Prose Poems by Michael Benedikt: Brief Prose Poems & Critical Prose
Poems at this Site are from Night Cries (Wesleyan U. Press, l976--revisions l998 & 2000)
[Last Modified fall '02. With New links since modification in '01]
(1) The Voyage of Self-Discovery
(2) Dress Soup (3) The Atmosphere of
Amphitheatre
(4) The Awards of Water
(5) New The Windowpane As
Monocle (6) Bed Tablets
(7)
Lurching
Lunch (8) Food for Sight (9)
Oral Insomnia
(9) Insomnia:
('Midnight'; 'Going To Sleep; 'Tossed Salad ';
'The Pills and The Water'; 'Cool Places On
Pillowcases')
In addition to poems from the 'Household
Hallucinations' section of Night Cries, site includes
most of
Poetry Society of America Newsletter Interview on Prose
Poetry,
with a few new
passages in this edition. And, most of essay, "A Few Notes on
The Future of The American Prose Poem"
first
published in The Prose Poem: An International
Journal.
Interview has comments on lst modern prose
poet, Aloysius Bertrand.
Links at end-site incl. lst all-Bertrand site in
English.
Note: This site
has a companion-site, Prose Poems & Microfictions. It includes--in
addition to other works from Night Cries--
info. re Benedikt's l976
landmark 600-page anthology of global prose poetry: The Prose Poem: An
International Anthology.
Click here
to read more about companion-site. Click here to go
there.
(Links at end-site include 6 of those ubiquitous
little Benedikt
Mini-Sites. &--New--of all things, a duo of
Xmas Pages &
more)
BRIEF PROSE POEMS FROM NIGHT CRIES
It's the voyage of self-discovery!--it started out promisingly enough, like something out of a child's picture-book: with all sails raised, a Captain lifting a champagne-glass and toasting the rolling seas; sailors lined up in a row on deck with all the buttons on their jackets gleaming, and with a bosun going toot-toot-toot. Now the ship, which after years and years of great sea-explorations, adventuring and wandering has recently run aground, sits upon the shore--stranded there 15 feet above sea level, with seaweed all over its prow and rust-dust all over its spinnakers; with its hull encrusted with barnacles and dripping ooze from all her portholes. Its landing-place seems at frst glance to be a pleasant enough little bay, however; and the Captain, who shortly after the disaster discovered that he is still an incurable optimist, has already begun to wonder if, given enough time and money, the old hulk might somehow be converted from a former four-masted schooner to a large barge for inland waterway travel--or even, just possibly, to a houseboat.
DRESS SOUP
We run out of laundry pails so, one morning, before she goes off to work for the day, my poor rushed beloved uses one of the cooking-pots standing on the stove to soak her dress in. Then, in the late afternoon, after she comes back home from work again and starts to prepare dinner, my poor rushed beloved is so tired that she forgets what she's doing while cooking; and, that night, we have dress soup for dinner! I suppose we feel that supper is a great success, too, because the next time we invite company we want to impress over for dinner, once again we serve dress soup! We follow it with a bow-tie cocktail, a pair-of-pants salad, a main course consisting of underwear, and a shirt dessert. It seems only appropriate that, the next morning, when my poor rushed beloved skips breakfast, she should explain her behavior by simply saying that she feels "really stuffed."
THE ATMOSPHERE OF AMPHITHEATRE
Whenever we turn on a faucet, a tube of water usually appears. I use the term "tube" because it appears, after all, not to be moving--it appears, after all, as likely to have been produced from the sink-porcelain upwards, as from the spigot downwards. Sometimes when I turn on a faucet, I simply tell myself, in a whisper, that "a column is coming." That's why a person in a bathroom with both sink faucets running and both bathtub faucets dripping, may be reminded of standing on a plantation veranda; and why being in the laundry-room in an apartment house basement can give one a feeling reminiscent of standing among the ruins of Greek Temple architecture.
At first it seemed as if it might just be the morning coffee again, boiling over on the stove again and overflowing from the percolator with its usual loud, scalding, scolding, disapproving hiss; but then, after I ran into the kitchen, I was relieved to see that the brown stain on the white porcelain had taken the form of a "splash"--which is to say it had taken the form of a circle with fringed edges, meaning that it was actually only just another form of water setting its seal of approval on solids. Do raindrops act any differently, I wondered as I turned down the flame--or do they too approve as they apply their pure, glueless, transparent stickers? Yes, I decided, even now as the morning coffee resumes its brewing, surely the dews are descending in all directions to award billions of blue ribbons of their own to everything firm; surely the rushing of rivers is like the roar of applause for the solidity of the earth; and surely the only reason why we do not regard the Oceans with all their thrashing waves as some kind of a threat, is that obviously they too closely resemble auditoriums full of crowds of people cheering and stamping feet....
