Ivan Argüelles Engages
SELECT POEMS by John M
Bennett
(Luna Bisonte Productions, 2015)
my tongue I thought ,on a shelf
JOHN M BENNETT, INNOVATIVE, EXPERIMENTAL AND UNIQUE
[First published as Introduction to the
book]
Tristan Tzara: "DADA remains within the framework of European
weaknesses, it's still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different
colors so as to adorn the zoo of art with all the flags of all the consulates.”
A critic once said of Lost and Found Times (John M Bennett’s
seminal underground press mag, 1975-2005): “Insults...the
past 3,000 years of literature.” One could apply that criticism to the whole
of Bennett’s dazzlingly varied and maddening output. One could even ask with
some justification: is this poetry? Where to begin analyzing let alone
writing about this baffling and certainly most avant garde of all artists/poets
living and working in the U.S.A. today? I recommend checking out his short
video (one of many he has created) called “Olvido del surr”, read with
Luis Bravo; one gets both the intended oral quality of the poem (which sounds
like some eerie Mesoamerican Indian ritual chant) as well as its visual and
typographical effects. For, above all, Bennett’s “poetry” is more like a
meta-poetry that requires all the visual and aural senses to appreciate it. His
experimentations over the years have encompassed particularly the expanding
world of visual poetry (vispo), an extension of what used to be referred to as
“concrete poetry” (particularly successful in
Brazil). The structure of the poem on the page gradually becomes a work
of art, divorced from its mere semantic sense (or lack thereof) as it seems to
appear to the reader. Bennett employs numerous techniques, not the least of
which is his own “polyglottery”, frequently moving in and out of
English, Spanish, Portuguese, French or some Mesoamerican language. In the
above mentioned video, “Olvido del surr”, all these “techniques” are
brought to bear.
To
invent John M Bennett one has to invest in a fascination with words, and as an
infant he preferred books - and his first writing was before he could
"write" – when he would take little pieces of paper and do “picture”
words on them—things that were more word-like than picture-like - a boat a
house a cat, whatever, like what you might see in a Mixtec codex. He recalls chanting words over and over (to
the annoyance of his parents) and when he heard a new one - cloud cloud cloud
cloud cloud mailbox mailbox mailbox mailbox mailbox, would go on and on.
(Many of Bennett’s maddeningly obsessive “poems” continue this practice). In 1949 and 1951, on the ship to and from
Japan, he wrote such little notes, by then including alphabetic words, wrapping
them up in boxes and/or bottles, and throwing them overboard. He still does that and still keeps up the
chanting. So in a sense he’s
always been writing poetry, though
he didn't know it was "poetry" until much later – in the 6th
or 7th grade? And at that point he started haunting bookstores and libraries,
reading whatever came his way so that his "influences" may be
something innate in him. He lived in a house full of books, being fascinated by
the typewriters and writing/drawing tools there at home. He says he never took
a typing course, never a drawing class - except briefly as a child in Japan -
and never studied "writing"- only literature.
Bennett lived in Japan 1949-1951, where his father, an anthropologist,
was doing acculturation studies for the occupation authority. These few years
made a very strong impression on him in various ways: his sense of aesthetics
developed there. Japanese writing and art resonated with him in a big way (he
remembers seeing Rashomon, a new film at the time, in a Japanese theatre, and
understanding it, even though his Japanese was very sketchy). With his parents
he visited temples, museums, rural towns, fishing villages etc., all of which
was formative. He had his first
culture shock on returning to the US, which in some ways still feels like an
alien place to him. Bennett’s fascination with inventive typographies may go
back to impressions of Japanese calligraphy, and many of his pieces which
“feel” minimalistic may have unconscious roots in Japanese haiku or Zen koan.
As for the culture shock he felt, this also may be reflected in the
multilingual, continental and Latin American tendencies his work has taken from
the onset, hence disassociating it from an American bias.
As for the authors he read that impressed him and that had resonance of
some kind, these vary at different times, though naturally with some of them
the resonance was more long-lasting and still present. The list includes Keats
and Shelly, the Elizabethans - Shakespeare and George Herbert, and maybe Donne;
and especially: Whitman, Lorca, Machado, Jiménez, Neruda, Vallejo, Parra, Huidobro, Huidobro, Huidobro, Argüelles,
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Manual Acuña, Mallarmé, and lately going back
and rediscovering people like the two Heredias, Valery, Lezama Lima (as
novelist), Góngora, Sor Juana, Burroughs, Dickinson. This is just a sampling,
it misses many – principally the many poets, his contemporaries, whom he values
greatly and who “get his juices flowing”. "Influence" for Bennett is
a tricky word in that he does not feel influenced so much as being in the
presence of all these voices that are part of an atmosphere he breathes--in an
odd way for him it is almost as if he is writing in them, rather than that they
are being a part of his voice.
