Word: free
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...result of this search is his new collection, “Mean Free Path.” The book is comprised of intimate verse narratives, addressed to a certain “Ari,” who seems to be the narrator’s confidant, or perhaps a lover. The narrator touches on thoughts about everyday life and discusses beauty, love and literature as if he were lying in bed beside Ari, chatting before sleep, almost whispering...
...strength of “Mean Free Path” lies in its air of intimacy. The subjects of the poems range widely from the most quotidian matters—the act of looking up from reading a book—to the gravest ones—the death of a friend. By including the trivial alongside the serious, Lerner creates the illusion of conversation with a close friend. He writes, “I want this to be... a little path / For Ari... That’s why I speak / In a voice so soft...
...order to deliver on this intimacy, Lerner has attempted to invent an entirely new form, rather than following the pre-existing structure of the sonnet or writing with the openness of free verse. He strictly regulates meter, punctuation, and stanza breaks, but not without constant and subtle variations, which permit his poems to avoid what Pound denounced as the “sequence of a metronome...
...form, along with the content, renders the book a single, prolonged conversation. At first glance, “Mean Free Path” appears to be a collection of short, untitled poems. But here, the absence of titles is significant; the obscured distinction between poems is strengthened by Lerner’s intentional thematic repetition. That is, thoughts that were mentioned at the beginning of the book are repeated throughout the book over and over again—often in the same exact words; somewhat as if Lerner were attempting a modernized sestina...
Nevertheless “Mean Free Path” succeeds in creating a fresh style of poetry. Despite some wrong notes, Lerner has undoubtedly achieved a moving manifestation of our daily contemplations. Its structure, innovative as it is, manages to narrate the everyday sentiments of human life as they actually occur: in bits and pieces...