"The windows are the eyes of the house." The moment I read that illuminating statement, I dropped the interior-design magazine subscribed to by my wife which I 'd been reading all afternoon on our living-room sofa onto the floor, leaped to my feet, and rushed out of the room to the bathroom. In the medicine-cabinet I found a bottle of Visine and an eyedropper, then ran back into the living-room where, employing the eyedropper, I squirted Visine all over our two front picture windows, to help them see better... Then, with a bottle of Windex spray from the kitchen, and my polishing rag from the corner cabinet, I made haste to polish up those living-room windows until they shone still more brightly than any eyes! But clearly, something was wrong there--obviously, a suitably appropriate finishing touch was still necessary. So, after rushing into our bedroom I grabbed one of the spare mascara-trays from my wife's dressing-table, returned to the living-room and flipped mascara all over all the curtains--concentrating of course on their fringes. Then, coughing and choking, I ran outside to catch my breath. While standing out there, recovering, I thought of the finishing touch which logic clearly dictated was both necessary and proper. After rummaging around in the garage, I found a single rather large sheet of window-glass left over from when our happy abode was initially constructed, and to give our happy home additional focus, carried the windowpane out to the front lawn and propped it up with a stick at one side of it, to function out there as a monocle. It looked affected yet effective. But then I stopped to think for a moment: Albeit in the interest of household beauty and decorum, was I perhaps making some mistake? What would my wife think? Mascara, monocle? She already knows full well that I'm the last man in the world to object to gay people socially--but after all, who wants a homosexual as a house?
'BED TABLETS'
I 'd been noticing that my brand new bachelor sleeping quarters were beginning to look just a wee bit shabby lately. The bedclothes looked especially bad, what with the wisps of stuffing coming out of the seams of my quilt, and what with my sheets and pillowcases in need of serious mending attention--if not complete replacement--sometime when I could get around to it. So that it was quite a relief when I went to the medicine-cabinet and the label on a little bottle of white pills caught my eye. Paraphrasing the Valium prescription phoned in by my doctor, the pharmacy had marked the Rx label, in big block letters, "Bed Tablets." So, to improve the condition of the room, I immediately went back to the bedroom and sprinkled "Bed Tablets" all over my big, four-poster bed--and then, immediately afterwards, went to sleep on the floor, to give the room time to recover! And sure enough, the next morning, I noticed a great improvement in my bedroom--at any rate, after spending half the night on the floor, believe me, my bed was certainly beginning to look a whole lot better to me! So, lately I've been wondering whether--no questions asked of course!--my doctor might be willing to telephone in a prescription to my favorite pharmacy for "Wall Cream."
LURCHING LUNCH; OR 'FAST FOOD'
Rushing around Wall Street the other day, I found myself running not just a little late, as usual, but especially late on my appointment-schedule. Worse yet, it was around lunchtime, and I found myself feeling exceptionally hungry. So, to try and catch up on things and save some time and thus restore a little balance to my business schedule, I decided to skip my usual, sumptuous tax-deductible business lunch, stop wherever I was, and run into the nearest "fast food" luncheonette to grab myself a sandwich. I really did have to grab my sandwich, too, because when I reached out to pick it up, it fled over the edge of the lunch counter, and I lost several minutes jumping up and down all over the luncheonette floor before I finally stepped on it and stopped it. In the meantime, the pickle flew off the plate like a projectile and ended up out of reach, on the roof. For dessert, I grabbed a hasty cup of coffee which splattered all over my nice, clean white shirt; and a wedge of pie which, as soon as I touched it with my fork, jumped off my plate and stuck in the wall like a spear! Yes, It was certainly a real time-saver, this particular, fast-food luncheonette; and to express my thanks for the truly remarkable service I had received, before I left--running off for the security of the first French restaurant I could find and a 10-course sit-down dinner there--I must confess that in my confusion I gave both the waitress behind the counter and the cute-looking counter-boy, an exceptionally large tip.
FOOD FOR SIGHT
We humans usually like to prepare our food attractively--so attractively, that sometimes it almost seems a shame that, to get appropriate nutritional benefit from it, we actually have to consume it! And then, have to grind it down and even dissolve it, using our teeth and then our various digestive organs, so it becomes almost invisible! Before dining, our food-preparations are often so complicated from the point of view of enhancing their visual appeal, that it's as if we believed the eye were some kind of secret stomach, or that intestines had vision! When we get hungry, you'd think we thought that meant our digestive juices were giving a seductive wink in the direction of our liver; as if the anal canal were nothing but a long, long look, such as is exchanged by lovers; as if chefs were the sort of people who lick their lips when they see a pretty girl--and as if all male diners were victims of satyriasis, & all female diners nymphomaniacs.