Bennett says that obviously much of what he does, or any poet or artist
worth their salt, is completely unique, but at the same time it's also a
collaboration with all these other voices. They collaborate with him or he with them,
which is not the same thing as an "influence". In fact Bennett’s
actual collaborations with other contemporaries are many (e.g. Chac
Prostibulario, in collaboration with Ivan Argüelles), and more recently he
has taken to combining parts of poems from contemporaries and well-established
poets to form new poems. He has also become fond of using “faux quotes”
ascribed to other poets living or dead, or fictional.
Bennett’s
education includes attending HS at a lab school at Ohio State University
(though he graduated from a big public school in St. Louis, another culture
shock!); BA cum laude at Washington University, St. Louis, double major in
Spanish and English, 1964; MA in Spanish language and literatures from Wash U,
1966; Certificate of Competence (really a 2nd MA) in Latin American studies from
Wash U, 1966; PhD in Latin American literatures, UCLA, 1970. He was an
assistant professor in the Romance Languages Dept. (Spanish section) at OSU,
1969-1976, teaching mostly Latin American literature and some Spanish
literature.
Bennett has worked in the OSU Libraries since 1976 -- at first in the
Latin American Studies Library, then in Rare Books and MSS Library, where he
started the Avant Writing Collection. In this manner he wove connections
between his work and his art. There had always been a connection there: he
studied Spanish because of the literature, which meant something to him as a
poet, and because he felt that in English there would be a conflict between his
art and his professional work. When
he was still in High School, he discovered that what he wanted to do was "to
change the language".
With that arrogant goal in mind the bland and somewhat repressive nature
of English departments would cause him big problems. Not only did he find the
literatures in Spanish more interesting, but the culture in the Spanish
departments was much more open to the new, and things were really happening
there. Because of his PhD in Spanish/Latin American literature, he has a
scholar’s familiarity with such diverse authors as the 20th century Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro and the
great Siglo de Oro poet Luis de Góngora. Equipped with these professional
skills it was no accident he came to be the curator of the "Avant Writing
Collection", "The William S. Burroughs Collection", and "The
Cervantes Collection” at the OSU Libraries.
At this point one might say his artistic and professional careers
intersect in a manner that again displays the intellectual depth and variation
which are at the core of Bennett’s artistic forays, multiple and many directed.
The death of Charles Olson in 1970 and the ascendancy of the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop in the late 60’s mark the end of a period when poetry was
still a spontaneous creative activity by “poets” as such, best exemplified at
the time by such movements as the Beats and the New York School (Allen
Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, etc.). The workshop influence was pervasive and not
necessarily healthy as it demanded more and more that a “poet” be defined by
his or her earning an MFA. The poetry was self–defined as “well crafted” verse
and more often than not was based on an “ego” narrating some critical event in
his or her life. The system became ingrown and self-perpetuating, each
qualified MFA holder was entrusted with teaching positions and setting up more
workshops around the country. At the same time the post-modernist LANGUAGE
school received a great deal of attention as the next big thing in poetry, but
in fact the practitioners of this movement were also by and large “academics”
who in turn isolated this movement in its own ivory tower. As an unconscious
(perhaps not so unconscious) reaction to the “academicizing” of poetry there
arose like a fungus a plethora of small presses and little magazines dedicated
to publishing writers who did not fit the MFA profile required of “poets”. In
fact this was the arena where real experimentation in poetry continued and
thrived. Not that all of this output was good, much was ephemeral, but the
experimentation was heady and fertile. It was in this atmosphere that John M
Bennett got a start with something called The Frustration Press; he did
chapbooks of his own work, mostly using a ditto machine “the fading blue spirit
ink”. Then he started Luna Bisonte Prods as a front for various dadaesque,
surrealesque, fluxusesque and mailart activities. Lost and Found Times began as
“mailart publications”, and mailart was an element of the magazine throughout
its run. LAFT, which went on to
become one of the most influential of the small poetry mags throughout the 70’s
and 80’s, was characterized by original zany dada surrealism pitched efforts
with a strong visual typographic orientation. It’s appearance was unique,
always with a sort of blurred or out of focus graphic representation of some
kind. It is to Bennett’s credit that through his press he fomented the work of
many upcoming experimentalists on the poetry scene, and he continues to do so.
As Bennett puts it he continued to publish LAFT in “order to publish great
stuff people kept sending me that couldn't be published anywhere else but that
NEEDED to be published. That was
the underlying general editorial motive.” The Avant Writing Collection at OSU
is based on the same underlying idea/practice.
