by Ben Lerner
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

“Ignorance that sees itself is elegy.”

As a culture, Ben Lerner offers, we are not over 9/11 because there is no such thing as being over it. It is, however, inherently American to try and patch things up as swiftly as possible: to find quick fixes, to feel better about things. A culture of half-assed patch-up jobs that suffice because they were swift in offering some form of satisfaction.

Perhaps what we need is a nod that in most cases—and especially with 9/11—there is only living with it: “the memorial will have to be continuous,” Lerner writes, flexing better rhetoric than Bush’s whole staff of manipulative windbags, while using all 115 pages of his astonishing second book to illustrate it’s not that simple—not by a long shot—but that it can be done.

Angle of Yaw, a series of prose poems interrupted by chiseled-to-perfection verse poems, is great for a number of reasons, particularly for the fact that it’s not explicitly a “9/11” book: it’s a book about culture, and finally a book that delineates better than nearly any other book printed this year the impossible struggle of—the American? The artist? The mourner? The human being.

I don’t mean to imply Lerner devalues the notion of 9/11 memorials. He doesn’t at all. What he’s interested in is avoiding the impulse to control events after they occur. 9/11 is flush with contemporary culture. But any culture, we’re reminded, is made up of individuals, and is thus built on the minutiae of daily life: 9/11 is a part of a person as much as mechanically separated chicken, shaving, the phrase “updates are ready to install” popping up on their computer monitor, political rhetoric, and the fact that “Big Bird towers over the human actors.” It is everyone’s struggle to keep up.

Lerner is deft at employing absurdist humor when need be. What, after all, is American culture if not humorous and absurd? His lean prose poems—divided among separate sections, both titled “Angle of Yaw”—recall Simic’s The World Doesn’t End, but with a contemporary flair:

LASER TECHNOLOGY has fulfilled our people’s ancient
dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts in half remains
standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move,
none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in
half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light.

This passage works to poke fun at the fear and paranoia that has gripped American culture. More than humorous, though, passages like this are incredibly insightful. Keep moving, Lerner suggests, however terrifying the notion that it might mean your head falling off.

The question is how to keep moving—and who is going to tell you how. One key to learning how is simple: do your best to avoid reading things presented in a vertical plane: “When the page is shifted to a vertical plane, it becomes an advertisement, decree, and/or image of a missing pet or child. We say that texts displayed vertically are addressed to the public, while in fact, by failing to teach us the humility a common life requires, they convene a narcissistic mass.” One need not cease looking for lost pets; but one should think individually about what kinds of messages are being broadcast for consumption by the masses.

Okay, so we already knew that. But there’s an important next step, and it goes beyond analysis—when you reach any kind of general understanding, it is vital that you do your best not to impose romantic meaning on your results, because that is merely a construction—a shoddy patch-up job to make yourself feel better. This brings me to the book’s best poem, one of the best I’ve read in some time, the seven-page tour-de-force “Didactic Elegy.” If you didn’t realize you still had the capacity to cry over 9/11, the poem reminds you—by avoiding every romantic construction you could imagine associating with the tragedy, while reminding you it was just that—a tragedy. Horror is as real as any scientific formulation, as real as studio managers and football games.

“Didactic Elegy” focuses on the notion of imposing meaning where there isn’t any, and uses a tasteful, simple, borderline absurd metaphor: a piece of abstract art comprising nothing more than “a bold, black line across an otherwise white field.” Anyone could produce such art; though once it’s been designated art, not anyone can see it as something absent of meaning:

It is easy to apply a continuous black mark to the
surface of a primed canvas.
It is difficult to perceive the marks without assigning
them value.
The critic argues that this difficulty itself is the
subject of the drawing.
Perhaps, but to speak here of a subject is to risk
affirming
intention, where there is none.

“Interpretation,” he notes, “is an open struggle.” He presents a world of artistic and critical analysis, so it’s hard not to shudder when he drops this bomb on us:

Events extraneous to the work, however, can unfix
the meaning of its figures,
thereby recharging it negatively. For example,
if airplanes crash into towers and those towers collapse,
there is an ensuing reassignation of value.
Those works of art enduringly susceptible to radical
revaluations are masterpieces.