ORAL INSOMNIA
It's another attack of all-out, all-night oral insomnia! Lips incessantly babbling, like feet kicking back the covers. Teeth gnashing like arms thrashing, or legs getting caught in the bedclothes. Ears ringing, or even stinging like a sleepwalker's stubbed toes. A sudden outcry in the night, in which we call out in our sleep and give ourselves the answer to some personal problem or to a business dilemma which had long been in need of solution, mingles with perfect somnolent logic with a wave of nausea resulting from going to bed too soon after a big, overly-rich dinner. What sweet medicinal syrup will calm the stomach of the mind, will feed a mouth which waters for still more metaphors? Oh, the shapely muse of gourmet food-preparation techniques is entertaining us in our sleep again--dominating our dreams, dressed only in a chef's hat. In the morning, if we went to the computer to type out a few of our thoughts, we might find a sprig of parsley on the keyboard.
MIDNIGHT
Midnight--An alternative way of looking at it: All around the globe, whenever and wherever the clock strikes midnght, billions and billions of the prescription and non-prescription sleeping pills which restless, stressed-out people worldwide take about an hour before bedtime, are starting to dissolve in billions and billions of stomachs. Now, at last, without resorting to any of our usual, overblown social rhetoric--and in fact, without any kind of sentimentality whatsoever--we well-intentioned people around the globe can truly claim that we belong to a world of "Brothers and Sisters Beneath The Skin."
'GOING TO SLEEP'
We use the phrase "going to sleep" because sleep really is a place we go to! And we spend all day getting there, too, driving hard down the highways of staying awake, and racing across the bridges and under the viaducts spanning vast rivers and tracts of time. And we have to travel far, too--speeding through our waking lives at the rate of 16 hours per day!
TOSSED SALAD
Whenever he tried to fall asleep, he tossed and turned so vigorously that when, in the late afternoon, he tried to catch up on lost nightly sleep by taking a quick nap just before dinnertime, his wife--who around that time was usually just beginning to fix dinner--used to affix a salad bowl to his backbone as he lay there. Tossed salad, with Russian dressing, was his Specialty.
THE PILLS AND THE WATER; OR, THE RECKLESS PATIENT
To get some rest finally after a long and sleepless night, he went to his medicine cabinet. He found the bottle marked "bed tablets" and--paying no attention whatsover to the label on which his pharmacy had transcribed his doctor's prescription for sleep disorders--opened it. Then he shook the pills out of the mouth of the little Rx bottle onto the palm of his hand; and flipped a few them toward his open mouth. Imagine his surprise when the pills flew straight over his shoulder and onto the bathroom floor! So, to be consistent, and also to make sure that everything remained orderly and that he had taken his pills properly, he took a glass, filled it with water, and flipped the water over his shoulder after the the pills, also onto the floor.
COOL PLACES ON PILLOWCASES
Looking for cool places on our pillowcases on a summer night! No Columbus ever set out on a more perilous exploration; no Astronaut ever set out on a more difficult mission--as my fellow insomniacs, especially, will doubtless agree. Consider for example the fate of many a would-be summer sleeper who, while looking for cool places on a pillowcase on a summer night, falls out of bed--and who then finds himself or herself lying on the floor, with bruises on head and shoulders; and with feet in the air, lying there completely upside-down....
--Above are some examples of short prose poems--
Source Note: All poems except for "Food For
Sight" appeared in the section of Night Cries, Benedikt's 4th book of
poetry,
called "Household Hallucinations" (section IV).
Earlier versions of all poems appeared in Night
Cries, by Michael Benedikt (Wesleyan University Press, l976)
© l976
Michael Benedikt (now sole owner of copyright). All rights
reserved.
Webversions of "Dress Soup," "The Atmosphere of
Amphitheatre,"
"Bed Tablets," "Lurching Lunch," "Food For Sight," "Oral
Insomnia" &
"Insomnia" (including 'Going To Sleep'; 'Midnight' ;
'Tossed Salad '; 'The Pills and The Water' & 'Cool Places On
Pillowcases')
© l998 by Michael Benedikt. Webversions of "The Voyage
of Self-Discovery" & "The Awards of Water" © 2000 by Michael
Benedikt.
Webversion "The Windowpane as Monocle" © 2002 by Michael
Benedikt.
Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely concidental.
Photo by Robert Turney.
FORTHCOMING: OTHER BRIEF PROSE POEMS TO BE POSTED HERE IN 2003
Click to Top of Poems Top of Site
"Benedikt Talks
About Prose Poetry"
"Future
of American Prose Poem"
[CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE PROSE POEM AS A LITERARY FORM]
PSA Newsletter # 19 (Sept. l985)
The Poetic Process: No. 3 in a Series of Interviews
'MICHAEL BENEDIKT TALKS ABOUT PROSE POETRY'
Interviewer: Dennis Stone
[ Note: Responses to Questions have been updated.
Additional updates & word-changes in this '02 site-edition.
Updates in
'02 of more than a few words marked
New. Those updates begin towards
close of interview ]
Q: What is prose poetry, anyway?
A: A good, if complex question. Your question was also mellifluously phrased, what with its off-rhymes and all! But if I'm going to answer it, it means this interview has to start off with a bit of a soliloquy.
