The Gray Notebook did not originate as a book of poetry. Rather, it was, literally, a gray notebook that Russian avant-garde writer, Alexander Vvedensky, kept from 1932-1933. At 17 pages long (excluding the endpapers, a “Translator’s Note,” and the colophon which brings the published version…

Michel de Certeau dedicates his multi-disciplinary work of theory, The Practice of Everyday Life, to “the ordinary man. The common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets”—and then launches into an assessment of the place and circumstances of everyday man’s everyday…

The phrase “mean free path” belongs to the nomenclature of physics and designates the average distance covered by a particle or wave between successive impacts. Mean Free Path also names Ben Lerner’s third book of poetry just out from Copper Canyon Press. The transposition of…

The twin notions of microcosm and macrocosm neatly model the dominant orienting lens of Western thought. From the pre-Socratics on, thinkers who contend that they have discovered cosmological truths argue that man is a little world embodying the structure and traits of the greater universe….

In his 1939 lecture, “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” Paul Valéry famously fleshes out the analogy between walking and prose, dancing and poetry. Prose is like walking in that it has “a definite aim. It is an act directed at something we wish to reach.” Poetry,…