With respect to Bennett’s start as a poet in the 70’s, he felt he did NOT
fit into any of it--what he was doing didn't jive with any of the publishers of
that time, with the exception of C.W.
Truesdale, who published two books of his in the early 70's (Found Objects
and White Screen). But much of the reason he started Frustration Press
and then Luna Bisonte Prods was to publish stuff that no one else would, of his
own, and then also of others who gradually came out of the woodwork, who
equally couldn't be published. It
seems that a lot of poets who are now fairly well known in the avant garde
scenes, were first published in Lost & Found Times, a fact of which he is
quite proud.
There are so many aspects to Bennett’s “poetry” that in a sense the term poetry
does not adequately cover the whole of Bennett’s creative endeavor and
output. Under the impetus or guise of poetry he has done so many different
kinds of things that keep evolving into new things, that it is difficult to
make something of the whole work step-by-step. Through the late 20th century
he often reached a point where he decided to make a "big leap"
forward into something very different.
He would get himself worked up to do it, and then take a plunge into the
unknown without any idea as to what he was about to do. The results were
generally satisfying in the long run.
He still does this, though less dramatically, perhaps, and there's more
of an evolutive process. Much of what he has always done through these changes
is to incorporate aspects, often minor ones, of previous styles into the new
one, expanding on them so that they became a major aspect of the new
style/approach: a mix and match, so to speak, layering various “schticks” to
create something “new”. And indeed when one looks at the range of his “works”
in some sort of chronological order these efforts at shifting styles, mixing
and matching etc, intensify to the point where something utterly new results,
such as in many later texts which are sometimes totally visual (Sacaron
navajas), or emphatically visual with some vestiges of poetical “text”
interspersed (Las Cabezas Mayas).
Language for Bennett is inextricable from consciousness, and thus very
hard to talk about because of not being able, really, to get outside of it.
Unlike the so-called LANGUAGE poets, for whom language is an abstract
post-modernist speech act of objectification divorced from any intent of
lyrical expression or narrative, in short an anti-poetry, Bennett’s language is more of a
meta-language, a conscious employment of words to metamorphose themselves in
weird, disjunctive combinations that may baffle or annoy the reader. As William Burroughs says in The Ticket
That Exploded: "Would there be any time if we didn't say
anything?" So for Bennett language is much more than a "linear
construct to...describe events and emotions". Events and emotions occur in language
(as well as elsewhere). Bennett
employs language to say it all, that is, to re-create the entire world,
but in as few words as possible.
His poetry is almost of necessity a minimalist approach to incorporating
the whole. For Bennett “a poem is a kind of singularity in the center of
a black hole, matter in an impossibly dense mass, including time.” The many
gimmicks and word-play he employs constantly in his poems are to this end: to
say as many things as possible all at once. Almost unique in contemporary poetry is
Bennett’s use of multiple languages; e.g. English, Spanish, French, Nahuatl,
etc., all of which swarm in his “head or heads.” Bennett’s concept of language
is that every word is related to every other word ever made, in every language,
present, past or future. In Bennett’s words: “another way of describing what I
do is that I work in that zone of resonance of all those other
words/languages.... the technique
of "transduction" is one way of doing that: instead of translating
a word I use another word that sounds like it or in some other way resonates
with it.” Bennett’s use and concept of language compares with James Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake. Further, Bennett says what he has found “through my own work and
through working with patients as a poetry therapist, is that each of the
functions of language -- speaking, thinking, writing, translating, reading,
learning new languages, etc. -- involves a separate mental process, and each of
those processes must be learned and practiced separately. There is some
overlap, but in general each works on its own. Part of what I try to do is to
combine those processes into a single process.”
Clearly for any attempt at comprehending what Bennett’s poetry is about,
his views on language and languages is at the core. Once it’s understood what
these views are, the apparent nonsense and chaos of the “poems”, as such, while
not taking on any more meaning than they had before, become comprehensible as a
system to express his own particular Weltanschauung through language.
But Bennett’s work did not arise from a vacuum; it has its antecedents or roots
in various earlier movements and poets. One could begin by citing Mallarmé’s “Un
coup de dées” with its visual outlay on the page. But perhaps the principle
historical movement by which Bennett’s work could be identified is Dadaism,
with its emphasis on the absurd, its deliberate syntactic breakup and its
typographical display on the page. Two obvious antecedents from the Dadaist era
are the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, whose masterpiece Altazor is marked by
a mounting wordplay, frequently reduced to nonsense syllables, and Guillaume
Apollinaire whose Calligrammes may be the first, and among the most
brilliant, examples of visual poetry.