The prose poem is an established form practised internationally. It has been in existence for about 150 years. Its pracitioners include both significantly established verse writers (such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé; and in the 20th-century, Valery, Brecht, and Jimenez, and also many writers who've never written a line of verse at all, such as Turgeniev, Solzenitsyn, Arreola and Cortazar). In the USA, and in the English-speaking world in general, it's still a somewhat embattled literary form. That's partly because with rare exceptions, critics still haven't said enough about it yet--or, at least, enough that's insightful and positive. And, in the USA, I understand that many college and university Creative Writing departments teach neither prose poem theory nor its practise--although I gather that recently, this lamentable trend has definitely been changing for the better!
That this should happen was, at least in part, my hope when
I first put together my anthology,
The Prose Poem: An International
Anthology (Dell/Laurel, 1976), the first such anthology in English. It's a
collection of some 600 pages of prose poems from around the world, most of which
have been written by rather well-known poets in the medium of verse.
*
It's generally agreed that it was the 19th-century French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), the founder of modern French poetry, who began the modern trend towards prose poem-writing; and who was, and still is, the prose poet who has had the most influence. Baudelaire was the first prose poet who was fully conscious of the fact that he was working in a new, modern medium whose ground-rules had yet to be established, and whose boundaries were yet to be explored--both in terms of form and subject-matter. Baudelaire started by rewriting some of his verse poems as prose poems. His modernity extended to writing prose poems about the sometimes gritty underside of modern urban city life--a subject he began to explore in prose poetry circa l855, with a group of poems called Petites Poemes en Prose (later retitled Paris Spleen). Baudelaire said, in the preface to his Petites Poemes en Prose--in a memorable passage which I've translated and re-translated both in my mind and on paper a thousand times:
Which of us, in his ambitious moments, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose-- musical, but without [conventional] rhythm and rhyme, and supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the promptings of the unconscious?
What Baudelaire was calling for, among other things, was nothing less than a richer, more intimately "inward" and psychologically truer poetry than had theretofore existed in Europe.His overall poetic program resembles that of his approximate contemporaries across the English Channel, the English Romantic poets. Particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge. They too, in reaction against 18th century formalist preoccupations, broke with the traditions of strict verse as it had been practised throughout Europe in the l8th century--even though like the other English Romantics, they wrote verse, and verse that rhymes, too. And, like Wordsworth especially among the English Romantics, Baudelaire employed a naturalness of diction in his work-- particularly in his prose poems--which in and of itself seems quite "modern"--even today! Baudelaire's diction follows the contours of the human psyche, which doesn't, of course, naturally think in strict forms like sonnets and villanelles. The Prose Poem, which avoids by degree (but not by kind) various strictly formal devices of rhymed verse, and which emphasizes an approach more naturally consistent with the inward or "associational" turnings of the human psyche--the mind's fondness for dream-like creations of metaphor in particular--seems an ideal vehicle for such sophisticated, psychologically realistic, esthetic aspirations. Not only historically but today, too!
Shortly before Baudelaire there was Aloysius Bertrand, author of Gaspard de la Nuit. Bertrand, born in l807, died in l841--more than a decade before Baudelaire's prose-poem-writing started. Bertrand never used the term "prose poem," however--and striking as Bertrand's work is, it focusses on early Renaissance life rather than modern urban life. (Bertrand described his work, in its subtitle, as "Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot"). Also, Bertrand was never as self-consciously, much less outspokenly ambitious about his formally adventurous intentions as was Baudelaire. Gaspard did not come replete with a critical apparatus re the new genre like the one which Baudelaire--tackling the implications of the new form head on--provided in his Petites Poemes en Prose preface. Gaspard has an interesting Preface, and a Prologue, too--but vis-à-vis literary form, they're far less theoretical.
*
France, in any event, is the home of The Prose Poem. And though Baudelaire's most inspired followers, Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarmé, show points of contact with English (and, of course French) Romantic poetry, Rimbaud and Mallarmé demanded much more--thus causing Rimbaud, for example, to even abandon the medium of verse altogether, and like Bertrand, write solely in the prose poem form for most of his brief writing life. (I suspect that many verse poets who turned to writing prose poetry have undergone such periods of temporary or even permanent poetic abstinence). The Surrealist movement of the l920's and l930's, which was founded in France but which soon became an International, global movement, was perhaps the wildest outgrowth of this emphasis on a psychologically-based art. Surrealism went even further than Baudelaire had--even going so far as to declare open warfare against any ingredient in art that wasn't the product of spontaneity; or, as I see it, what Baudelare termed "the promptings of the unconscious." Despite their purportedly anti-artistic stance, Surrealist (and semi-Surrealist) poets around the world have written many marvelous prose poems! Quite a few of them are included in The Prose Poem: An International Anthology.
