotes from her source texts at will and generally without the use of quotation marks. Lerner, too, often opts not to use quotation marks or italics within Angle of Yaw, but for different, if related, reasons. Rather than burying authorial references, he buries the symbolic referents of words themselves. The book’s first prose poem contains the line: “A beware of dog on keep off grass.” Lerner’s clever choice not to mark any of these words with quotes or italics destabilizes the reader: what level of signage are we at? The referent wavers—is that just a dog, or the word dog, or a sign with the word dog on it: “BEWARE OF DOG”? A later poem commands, “Shovel snow from the path; file snow under snow.” In other words, while you literally (ack) pile snow upon snow, categorize “snow” beneath the rubric of snow. Lerner manipulates the text to demonstrate that texts are intrinsically manipulative. It’s brain-tickling and very effective.

The tonal unevenness I earlier alluded to in Angle of Yaw is only partially mediated by Lerner’s embedded apologies/excuses for his attitude: “The smugness masks a higher sadness.” When I read the line “We are trying too hard not to be funny,” I sort of agreed. But some of these poems are in fact very funny, and they are among the most successful. One prose poem is a hilarious (to me) send-up of playtime in the postmodern age:

The girl plays with nonrepresentational dolls. Her games are devoid of any narrative content, amusements that depend upon their own intrinsic form. If you make her a present of a toy, she will discard it and play with the box. And yet she will only play with a box that once contained a toy. Her favorite toy was a notion about color. She lost it in the snow.

On the opposite page, there’s a similarly delightful piece, almost a short short, that combines elements of Paul Auster and Jorge Luis Borges in a little detective story where representation and causation are confused and intertwined—the detective, creating a pushpin map of a series of killings, realizes the killer is arranging his victims in the shape of a smiley face. “The detective knows, and the shooter knows the detective knows, that the shooter must complete the upward curving of the mouth.” I couldn’t help but grin at the grim absurdity of this. And at Lerner’s lovely way of turning the tale in on itself: “The shooter dreams of pushing a red tack into the map, not of putting a bullet into a body. The detective […] drives metal stakes into the ground to indicate the tacks.”

The book’s third section of poems, “Didactic Elegy,” is about art, and art after 9/11. (This may just be one poem; none of the individual pieces in the book are titled.) Lerner here, as elsewhere in the book, explores how images of reality warp and shape reality. Repeatedly, he implies that as representations of the world become more realistic, reality necessarily becomes less realistic; the two become indistinguishable. The view from the airplane looks more and more like our simulators. War morphs into a sophisticated video game: “Points are taken away for killing civilians, but points are irrelevant.” Again here the poetry is broken into lines. Oddly, the lineated poems in Angle of Yaw tend to sound less like poetry. This piece moves syntactically, paratactically like an essay, as in this very prose-like (I hate to use the pejorative “prosaic”) stanza:

By economy I mean that the field is apprehension in its idle form.

The eye constitutes any disturbance in the field as an object.

This is the grammatical function of the eye. To distinguish between objects,

the eye assigns value where there is none.

As an essay in poem form, or vice versa, this is less successful than, say, Anne Carson’s hybrids in books like Glass, Irony, and God, Men in the Off Hours, and the recent Decreation—in that I remained partially unconvinced that poetic lines were the form best serving this content. However, this section contains some of Lerner’s most brilliant ideas, like “The phrase unfinished masterpiece is redundant.” Lerner puts forth that the most enduring art remains always open to interpretation, and reinterpretation, so that new audiences can experience its power though removed from its original historical context. “For example, / if airplanes crash into towers and those towers collapse,” he writes, our national body of art necessarily undergoes a “reassignation of value.” The masterpieces are those objects of art that are perpetually relevant.

Luckily for us readers, the bulk of this book consists of prose poems—one justified block per page, averaging about a hundred words each—and in these Lerner seems to have really found his form. In the second “Angle of Yaw” section, he again and again concocts just the right admixture of wonder, complicity, and wry edge, with a powerful cumulative effect. Anyone who pushes past the first ten or so slightly unwelcoming pages in Angle of Yaw will be rewarded with many more pages full of Lerner’s quirky and sometimes profound musings:

The phobic […] must be conditioned to fear the opposite of what they fear. The difficulty of such a treatment lies in finding the counterbalancing terror. What is the opposite of a marketplace? A prime number? Blood? A spider?

*

If you don’t secure your own mask first, you’ll just sit there stroking the child’s hair.

*

When a child dies in a novel, he enters the world. And writes the novel.

The final section of the book, “Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan,” differs from the other non-prose poems in a couple of ways. These seven pages unmistakably constitute one poem, and they feel unmistakably like poetry rather than prose. Lerner achieves a hypnotic rhythm through a series of declarative sentences, which seem to emerge from a medley of speakers:

A child could have painted that.

We dipped cicadas in WD-40 and ignited them with punks.

Magnetic resonance imaging reveals a degenerate hemisphere.

A diamond cheval-de-frise tops the White House.

The floral arrangement is based on outmoded ideology.

I am unmatched in my portrayal of subtle human emotions.

Workers report cracks in our mode.

There is no beauty like the beauty of a throwaway line

the split second before it’s thrown.

This poem is political without being preachy. One of the strengths of Angle of Yaw is its wholesale rejection of solipsism—Lerner isn’t interested in proving that his singular viewpoint of the cosmos is unique. He’s far more interested in speaking for, or as, the collective. If anyone happens to be listening. . . .

Some books are crafted to make you swoon with their beauty. Angle of Yaw is not that book, and as long as we’re displaying parodically exaggerated gestures, it’s probably more likely to make you furrow your brow and scratch your head. I admit I was somewhat inclined to approach this collection skeptically, given its aura of establishment—even though I’d very much liked the work I’d seen from Ben Lerner in the past. But I’m on Ben Lerner’s side! I think we need, and need to read, more books like this one: more poems that don’t content themselves with pretty language and images. This is brainy poetry that approaches the level of theory. It will challenge you as a reader and as a citizen. You don’t need to read it out loud to appreciate it. In fact, read it in bed, alone, with a flashlight. Let it creep you out.