This past week the poet and novelist Ben Lerner spoke with the students of SUNY New Paltz about his work.  Lerner is the poetry editor for Harpers, and the previous poetry editor for Critical Quarterly.  He is also currently a professor at Brooklyn College, and has taught at The University of Pittsburgh and California College of the Arts.  His latest book is The Lights (2023). 

Lerner discussed, in his terms, “the dramas of repurposing language and recontextualizing language.” (1)  I was first introduced to Lerner through his poetry book Angle of Yaw, published in 2006 by Copper Canyon Press.  The “angle of yaw” is the angle between the direction of travel and the direction of wind, specifically the rotation around the vertical axis (picture shaking your head no).