*
After Bertrand and Baudelaire (this historical compression is difficult but necessary, in order to answer your question, I guess) the prose poem form continued to develop in the later l9th century and throughout the 20th century not only in France--which continued to be a veritable hotbed of talented prose poets--but also flourished in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia, Hungary, Russia, Japan, the USA, and Great Britain, where T.S. Eliot actually attempted a rather curious, French-influenced prose poem. In English, we also have the various "Epiphanies" written by the great Irish novelist James Joyce--most of which were incorporated into his novels. Despite an (all-important, I'd say!) decision by their author not to publish them separately, they more or less qualify as prose poems. In the USA., poets have "discovered" the form mainly since America's culturally very restless, and esthetically highly explorative mid-1960's, with pioneering work in the genre--and, in some cases, entire books--by for example such forerunners as Karl Shapiro, Anne Sexton, Robert Bly, James Wright, W.S. Merwin, and David Ignatow. Before that, significant American works in the form were published by, of all people, novelist Sherwood Anderson in the 'teens of the century; and by the highly original, self-styled "renegade" poet Kenneth Patchen in the l940's and l950's. Works having a close relationships to prose poetry were also published by in the 'teens of the century by Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell among others--and, in the l920's William Carlos Williams also had a go at the form. But it is in the mid-l960s that these efforts were taken up by an entire generation of US poets who, without hemming and hawing, or issuing even implicit invitations to scholars to get "reachy" about defining the form they were writing in, wrote prose poems and named them as such. Several poets of my own generation have written scores of prose poems. For example, Russell Edson, who started writing in the early l960's, and who writes prose poems exclusively (although early on, he referred to them mainly as "Fables," only later on routinely referring to them as Prose Poems). And there are many poets who came just slightly afterwards, and who write in both verse and prose--writers such as Jack Anderson, William Matthews, James Tate, Carolyn Forche, Stuart Dybek, Vern Rutsala, Maxine Chernoff, and Brian Swann, among other talented poets. Occasionally poets the technical sophistication of whose works always showed that they were fully aware of the existence of prose poetry--& whose translations show that too--will jump on the bandwagon and publish works of their own in the form--in relatively recent years, John Ashbery and Charles Simic, for example.
I don't think that any of us have exactly "followed in the footsteps" of our distinguished forebears, however. The prose poem, being a form whose ground rules are less established than those of more traditional verse forms, tends to call for and inspire a certain originality. But it's doubtful that poets such as those I've mentioned above needed to read the work of others to get their inspirations! As I've said, the l960s was simply a culturally very explorative, restless period; and that restlessness extended to poetry. Many poets who started publishing in the l970's have written prose poems--a smaller number have published entire books of prose poems. By the l980's, except for the most conservative bastions of literature, prose poems were all over the place--the appearance in the l990's of literary magazines devoted solely to prose poetry, actually lags the creative market slightly! The poems such litmags publish show that the prose poem is not only alive and well, but thriving increasingly. From the point of view of most of the established critics--who tend with a few notable exceptions to be a rather conservative lot--I suppose it's probably still too early in the history of the poetry of my generation to begin sorting out influences and cross-influences. Too bad!--I'd like to see that happen during the lifetimes of my fellow American prose poets, rather than posthumously. In any event, that's not for me to do! (I'd rather, for example, write more poetry).
Anyway--to get back to your original question, "What is prose
poetry, anyway?" Historical perspectives such as I've mentioned aside, I'd most
simply and briefly define The Prose Poem as:
A form of poetry
self-consciously written in prose, yet characterized by the conscious, intense
use, of virtually all the devices of verse poetry--except for strict meter;
rhyme; and the line-break.
Q: Could you be more specific about the use of verse devices in prose poems?
A: Yes--but with the understanding that what I'm about to say--although deduced from reading a lot of prose poems from around the world, will also naturally and inevitably reflect something of my own prose-poetry-writing-practise and preferences. You're asking me to wear "two hats" here--a poet hat and a scholarly hat, and the latter is of course a complex one with a big brim and lots of speculative curleques on top. But I'll try to be objective as I can about what I see today as--eek!--The Paradigms Of The Prose Poem.
The prose poem makes considerable use, for example, of that most psychologically "inward" poetic device of all: metaphor. Metaphor of course is one of the wildest qualities of both the human psyche and poetry. The extraordinary combinations of events which are assembled to make up our dreams, for example, represent the mind's extraordinary--in fact truly ferocious--capacity to generate metaphor. An ability to create metaphor--to let metaphor out of the overly rational cage in which our more numbingly conservative poets sometimes practically imprison it, so that metaphor can perform for us and entertain us--is a prerequisite for any writer of prose poems. But the animal needs a certain taming! Dreams transcribed may offer the raw material for poetry; but cannot in and of themselves make poetry, either for the verse poet or for the prose poet--whose temptation to merely transcribe dreams is obviously greatest. In any event, having cast the idea of the line-break--sometimes no doubt somewhat reluctantly--behind them, it's as if historically, prose poets were looking for a "center of gravity" to take the place of the line-break; and found it in metaphor! Prose poets, like verse poets, are doubtless driven to do what they do by personal proclivity on the one hand, and on the other by the nature of medium they are working in--and the prose poem medium especially seems to call for a metaphor-based "center of gravity." Contemporary poets writing in verse can of course do things that prose poets cannot. For example verse-writers can explore the ideally quite excitingly dynamic sense of "push" and "pull" and "turn and counter-turn" that can result from skilful management of the line-break. Personally, my own experience is that when I start missing the fun of trying to create that kind of poetic excitement, I go back to writing verse for a while!