One may well ask what differentiates Bennett’s poetry, which seems so
implicitly based on language as such, from the LANGUAGE school of poetry. For
one thing LANGUAGE poetry is rooted in the academy, and its practitioners are a
well soldered group, insular and exclusive, that adheres to strictly
post-modernist theories of literary deconstruction. Theirs has become a socially entrenched style
that presents itself as in some way definitive. While there have been some interesting
writings to come out of it, there is a serious dogmatism about it, not
dissimilar to the surrealistic dogmatism of Breton, that makes it feel like a
peculiar attempt to apply "politically correct" ideas to a style that
seems irrelevant to those ideas. On the other hand, Bennett’s poetry is wholly outside
the academy, and like so much of the very best poetry written since 1970, is
apparently sub rosa, barely
visible to the main-stream publishing houses that profess to promote “poetry”,
such as Wesleyan or Pitt. Bennett’s poetry is truly “experimental”, and again
like so many other of the best poets of his generation, has had to rely on
fiercely independent small presses that do not live by the
grants-and-foundations-mill of the Poets & Writers establishment. LANGUAGE
poetry as such began it seems as an experiment against the “canon” of poetry,
but almost immediately became a genre co-opted by the academy. It’s safe to say
that Bennett’s work, as well as that of other experimentalists or innovators in
poetry since 1970, has been flat out rejected by the jealously guarded main
stream poetry world that thrives on Iowa Workshop MLS graduates to perpetuate
itself. For Bennett language is organic, palpable, multidimensional, swarming
and breathing, and not a deconstructed post-modernist theory.
The
visual aspect of Bennett’s work cannot be emphasized enough, as it is again
language exploited for its appearance on the page. This visual aspect has
always been important to him: to visualize the text as it appears on the page,
as a random or not so random design, as it were. Perhaps the first major
explicitly visual work beyond textual poetry was some collage poetry he did in
the early '70's. A selection of these pieces was published by C. W. Truesdale in a book-in-a-box called Found
Objects, and others in White Screen, and in a number of Luna Bisonte
Prods chapbooks. From that practice, and from hand-writing he began doing
calligraphic work, his own calligraphy (never having studied the formal kind)
which he still does. In fact,
Bennett’s idiosyncratic calligraphy (a zany sort of scrawl all but illegible at
times) is one of the earmarks that sets a Bennett poem off from anybody else’s.
The drawing developed out of the calligraphy. He says his drawings are
basically writing, hieroglyphs as it were. One of the best examples of that
kind of thing is Las Cabezas Mayas. Like the sound and oral work he does, this
technique is just another way, not so different, of achieving some of the
aspects of language and linguistic expression which characterize Bennett’s
prolix and often complex body of work.
An extension of what he calls “calligraphy” is the radical use of
differing typographies employed in a single poem. Recently he has returned to
collage, and to mixing collage, drawing and calligraphy.
Another important dimension to Bennett’s work is music, or sound.
There was always music in Bennett’s house as a child--classical, jazz,
"ethnic" (his father was an anthropologist), so he took to music very
early. He had his own record player in his room and would listen to a lot of
Bach, baroque, classical, Fats Domino, Rock Around the Clock, and other great
'50's rock. He also learned to
play the clarinet, then oboe--also sax and bass clarinet—which he played in the
school orchestra and chamber groups, and seriously considered going into music
as a career. He did jazz and
poetry with friends in high school. Some of what he has been performing the
past 3 decades or so is in that vein, although he says it is not "jazz and
poetry", but rather “improv” music,
using his poetry as if it were another instrument. Whatever it is, it is not poetry
accompanied by music. He has also done, mainly in performances, what could be
called sound poetry, his own rather eccentric versions of it. An example of
this is referred to in the opening paragraph, the piece “Olvido del surr”. All
this would suggest, correctly, that the sound or music of language and
form are an important part of how he writes. According to Bennett “there are at least 5
dimensions to a poem as I write it: sound, visuality, meaning of the words,
rhythm and movement through time, and resonance (what other words and/or images
come to mind that aren't explicitly there). All are equally important.” Music, then, has
always been important to Bennett, and he listens to it constantly, especially
baroque, early music, avant garde, classical, "world" and
"ethnic", jazz, experimental and sound art. In the 80's and early 90's he recorded some work
he had done on saxophone, and used it in some work he did with poetry and music
and other musicians. Recently he
has been playing various kinds of flutes, often as part of poetry performances.