It is human, and American, to revaluate things until they are masterpieces as a means of controlling them and purging them. Fuck purging, Lerner suggests; we’ve seen the image of the towers coming down a thousand times, “But as it is repeated, the power of an image diminishes,” because the viewer—critic—ascribes various metaphysical and romantic meanings to it. “The image of towers collapsing” is thus separated from the actual collapse of the towers: “Towers collapse didactically. / When a tower collapses in practice, it also collapses in theory.” We’ll be okay, Lerner seems to offer; just don’t diminish the event by trying to excise it:

Should we memorialize the towers or the towers’
collapse?
Can any memorial improve on the elegance of
absence?
Or perhaps, in memoriam, we should destroy something
else.

I think that we should draw a bold, black line across
an otherwise white field
and keep discussion of its meaning to a minimum.
If we can close the event from further interpretation
we can keep the collapse from becoming a masterpiece.

The key is to intend as little as possible in the act of
memorialization.
By intending as little as possible we refuse to assign
value where there is none.
Violence is not yet modern; it fails to acknowledge
the limitations of its medium.

That’s not to suggest a person shouldn’t fight back—only that a person should never pretend they’re fighting back. Iraq, anybody?

For struggling, beautiful, but ignorant creatures like humans, “Refusing to assign meaning to an event is to interpret it lovingly,” Lerner writes, and goes on to acknowledge that with his poem, he has constructed something that—however clinical and formulaic the language—is perhaps and attempt to excise the pain of 9/11. Perhaps the only real elegy, then, is to refuse to assign meaning, to acknowledge some horrors are beyond our ability to catalogue and formulate: “Ignorance that sees itself is elegy.”

Outside of “Didactic Elegy,” the poems in this book are a wonderful and sympathetic look at culture, at the ways it inevitably changes around us and the ways we take part in promoting that change. His wonderful prose poems continue to strike both the humorous (“WHEN WE FOUND EYES in the hospital Dumpster, we decided to build the most awesome snowman ever.”), the political (“AN INFINITE PROGRESSION OF FINAL FRONTIERS designed to distract the public from its chest wound”) and the impossible struggle of the unaware human grasping anything that resembles the divine: “The gavel fell on a percussion cap and now we’re holding candles, singing, My God, My God, show me what you’re working with.”).

Genuine love and sympathy emerge, the same way they do when you watch anyone doing humbly the work of their inconceivable lives. Remember the metaphor of the “blank white field?” It comes into play again as a real field, illustrating the American sports fan. The ultimate fan is in a stadium wearing a foam index finger—“a model of fanaticism”—and watches “the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV.” It could be labeled ignorant to ascribe your weekly happiness to the performance of athletes on a field, but this man—who then “initiates the wave that will consume him”—is present for meaning and significance so implicit that he gets swallowed up in the meaninglessness of it. The man has actualized, in a sense; because he’s now the star, being a sports fan is no longer a struggle for him; he is for a moment everything, and therefore nothing—ignorance that sees itself is elegy, indeed.

Such sympathy also extends to the long verse-poem that concludes the book, “Twenty-one Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan.” The title isn’t as sarcastic as you might think; political parties aside, we’re all of us citizens somewhere, and more than that, people. The poem calls upon apparently random images and ideas from contemporary culture, often regurgitating clichés that suit their own ends. In the end, he triples up the term “Oyez oyez, oyez.”—a classic cry of “order” from a court crier—before offering a piece of famous American rhetoric—“They slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God.”—and finally devaluating rhetoric itself—“Is this thing on?”

The term “angle of yaw”  refers to the angle between a vehicle’s current direction and the direction of its actual direction of travel—a 9/11 metaphor that will give you goose bumps, but inevitably, a note about our direction as a culture. If we allow ourselves still to feel 9/11 in our bones, hate it, and find ourselves willing still to love a multitude of other things, we’ll begin to define ourselves once again instead of allowing the powers that be to define us—a message that should resonate for  any culture for years, outside of the specifics of 9/11. Shantih shantih shantih.

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