In short, a poet's skill at managing metaphor, and ability to "tie poems together" using metaphor is I'd say, structurally speaking, all-important in good prose poems. Good prose poems don't flop all over the place! Even those prose poems which engage in a lot of mentally- associative "leaping" around the unconscious--for example, those of Robert Bly, who is probably USA's first and certainly still our leading wizard in that style, and who has obviously inspired the work of many other talented, chronologically younger magicians--attain balance. They're tight--infinitely tighter, for example, than the kind of verse that goes around which has only wearing its author's heart on its sleeve to recommend it. Let's remember that our old friend Baudelaire in "To The Reader," the prefatory poem of his big, mid-l9th century masterwork in verse, the then-shockingly-entitled Flowers of Evil, identified himself as not only a proponent of the unconscious in poetry, but also as a sworn enemy of boredom in poetry. Because of their "cutting-edge" explorations of metaphor, prose poems at their best often make for highly exciting alternative, and even counter-culturally stimulating reading. They're often highly skeptical of, or at least poised about, subjects that many bad poems, like many unthinking people, automatically and conventionally get lyrically giddy about. Sometimes, due to their risky coaxings and explorations of metaphor, prose poets seem particularly able to stake out and humanize areas that are, believe me, positively Visionary!
Yet another quality to be found among good prose poets: a keen ear for unusual, unconventional, and even peripherally mellifluous sounds & music--including a feeling for off-rhyme of all kinds--and even for rhyme itself. I'm speaking of internal, rather than "end-stopped" rhyme, of course! In other words, it's helpful if a prose poet doesn't have a "tin ear," since so many of the sounds he or she will be putting together will be assembled not in order to "round out the line," but rather mostly by instinct, and then crafted into poems which are if the writer happens to have written well, successful organic wholes. Yes, just as with verse poets, there are alas such things as prose poets with "tin ears." I hope you, as a reader, never have to misfortune to stumble into the work of either...
Also necessary for a good prose poet, I think--since obviously, like most free verse poets most prose poets today seldom "count syllables" when writing--is an especially keen ear for rhythm, and for the rhythms of natural speech in particular. Like Metaphor, natural speech or the speech of "men speaking to men" as Wordsworth called it ("humans speaking to humans" would be even better), tends to express inwardness better than strictly formal, "hi-falutin" forms of diction. Even good poets writing free verse sometimes stumble into impossibly "hi-falutin" dictional patterns-- indeed, some of our more formalistic verse poets seem to believe in it!--but in prose poetry especially, unless such "slips" are executed very carefully and self-consciously, stiffness of diction can be at worst deadly and at best horribly out-of-sync with the inwardness-related purpose of the poem. The prose poem's fondness for the colloquial, leads I believe to the peculiar kind of humor you find in the work of many prose poets. The unconscious too, after all, is often funny--dreams, whether they are good dreams or bad dreams have ingredients of The Incongruous, like comedy. My esteemed prose-poem-writing colleague Russell Edson and yr. humble servant Benedikt often tend to that, I hear, according to those--still!--relatively few critics who have their ear to the ground where the prose poem is concerned. (Edson and I apparently also have in common a certain delerious love for metaphor, by the way--although as literary creatures, he and I have our numerous individually distinguishing marks).
A final key ingredient which you can find in effective prose poems, I think: To give balance to the psychologically "inward" aspect of the prose poem, a decent--and even a fairly rigorous--sense of logic. Waywardness of thought easily gets exposed as irrelevance in a medium as historically anchored in matter-of-factness as prose. But again and again, a lesson in writing poetry in any genre is that it takes a lot of discipline, and often a whole lot of poetry revision, to improvise really well. I sometimes think that that's especially true of attempting to express "the well of the unconscious" really well! New: What the Surrealists called "Automatic Writing" may to some extent be involved in the creation of a prose poem, as a means of coaxing the unconscious out of its cage, or lair--but I tend to agree with T.S. Eliot when he says (I'm paraphrasing) that ultimately no verse is really 'free' for a poet who wants to do a good job.