It is open to question whether one may regard poetry when it is read
aloud, presented, as an “oral” art, as a performance. When he was in
school and college, he did a lot of acting, and for several summers when he was
in graduate school in St. Louis, he earned money acting in a Commedia dell'Arte
troupe, a different play every week.
He played Pantaleone, one of the stock characters of that genre. It was
improvisational, based on a general plot outline and consistent
characters. He also acted in
plays, most memorably playing Lucky in Waiting for Godot. From this experience rather than reading his
poetry he began to "perform" it, only the role he was playing was
himself, or one of the many John Bennetts. He became his own cast
of roles or characters, which doesn’t make them any less authentic, but all the
more authentic. Learning other languages also plays a role in performance,
insofar as speaking another language is rather like taking on another self or
role, in that a different language embodies a different culture. As a result he has learned to perform
rather than read his poetry.
At times the performance aspect of his reading may get ratcheted up a
bit, especially with some of the more extreme processes he employs, and also
when he performs some of the visual poems.
As a natural outgrowth of Bennett’s performance techniques the Be Blank
Consort was formed when he was at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2001 with
a group of other visual poets. The
concept of Be Blank is based on creating scores out of poems and visual poems
so that they can be performed by a group, rather like a chamber
ensemble. Some of the scores, in
fact, use musical structures , such as canons and fugues, with the text read
simultaneously by many people, each one starting at a fixed point after the
other. The original group has
gotten together several times in various places to perform, and they produced a
CD, and wherever they perform local poets may join in to perform with them. Or,
based on the various score compilations they have done, one of them can form
the Consort anywhere with anyone , like some kind of self-generating biological
organism. Bennett has done that in Mexico, and other places. The original group included Bennett, Scott
Helmes, K. S. Ernst, Michael Peters as prime movers and shakers, but has since
included at various times Sheila E. Murphy, Tom Cassidy, Geof Huth, and many
others.
Bennett considers poetry as first and foremost oral, but also
first and foremost visual, textual, and conceptual, or all at the same
time. Bennett asks: “In the
history of our species did speech come before writing? Probably so, at least in regards to more
complex forms of writing. But
that's not for certain, and in any case was so long ago that it's kind of
moot. For most of our history
these functions/matrices of poetry have all been of equal importance.”
If Bennett had done nothing else but found and edit Lost and Found
Times he would for that alone deserve a footnote if not a chapter in a
history of contemporary American poetry. In the hectic milieu of countless
small press and little poetry magazines, frequently just stapled and
mimeographed, Lost and Found Times had few equals. Perhaps the West
Coast magazine Kayak, edited by George Hitchcock, comes closest to it in
nature and content. But while Kayak had a distinctly surrealist bias
combined with artful collages, LAFT derives more from an absurdist, dadaist
matrix, and seemed somehow “messier”. Kayak consciously died with its 64th issue, to be revived in sorts by the slicker Caliban,
edited by Larry Smith. Many of the same poets can be found in either venue.
LAFT continued appearing through 2005. An anthology called Loose Watch
was published in 1998 and covers material from issues 1-39. Quoting from the
preface of that publication: “From its origins in
mail art to its more recent participation at the edges of language (and what is
coming to be called post-language) poetry, Lost and Found Times provides
a model of how marginalized cultural workers can create productive areas of
engagement within a network of activity.” Indeed it is safe to say that LAFT
serves as a paradigm of relentless anti-cultural if not anti-literary activity,
that can be compared to earlier movements, such as Dada or Futurism, though
never strictly adhering to any ideology or –ism. Marvin Sackner sums it up
concisely: “I consider the magazine one of most outstanding compendiums of
international experimental literature and poetry.”
Bennett’s total output to date could form a monograph in itself. To
compile such a work exhausts one just to consider it. Such a “list” would have
to include not just the many actual books he has published, but the countless
chapbooks, leaflets, postcards, scraps of paper with what appear to be
hieroglyphs and some primitive form of script, and the myriads of sound
efforts, readings, performances, films, et cetera! How does one approach this
intimidating body of work to achieve some sort of assessment of it, to be able
to make a coherent critique of what Bennett is about? When asked the question
“which of your own books do you prefer, or wish to be remembered by for posterity?”
Bennett replied, listing the following 5 titles: la M al, Liber X,
Olvidos, Mirrors Máscaras, and El Humo Letrado. “And these
are just the textual works, I'm ignoring the visual works. As to why I like
these? I think that in various
ways they are the peaks of various hills I was climbing, and that they combine
the voices/techniques/manias I was working through in them. That is, they bring together a lot of things
into single works, which fulfills the need I seem to have to say everything at
once, so that every book, poem, phrase, word, letter, punctuation mark is as
multivalent as possible. The
world is a swarming, and I want to hold that world in my writing. Maybe these books do that more than others. Although I have to say that there are things
about some earlier books, such as Eddy, Blanksmanship, or Mailer
Leaves Ham, that I like a lot.”
