In the introduction to his 1976 book The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, Michael Benedikt
defines the prose poem as having six special qualities: an attentiveness to the
unconscious; a impression of external reality as something mediated by our
inner worlds; a feeling for the fluctuations of consciousness; a commitment to
colloquial speech; a sense of humor; and a “hopeful skepticism.” Benedikt’s
selections in the anthology give this definition a surprising degree of
credence, but Benedikt’s list doesn't just describe the style of the prose
poem: it provides the best possible brief definition of the qualities of his
own writing, in poetry and prose poetry alike.
1
The
image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but
from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the
relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is both distant and true, the
stronger the image will be…
—Pierre Reverdy, “The Image”
Benedikt came by his interest in the unconscious through
a long, deep, and fruitful engagement with Surrealism. Encouraged by Robert Bly
in 1963 to investigate Surrealism, Benedikt became devoted to French Surrealism
in particular, and in the early sixties alternated between undertaking translations
from the French and writing his own poems, as if deliberately seeking the
guidance of the Surrealist tradition. Indeed, by the time Benedikt’s anthology The Poetry of Surrealism appeared in
1974, he had become one of the leading American experts on Surrealist writing. So
central had Surrealism become to his sense of what was most valuable in
literature that, in his introduction to the anthology, he recruited his
immediate influences—New York School poets like Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and
Kenneth Koch—and his favorite poets from the English Romantic school—Wordsworth
and Coleridge—to the Surrealist camp. Benedikt eventually became wary of being
too closely identified with Surrealism, though, claiming in 1977 that
Surrealism was no longer central to his work. But, as the poems in the present
volume attest, from the earliest to the latest work, his poetry frequently alternates
or fuses passages of dream reality with empirical reality, following the
proto-Surrealist Pierre Reverdy’s description of the process by which strong
images are born via the juxtaposition of distant realities.
2
Modernity
in the broadest sense as it has asserted itself historically, is reflected in
the irreconcilable opposition between sets of values corresponding to (1) the
objectified, socially measurable time of capitalist civilization… and (2) the
personal, subjective, imaginative durée,
the private time created by the unfolding of the ‘self.’
—Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity
A confirmed agoraphobe, Benedikt was always more than ordinarily
attuned to the boundaries between the public world of objective events and the
world of private experience. In an interview with Naomi Shihab, Benedikt spoke
of how the problem of communication for the poet had to do with “bringing the
internal world and the external world together” linking or “playing off or
perhaps testing the language of travel folders, the language of banking, of
instruction manuals” against another world altogether, the world of “internal,
‘personal,’ or psychological things.” This, he goes on to say is “not only an
aesthetic imperative but a moral imperative.” We get a sense, from this
comment, of just how seriously Benedikt took the fusing of dream and external
realities. There are moments in his work, though, when the moral imperative to
connect the inner and the outer seems almost too great for him to bear. Condsider
Mole Notes, the most sustained and
most powerfully imagined work in Benedikt’s oeuvre.
This sequence of prose poems represents something approaching a total retreat
from the external world. Here, the world out there is dangerous, and the
tunneling Mole retreats in pessimism to a world of the literal and
psychological underground. One understands the urge to retreat, especially
given the events of 1971, the year in which Mole
Notes appeared: the Weather Underground bombing of the Capitol building;
the conviction of both Charles Manson, and of the America lieutenant found guilty in the Mai Lai massacre; the
arrest of 12,000 anti-war protestors; the Pentagon Papers bringing to light
corruption and cynicism at the highest levels; genocide in Bangladesh; the
prison riots at Attica; and the continuing specter of nuclear annihilation
looming over the entire planet. If, as Benedikt claimed, Mole Notes and his next book, Night
Cries, represented a “black pessimism,”it was pessimism well-grounded in
events. It was also a pessimism that faded, and the poems of The Badminton at Great Barrington; or
Gustave Mahler & the Chattanooga Choo-Choo find Benedikt once again
fearlessly exploring the boundary between the subjective and the objective
realms, this time giving us a protagonist who, unlike Mole, is excessively drawn
to the excitements and allures of the external world.
3
Their
purpose of writing was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking, or, in
Pascal's words, la peinture de la pensée.
They knew that an idea separated from the act of experiencing is not the idea
that was experienced. The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary
part of its truth…
—Morris W. Croll, “The Baroque Style
in Prose”
In an essay much-loved and
quoted by poets as diverse as Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Bernstein, the
critic Morris W. Croll described the tenor and technique of baroque prose,
which eschewed classical reserve for “the energy and labor of minds seeking the
truth, not without dust and heat.” Benedikt’s work frequently proceeds in the
baroque manner, showing the probings of the conscious mind as well as the
interweaving of the rational and the irrational. Not for Benedikt the paring
down of an initial prolixity into the austere perfection of the mot juste in the manner of, say, the young Ezra Pound when he cut the 36 lines of an initial draft down to the spare couplet
that is “In a Station of the Metro.” Instead, Benedikt shows the mind working to find the right
expression. Consider “Invitation to Previously Uninvited Guests” from Mole Notes, in which the smoke of a rare
cigar melting into a room full of guests is described as being “like a sugar
cube melting on the tongue” and “like honey in the mind of a diabetic,” similes
which launch a long catalog other comparisons:
…like
your wallet in the hands of a prostitute, like chopped liver in the heart of
the professional caterer, like surviving leaves in midwinter sleet, like ant feces in a vat full of nitrate,
like an inexpensive tieclip before the onslaughts of rust, like conversation
into silence among boring company, like the conception of generosity after
December 26th, like space beneath even the tiniest hand caressing
even the tallest lover discovering the joys of some novel perversion, like the
idea of 18th century chamber music in the minds of the oppressed,
like truth in a Latin-American newspaper, like dialogue in the mouth of the
megalomaniac, like meaning in the mind of the poet.
