In Their Own Words
Ben Lerner’s “Dedication”
Dedication
For the distances collapsed.
For the figure
failed to humanize
the scale. For the work,
the work did nothing but invite us
to relate it to
the wall.
For I was a shopper in a dark
aisle.
For the mode of address
equal to the war
was silence, but we went on
celebrating doubleness.
For the city was polluted
with light, and the world,
warming.
For I was a fraud
in a field of poppies.
For the rain made little
affective adjustments
to the architecture.
For the architecture was a long
lecture lost on me, negative
mnemonics reflecting
weather
and reflecting
reflecting.
For I felt nothing
which was cool,
totally cool with me.
For my blood was cola.
For my authority was small
involuntary muscles
in my face.
For I had had some work done
on my face.
For I was afraid
to turn
left at intersections.
For I was in a turning lane.
For I was signaling,
despite myself,
the will to change.
For I could not throw my voice
away.
For I had overslept,
for I had dressed
in layers for the long
dream ahead, the recurring
dream of waking with
alternate endings
she'd walk me through.
For Ariana.
For Ari.
"Dedication" by Ben Lerner from Mean Free Path (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Copyright 2010 by Ben Lerner. The poem originally appeared in Narrative and is reprinted with permission of the author.
On "Dedication"
This is the first poem in Mean Free Path. I wanted the dedication to be integral to the book, not something set apart on a prefatory page. Because the poems are largely concerned with the possibility of writing and being for, with finding a mode of address capable of something other than ironic detachment or expressing prefabricated structures of feeling, it seemed like cheating to have a prose dedication external to the poems and their pressures resolving all of these issues as if by fiat. The "for" this poem begins with is not the preposition one would expect from a dedication. Instead it opens with a "for" that functions as a coordinating conjunction in a litany of reasons for despairing of the art. But my way out of the solipsistic lament becomes the possibility of modulating that "for" into a preposition—into writing for another, for Ari.
Although I somehow don't remember knowing the poem then, I see now that Charles Olson's "Love I" must have been in my mind as a model: its repetition, its internal margins. I stole the structure of his poem's first stanza for "Dedication"—a stanza pattern that returns (with a difference) later in the book's "Doppler Elegies."