In this interesting response it is useful to pull out a few key words or
phrases, such as swarming, multivalent, and the need to have to say
everything at once. For someone just casually perusing any of Bennett’s
multivalent texts (text is perhaps a better term them poem) the page does indeed seem to be swarming
with words, bits of words, combinations of bits of words, multilingual
juxtapositions, typographical intrusions and calligraphic embellishments, none
of which seems to make a lot of sense read in an expectant linear order. The
texts which highlight or may consist of wholly typographic play and calligraphic
embellishments may actually appeal to a visual aesthetic sense, and hence
require no semantic explanation. But for the most part the bulk of this massive
corpus of texts must seem and perhaps remain baffling, which may be their very
intent or purpose. We have come past the point of asking: “What is the poet
trying to tell us?” Bennett’s texts might be compared to the abstract paintings
of Jackson Pollack or the aleatoric compositions of John Cage. We know a lot is
going on in such works, but it is not easily discernible exactly what it is
that is being communicated in the creative process, nor why if something is
being communicated, it is being done in such a manner as to either baffle or
irritate the intended audience. Let us take at random a (typically) small poem
from El Humo Letrado (The Lettered Smoke):
Meal Focus
aim to numb er the cornfled
tops yr ano lacustre er yr
año .fullness rains las piedras
rinsed with .ease of cramping
los chayotes en la mesa em
papada el cielo dreams or
blinds like un escarampión yr r
ashy forehead scuttled ,nice
an flimsy corner shingled with
yr suit .where I rivered
por
las camisas y los manteles
Here is one of the countless “bilingual” Bennett texts which actually has
a rather lyrical effect read aloud. Looked at carefully with words broken at
line breaks such as “r/ashy forehead ...” the text acquires an ambiguous
semantic quality: rash and ashy. Words run together is a
technique constantly used by Bennett, but which also recalls Finnegans Wake.
Neologisms also occur, I rivered. But is this all taken together
supposed to mean anything? Probably not. As for the Spanish words in the
text, they are employed more in the manner of what linguists refer to as “code
switching”, that is words from either language used in the same sentence
without regard to their position. A person who code switches uses two (or more)
languages simultaneously, such as in el cielo dreams, as if there were
only one language in his/her head. For this reader the text has an
overall dreamy quality, in which words become semantically diffuse, such as cornfled
(meant to remind us of cornfield). The concluding lines have an especially
lyrical effect: “yr suit / where I rivered / por las camisas y los manteles” (shirts
and tablecloths). In fact looked at a 2nd or 3rd time, the
poem seems less random in its choice of words, and more intentional. It is as
if someone were talking in his/her sleep about something. There is an anesthetic
effect in the broken up “numb er” and in the choice of “dreams”
and “blinds” in such close proximity. The poem is clearly the product of
a mind grappling with the world’s lack of cohesion, trying to articulate that
disorder in order to make it meaningful. One is reminded of Paul Valéry’s
comment” Two things threaten the universe: order and disorder. Multiply
this poem/text by thousands and you get some idea of Bennett’s incredible
output and intelligence. When one surveys this all but overwhelming output,
which seems at times labyrinthine, one is confronted not only by a portmanteau
vocabulary constantly in flux, but by the frequent references to body parts and
functions, vomiting, spewing, pissing etc. all over the page. One has the sense
that for Bennett the human body and its functions and malfunctions is the
microcosmos by which he measures the universe at large in all its swarming
linguistic variety.
As a footnote it should be noted that with the advent of email Bennett
sends out through the ether dozens of these compositions a month, many of which
he gathers to be included in new publications. Making these available through
email is an open invitation to others on his list-serve to riff off his
syllabic notes, and in return he will improvise on the works of others through
the email. An example of his joyous wordplay is the following from a very
recent email:
just one leg ,jjjerking
in a circcle
But
this is just the more linear/textual aspect, although the dominant one, among
the variety of ways he has chosen to express his poetry. Over a period of time
Bennett’s typographic and calligraphic embellishments or enhancements of given
texts on the page become more and more prominent. At times these can become highly
ornate, baroque one might say, and become more prominent on the page almost as
pictograms or pure ornamentation than the underlying semantic content of the
words they are embellishing. Some of the best examples of this rich, ornate
typography can be seen in recent works, such as Liber X (2012) or Mirrors
Mάscaras (2014), both of which as books or artifacts are beautiful, glossy
productions. At the same time Bennett’s linguistic innovations become more
intense, especially in his Spanish texts, or, better yet, texts that employ the
above-mentioned code switching technique. El Humo Letrado (2011)
purports to be “poesía en español”, but scattered subliminally
throughout this text are more than smatterings of English, such as in the poem Under:
“, otear y ,fumble one ,nada simple”. Perhaps the most experimental of his
linguistic innovations is his Sole dadas & Prime Sway (2012).