So, to sum up: While a feeling for metaphor, natural diction, sometimes fearlessless about funniness, and often fresh, surprising sounds and music links the scrupulous prose-poem-writer to our natural human inwardness, it's logic which links us most securely to the world to which we want to communicate. So, the prose poem is a fairly complete esthetic form, according to the human polarities and esthetic possibilities it incorporates I'd say, wouldn't you? Thus ends my long soliloquy describing briefly as I could, the generalities of prose poetry--both history and chacteristics as I see them now. And now--since I notice that I've just started to ask you, the interviewer, the questions--I'll stop trying to do the nearly impossible by generalizing about a form which is, after all, still evolving; and shut up.
Q: Some writers (Agee, Wolfe, Merton) composed what people call "poetic prose." Is this the same as prose poetry?
A: No.Wonderful as those writers you mention are as prose writers, they weren't, for example, primarily verse writers composing pieces self-consciously, in shorter prose forms, each of which works as a self-contained whole.Those are distinctions which I think it's important to make.
Q: It's been said that most American poets are in fact writing prose poetry, but are disguising their work as verse poetry by using line breaks. Do you agree with this?
A: I believe that fewer writers of prose poems are abusing the medium of poetry than are some of the disreputable poetasters who have only their manipulation of the line-break to offer, and who've slipped in among the many writers of breadth composing "end-stopped" rhyming verse. The disreputable compositions of the former, to my mind, qualify as merely an unusually hard-to-read, annoyingly tricky, intellectually more or less exhausting form of doggerel. I've neither the patience nor interest to read such work anymore, period.
Q: Do your own prose poems have a hidden form that is not apparent to the reader? Is form in fact important to prose poems?
A: A two-part question, no less. About Form being important to prose poetry: Yes, it is. But it's "Organic" in structure like, for example, most Romantic and post-Romantic music. And, like nearly all such music--& jazz too--prose poems tend to transmit a sense of having been improvised, spontaneously or quasi-spontaneously. That's yet another thing prose poetry has in common with "free verse," as opposed to verse written in strict forms. If that doesn't sound like a firm enough basis for poetry, consider "Organic Architecture." Like the buildings of Louis Stack Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and their multitudes of followers among 20th-century architects, form in the prose poem springs from nature and especially from human pyschology, which is after all part of nature. It may have a certain improvisatory "feel" to it; but in good prose poems there is also a logic and a craftsmanship that prevents the building from falling down on you. In other words, if the prose poem is a good prose poem, for all its improvisations you sense its shapeliness, the way in everyday life you can sense that a reasonably-under-control person's talking, rather than just some turkey who's just saying whatever happens to come into his head. Like 'free verse," only more so, prose poems put a lot of chips down on the truth of positive pronouncements about the legitimacy of Organic Form in art--which is what Allen Ginsberg is doing in relation to poetry, when he proposes rather daringly: "[If] Mind Is Shapely, Art Is Shapely."
Answer to the second part of your question, re my own poems: Nope, there is no deliberately "hidden" esthetically un-self-contained key in my prose poem books (Mole Notes, 1971; and Night Cries, 1976). Those two books, both issued by Wesleyan, simply came about when I re-examined the long lines of verse in my first two books, The Body (1968) and Sky (1970), both also issued by Wesleyan; and then, following certain "inner promptings," decided to transform the long lines of my verses by extending them into prose paragraphs. The lines of my verse were getting longer and longer anyway--New: particularly in the rather ambitiously lyrical poems towards the close of Sky--so you might say that I was just following my nose. (PS--The poems at the close of Sky are among my favorites in that book). Hints of the origins of my early prose poems in the verse poems, appear in the way I break up some of my prose poems into stanza-like sections--actually numbering those stanza-like sections, even in the context of otherwise unmodified, non-formatted blocks of prose. It's something I started doing early on--for example, in my first mss. of prose poems, an as-yet-uncompleted collection called Universe which I started around l970, & which I still return to from time-to-time. Literarally-speaking, it's sort of an original method, I think--I used stanza-like numbering within blocks of prose in Mole Notes and Night Cries, and still use it in some of the prose poems I'm writing today. So do others. In any event, I feel that the "key" to my writing prose poetry was quite logically arrived at. Despite my effortful anthological act in The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (1976), I feel I came to the prose poem quite logically and naturally and esthetically--several years in fact, before I began serious work on that anthology. In short, the "key" to my writing prose poetry is to be found in the pockets of my verse, so to speak. Incidentally, the same is true of my anthology of Surrealist Poetry for Little-Brown--The Poetry of Surrealism, published in l974. I was instinctively drawn to means of expression which have points of contact with Surrealism long before I began to compile it. I'm again referring back to my first two books of poetry, The Body and Sky, which are in verse. But I'm getting off the subject of prose poetry. Next question, please.
Q: A poet I know told me he was having trouble getting his new collection published because it had too many prose poems. Have you run into this editorial prejudice in publishing your own work?