What we see here is the mind
of the poet seeking the mot juste,
rather than the mot juste itself. While
there’s a certain humorous quality to the proliferation of similes—when we
arrive at the final image of meaning dispersing like smoke in the mind of the
poet, we’ve reached a point of comic exasperation—there’s a serious purpose to
Benedikt’s method. Just as he saw the exploring of the intersection of the
inner and outer worlds as a moral imperative, he saw the depicting of the mind
in thought as a moral as well as an aesthetic matter. His representation of the
mind’s processes, he once claimed, had to do with “incorporating more and more
and the incorporation doesn’t make you lose
focus… but rather makes you get a greater part of your mind in focus.” For Benedikt, if one is to
write truthfully, one must write the process of the mind into the poem.
4
That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me
after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love
with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a
poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted
to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was
born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of
adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky
Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last
between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may
be the death of literature as we know it.
Frank
O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto”
The comic quality of Benedikt’s work comes with an
impressive pedigree. An exclamation-mark laden, buoyant, faux-naïve quality is
especially evident in the earlier work, which was very much written in the
shadow of Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, whose works the young Benedikt would
often read for an hour or so before setting down to write his own poems. A
decade or so younger than the leading poets of the New York School, Benedikt
was, like most of the more established poets, a Francophile, an ivy leaguer,
and a professional art critic. Like them, too, he tended to write with an
awareness of the hip, knowing intimacy of the New York poetry scene. He’s not above dropping a proper name or two
in a poem, and once you start counting the pronouns in Benedikt’s poetry,
you’ll be surprised at how many times you’ll find “you,” “we,” and “us”— both
of these are techniques that help to build a sense of reader-writer community. Indeed,
much of the charm and warmth of Benedikt’s comic gestures depends on one’s
sense of being taken into a little imaginative circle, where we communicate as
intimates. His is a poetry that cracks a wry smile in a small room, rather than
sounding a barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.
5
The principal object, then, proposed
in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to
relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of
language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain
coloring of imagination...
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Benedikt was prone to abuse T.S. Eliot in his critical
writings, and one understands why. Unlike Eliot, whose strongest work could
read like a polyglot tissue of quotations from classic or arcane texts,
Benedikt insisted on a certain plain-spokenness, an ordinary language as the
medium for poetry. He complained in Poetry
about poets who asserted their bardic privilege, which was really nothing more
than a “bardic abuse,” whose method was tediously “‘kultural,’ involving
ponderously ‘literary’ phrases or phrases whose grace is meant to astonish,
representing, by stuffing implication, the poetic soul.” This is not to say
that Benedikt limits his range of diction to that of the ordinary man on the
street, as the high incidence of the Romantic exclamatory or classically apostrophic
“oh!” in his writing makes plain. What Benedikt does, though, is to shy away from the notion of the poet as a kind
of collagist piecing together the fragments of tradition, and insist on
language that appears to be the expression of a speaking subject, a talker
talking to us. The notion is at least as venerable as Wordsworth, and as modern
as Frank O’Hara, with his idea that the telephone can replace the poem—and it
is an idea Benedikt inherits from both poets.
6
A particularly perceptive
analysis of Benedikt's Mole Notes
contains the following passage:
Ironically,
what Mole seeks by way of unreason is a more reasonable, rationally utopian
world. Throughout the poem… Mole’s dominant
emotion is, as Benedikt puts it, disappointment…. Mole-Benedikt cannot locate
or establish Mole City on earth as it is; he finds only war, riots, crime,
delusion. The great climax of the poem occurs therefore in what the poet calls
Mole’s apotheosis, his literal flying through space like a projectile. What in
the individual man amounts to a personal Thoreauvian-like revolt must perforce
divorce him from society.
—Louis Gallo, “Benedikt’s Blues:
Reason and Unreason in Poetry”
The passage captures the
hopeful skepticism of Benedikt’s work: skeptical
of any great claims for poetry or the renewal of the world, his poetry remains optimistic
about the power and prospects of the individual imagination. Even after he had
given up on many things—academe, fame, even the publication of his work,
Benedikt could ask that we
…suppose
then that, following our sudden realizations & quasi-epiphanies, madly
inspired
inspired
With
our eyes rolling around wildly, our tongue hanging out & our hair standing
up on end despite the breeze,
up on end despite the breeze,
One of
us rushes to our clattery, old-fashioned, pre-computer-era typewriter,
To make at least a temporary little
household racket…
Even if this racket might “Risk being
mistaken by some, for a ‘Throwaway Poem’” that the poet writes only “for the
light amusement of himself or herself & perhaps a few old friends” it
remains the medium of enthusiasm and hair-raising enthusiasm. And even if the
unpublished poems were tucked away in a suitcase, the hope remained—it is there
in that line about the poem being “mistaken” as something only for the poet’s
friends—that they would find their way out into the world, to you.