Sole Dadas is a complete transduction (not translation) of the long
poem Soledades by the great siglo de oro poet Luís de Góngora.
The original Spanish text is considered by many to be a high point in Spanish
poetry, but it is a very complex work involving a rich, erudite vocabulary and
an intricate Latin word order, which make the poem difficult to decipher.
Bennett’s transduction takes the Spanish text by rendering word for word an
English homonym (or something close to it) to represent the original Spanish
word. It is interesting the extent to which it also “feels” like a translation,
which it is not. This intricate and faithful-to-the-original (homophonically
speaking) “translation” will surely find its place among the major experiments
in contemporary poetry. Of the companion piece in that publication, Prime
Sway, a transduction of Sor Juana’s Primer Sueño, Bennett says he
wrote it “pretending I don’t know Spanish and writing it out (reading it) as if
it were English.” Of similar interest is Chac Prostibulario (1999),
a text composed through email with Ivan Argüelles, and written in the
code-switching manner employing mostly English, Spanish and some Portuguese in
a long sequence of seven-line stanzas to form a book length poem. The
fascinating aspect of this work is that though the two undertook to writing alternating
stanzas, after a point it is difficult to discern who is the author of which
stanza. A perfect blend. This work is a
bit like John Lennon’s A Spaniard in the works, or Finnegans Wake.
From
the visually idiosyncratic and highlighted typography/calligraphy employed
increasingly in Bennett’s texts to the purely visual, hieroglyphic texts is but
a slight leap in Bennett’s multi-directed trajectory. As a bridge to the purely
visual (vizpo) publications, there are two interesting titles that consist purely
of typographical/calligraphic texts: Cuitlacochtli—typographic stick figures,
and La chair du Cenote, both of which seem to derive from Apollinaire’s Calligrammes
in their elaborate and stunning appearances on the page. On the other hand
there are purely graphic works, colorful, zany, at times collage-like, but all
with the zigzaggy mental imprimatur that can only be identified as John M
Bennett. Foremost among these are: Sacaron navajas, a small book
consisting of very colorful pieces which at times look like they’ve been torn
from a larger Dada-type illustrative text; and the gorgeous Las Cabezas
Mayas Maya Heads, a colorful sequence of hand drawings of often quite
whimsical cartoon heads, punctuated sparsely by
typographic texts. Dan Waber also published a small chapbook, very
beautifully done, simply called this is visual poetry, which contains
some of Bennett's finest art work in this genre. Bennett continues to
disseminate a series of “heads” through the email—typically these are somewhat
recognizable human heads or skulls superimposed on scraps of text. Were Bennett
simply to be known as a premier vispo artist he would be ranked at the top of
the heap. But, amazingly, these graphic/visual works are just a part of the
entire Bennett œuvre .
Finally, it should be pointed out that Bennett does not work in a vacuum.
In fact he is one of the most collaborative artists working today. Among the
poets he has interacted with are: Peter Ganick, Ivan Argüelles, Jim Leftwich,
Olchar E. Lindsann, Sheila E. Murphy, Davi Det Hompson, poets whose writing
bears some relation to his, and whose work he finds quite stimulating. These
are just the "textual" poets.
When it comes to visual poetry, there's another group of artists he
interacts with: Tom Cassidy, Scott Helmes, Jim Leftwich, Serge Segay, Rea
Nikonova, Sheila E. Murphy, and his wife C. Mehrl Bennett. And in the past few
years, he has been sporting with some of the new Fluxus artists that are
out there, where there's an absurdist spirit that he finds very stimulating. As
to whether Bennett and the artists he interacts with form a "school or
movement" is open to question. Bennett also incorporates his own work, or
intrudes upon, the work of others, living or dead, in Spanish and French: Pablo Neruda, Rubén
Bonifaz Nuño, Nicolas Carras, Philippe Billé, Juan Ángel Italiano, Martín Gubbins, Julien Blaine, etc. In
recent years he has signed off many of his poems with quotes, often faux
quotes, of many authors, living and dead, a technique which lends a mock literary
flavor to the texts.
