Angle of Yaw – Ben Lerner > Mallarmé + Badiou + [ _ ]

E D I T   >>  Lerner's recent essay 'Hatred of Poetry' < Fitzcarraldo Editions > 
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/88730

"I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility."


Excerpts from Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw, that seem to grow out from a Mallarmian core... but then spills over something else..

———————————

The novel hurled to the ground breaks into verse
and achieves a perfect synthesis

of Bible and phonebook,
a chance synthesis
recalling the work of X
in its use of cherry and adverb.

A branch of adverb negatively rendered
is characteristic of a period
in which phonebooks possess all the qualities of epics

plus or minus three.
X is a generation that gloried in synthesis
privately performed,
in charity syntheses held for cherry trees.

I have chopped down the truth conditions for cherry trees
with a chance synthesis,

with a phonebook in one hand
and a bible in the other
and the other.


—


Configured to return to the thrower when hurled
and configured to return the thrower to the herd,

intended backfires configure warmth
for the polis and polis fans.
Context attributed to the skin at birth

picks teams:
shirts and skins,
redshirts and redskins
and tomahawking redskin fans.

"In 1825, the natives of Port Jackson hurled their halos and lay down"
Support your polis: chop the air.


>> from Begetting Stadia, Angle of Yaw, 2006, pg 7 - 8


////////////////////

...
The names of the dead are inscribed on the wall.
The play is making Hamlet's mother uncomfortable.
I can't feel my legs.
The limit of latitude past which trees will not grow.
                    Tear down this wall.
                    Let them eat snow.

Then, without warning, our guiding star burned out.
We stood around the sleeping infant to see if she was breathing.
The poet notes that beautiful days and seasons do not last.
My emergence from mother was captured on film.
All I ask is that we stop executing the mentally handicapped.
The stadium lights prevent the cereus from blooming.
But what if the mentally handicapped want to be executed?
                    Big Bird towers over the human actors.
                    We have both the right and duty to expand


—


into the blasted lands of southwest Asia,
Let's add touches of ethnic instrumentation.
I am attracted to women I do not respect.
the child makes a substantial advancement in poetics
with a canister of hair spray and a bic.
Then you wake up next to a war criminal.
A rapid slide through a series of consecutive tones.
                    The memorial will have to be continuous.
                    Lift every voice and sing

...

>> from Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan, Angle of Yaw, pg 123 - 124


Definition of 'Yaw' :

verb

verb: yaw; 3rd person present: yaws; past tense: yawed; past participle: yawed; gerund or present participle: yawing

1. 1.

   (of a moving ship or aircraft) twist or oscillate about a vertical axis.

   "the jet yawed sharply to the right"

noun

noun: yaw

1. 1.

   twisting or oscillation of a moving ship or aircraft about a vertical axis.

   "applying the opposite rudder will tend to reduce the yaw"