As part of Ink’s Visiting Writers Series, Ben Lerner read from his works ‘The Lichtenberg Figures,’ ‘Angle of Yaw,’ and ‘Mean Free Path.’ (Abby Hocking / Photo Assistant)

Equipped with prose and poems, poet Ben Lerner captured a gathering of students and professors on Monday Oct. 19 in the Library Auditorium.

Lerner, a professor of poetry at the University of Pittsburgh, recited several sections from his first two releases, “The Lichtenberg Figures” and “Angle of Yaw,” and his forthcoming book, “Mean Free Path.”

Characterized by prose-style density, the works combine political, social and natural imagery with enigmatic pronouncements. Lerner attacked the poems with measured intensity and a seriousness that seemed to make fact of every word.

Lerner accomplished the most in bold moments — certain declarations such as “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s weather has been canceled” and self-referential statements like, “I must drive many miles to deliver this punch line,” invited light-hearted laughter.

The selections were strung with meditations on corruptive forces that appeared to grow bleaker as the reading went on. The word “fascism” surfaced at least five times, and the poet compared the color of money, flowers, and even the sky to “night vision green.”

Language itself could be in trouble, Lerner said.

“My people, are you not horrified by how these verbs decline?” Lerner asked at one point. “I will never let the predicate wither,” he later promised.

Phrases blending pieces of sensory information — like gunfire and applause, or the sound of marching heard through a pillow — melted dimensions of time and place. Characters and objects behaved erratically, like comic strip characters falling out of frame.

Lerner elaborated on these strategies in a post-reading question-and-answer session, discussing the influences of technology, home and singer Nina Simone, who is a presence in one of his poems.

He described the singer as a model for “bending genre, not being tapped in any particular identity.” He noted that, as a child, it had surprised him when he learned that Simone’s deep-toned voice belonged to a woman.

The poet revealed darker aspects of his Midwestern youth when he spoke of “middle-class white boys who were armed and bored … a distinctly American pandemic.” That dangerous boredom came alive in one of his later sections, where Lerner paints an apocalyptic picture with “Glocks,” “Big Gulps,” and last-minute devirgination.

Much of his political material arose from a residency in Madrid, he said, where he composed his second book “Angle of Yaw.” Lerner said he spent that time meditating on Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, right-wing politics, and memorialization.

He alluded to a technological shock he received, when, during the 2003 Madrid bombings, an online news update preempted his realization that nearby noises were, in fact, the sounds of a terrorist attack.

That sort of encroachment had a hand in his readings, too. Lerner expressed an interest in art that keeps tabs on the effects of technology on humans. He even likened his jam-packed presentation to the “overwhelming saturation” of modern media.

Most listeners would probably agree, in that sense, that Lerner’s work demands more than a passing glance. Read aloud, each poem leaves its share of disjointed impressions.

However, it may be as the poet says in “Mean Free Path,” “there’s no such thing as ‘non-sequitur’ when you’re in love.”