Bennett says that despite the appearance of the poems he writes them as
stories, as narrations, a narration that incorporates much more than a single
line. This is analogous, perhaps,
to the sense of narration in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, or Lezama Lima's
in Paradiso or Burroughs' in his cut-up trilogy of the 1960's, texts
which he read for the first time back in the early 60's. He was terribly
impressed, and at the same time mystified by these works. In fact, many of the
works of others that impacted Bennett in one way or another, were at first sort
of incomprehensible, but they stuck with him until he finally "got"
them. In addition to telling a
story, most of his poems are highly lyrical, highly emotional. So what then is being communicated by these
texts? First of all they are protean:
there is no one exact thing to be drawn from them (i.e. there is no
"moral" to be drawn at the end of them, unless if what a reader wants
is a “moral”, the reader will find it).
Bennett wants to say it all simultaneously, in which case a LOT of
things are being said with great concision.
How to read these poems?
Bennett says the poems are “like mirrors in which the reader sees him or
herself, or an aspect of that self.
And that every time one looks, one will see something a bit, or a lot,
different. There are a number of
ways to see what's in that mirror:
basically they involve reading or saying the poem and paying attention
to your emotional response. That
response might cohere around a particular line or phrase or sound or
whatever. One can then try to say what that emotional
response is: "saying" something is giving meaning to it. Consciousness of meaning for most folks
generally involves language, being able to talk or write about
something. There are other kinds
of consciousness, of course:
there is meaning in sound, as there is meaning in music, which is
difficult to translate into language.
The same goes for the visual meaning a text has. And for that zone of resonant meaning
created by the words and concepts that are suggested, but are not
"physically" present.
These are all arenas of meaning.”
Bennett goes on to say: “So much of North American poetry is
fundamentally didactic-- it uses poetry as a tool to present some moral idea or
lesson. What I do is not that at
all; the ethics and values of our cultures can be taught, and are, in much more
effective ways. What I want to do
is to create a mirror of the larger swarming context of existence, in which
particular rules of behavior and thought are small particulate aspects.”
In this short essay I have attempted to give some sort of cohesion to the
extremely varied, multiple and complex work of John M. Bennett, one of the most
innovative and experimental poets, if not the most unique, in America today.
Yet, it is a sure bet that his name and work are all but unknown, if not
ignored in the literary and academic establishment where poetry is pronounced
with a capital P, and grants and awards are dished out to the sub-proletariat
would- be poets who hold MFA’s and are willing to punish others with their less
than catholic knowledge of poetry in hundreds of workshops across the nation
and elsewhere. Were Bennett a citizen of some Latin American country or France
or Spain or Italy, he would no doubt be well recognized for his chaotic,
irreverent, innovative, highly experimental, intelligent, and often beautiful
works, be they in traditional print form or in the sometimes dazzling graphic
representations. In fact, Bennett’s reputation is to some extent international,
and he has been published in France and Latin America. His interest in
Meso-American culture and languages has drawn him frequently to that part of
the world where is a recognized figure. So it is frustrating that, outside of
the relatively small avant-garde experimental performance world where Bennett
is a prime mover, he is so unknown and unappreciated in his homeland. As with
the music of John Cage, what may seem aleatory is in fact more intentional and
grounded than first perceived. Bennett has roots in traditional literatures,
those of Siglo de Oro Spain and of Elizabethan England, but he is capable of transducing
those literatures, metamorphosing them by way of the radical avant garde
movments of the 20th century, such as
surrealism and dada, into something utterly innovative and unexhaustingly New,
such as few contemporary artists have. It is the purpose of this essay to
hopefully advance a critical awareness of John M. Bennett and his fabulous,
multifaceted œuvre. It is fitting to conclude this essay with the
following recent poem written in Spanish by Bennett.
nada he escrito
no he escrito nada soy
el topo nimio del lugar
sin palabra sin palabra
he escrito una silla sin
plumas del pájaro caído
en el aguafón no he tomado
nada no me bostezo sin
tragar las fofofrases de mi
similencio de los libros sin
jamón sin lechuga con su
monstraza no me atra
ganto con una tinta in
visible con un algo mudo
que muere en un salivazo no
emito nada nada remito na
da redimigo y la nada
que escribo me titubea siempre
como foco que se estrella
en la escalera hablada que
subo y bajo vajo y subo
con mi lenguarabo atado y flagelante
...la gran boca que ha perdido el habla.
- César Vallejo
Berkeley, CA, October 2014
*****
Ivan Argüelles, innovative Mexican-American poet, is the author of many books, including: "That" goddess; Madonna Septet; Comedy , Divine, The; Orphic Cantos, and most recently a collection written in Spanish, Lagarto de mi corazón. A retired librarian he has lived in Berkeley Ca for the past 4 decades.