A: No; not with books. Years and years ago Wesleyan wasn't hesitant at all about risking publishing my collections of prose poems: Mole Notes (l971), my third book of poetry, and Night Cries (1976), my fourth. In other words, Wesleyan never held the form I was writing in against me--though it's true that what with the form I was writing in and the graphics in Mole Notes, Wesleyan University Press decided to bring out Mole--in a rather splendid edition, too--outside of their poetry program. As far as getting both books accepted in the first place, I suppose it didn't hurt that before submitting the manuscipts of Mole and Night Cries I had published with Wesleyan two reasonably well-accepted books--books in verse forms: i.e., The Body (l968) and Sky (l970). Or perhaps, with respect to Wesleyan's publishing Mole Notes and Night Cries with such alacrity, I was just lucky.
Where I did have trouble, as one might expect, was with some of the more conservative, old-line magazines years ago. I haven't tested those waters with prose poems for many, many years--though, together with new verse, I'm still writing & publishing prose poems galore. But probably, I'd guess, some literary magazine editors still literally hate prose poetry--perhaps because, even after all these years, as a form it's still to some extent an "unknown," a Work-in-Progress, and a gamble for people if they're somewhat ossified or even totally brain-dead and secretly believe that modern poetry stopped with T.S. Eliot (who, incidentally, took Baudelaire very seriously). Many critics, too, obviously prefer not to deal with literary forms that are to some extent still being defined. New: And those who do, too often make the wrong choices. Too bad--many of the critics who've recently turned their attention to "Language Poetry," for example, seem to me to be otherwise people of intelligence, talent & good will, who in addition to that write better than some of their subjects do. Notwithstanding my own critical & scholarly impulses in terms of addressing "difficult work," I refuse flat out to waste my time addressing work that's wilfully opaque. Art should IMAO shed light on reality, and not hide it much less fragment it any more than it already is rather annoyingly fragmented. I regard poetry as a means of providing enlightenment and pleasure, and not as means of providing nuts to crack. Work that does the latter is fundamentally academic.
Q: When poetry is taught in poetry workshops, is prose poetry given its due or is it ignored? Is prose poetry a good exercise for poets using other formats?
A: Although of course none of us can know exactly what's happening in poetry workshops around our 50 States, I'd like to suggest that the prose poem be taught or at least insightfully alluded by Instructors/Professors in Creative Writing classes--and then explored by students--during at least 2 or 3 sessions of each semester. New: And, I'd suggest that class time in English classes/Literature classes be devoted to the study of prose poems as a discrete literary form, as well. About writing prose poems being "a good exercise" for poets already working in other forms--I'd say definitely, "yes." For example, writing prose poems would give younger poets a chance to sharpen their sense of metaphor, loosen up the formality of diction some still think is necessary in literature, and develop their ears for subtleties of rhythm, music, etc. During those years when I was actively teaching full-time at various colleges--mostly of some distinction--I occasionally held such prose poem sessions for students, and it worked out pretty well. BTW, I'm proud of my students, both at the colleges and in the other poetry places where I've been in residence, some of whom have gone on to do excellent, maturer work--some in the prose poem form and others in other, somewhat less unusual literary genres. And, as an activity for maturer poets, I'd say this: A poet wants to keep his or her creative capacities ever-limber, right? And after all, historically speaking, like the Himalayas or the Rocky Mountains, the prose poem is undeniably there. So why not climb it?
Q: Do you have a new collection coming out?
[TO BE CONTINUED]
[Original Webversion of Interview, © l999 by Michael Benedikt. This edition, © MB 2002]
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THE FOLLOWING IS MOST
OF A BRIEF ESSAY IN
SEVERAL SHORT SECTIONS ON
"THE FUTURE OF
THE PROSE POEM."
IT WAS FIRST PUBLISHED
IN THE PROSE POEM: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
IN l993.
Note (1999): A few thoughts have been amplified
since '93.
(Amplifications of a some thoughts which complete the essay are
still in progress).
The Prose Poem: An International Journal (l993)
'A FEW NOTES ON THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN PROSE POEM'
It continues to seem to me that there is a shorter distance from the unconscious to The Prose Poem, than from the unconscious to most poems in verse. (That's obviously a good thing, it goes without saying, if the writer has an interesting unconscious; and a bad thing, if not).
***
Certainly there's a lot of unconscious, seemingly thoroughly primordial-type imagery among the prose poems of the first generations of American prose poem pracitioners, i.e., among those many writers who have participated in the revival of the prose poem in the US from the mid-60's through the l990's. Particularly, "Elemental"-type imagery. Perhaps to a fault! For example, references to "A Man," and "A Woman" (with which an unusually high proportion of prose poems begin, relative to poems in verse); Earth, Air, Water & Fire (which also make their appearance quite frequently, relative to poems in verse).
***
These habits are obviously legitimate--psychologically at least--since the unconscious mind tends at least in part to operate in terms of those and other such basics. And also, I guess, because the prose poem in America is still relatively new, "sticking to basics" is sometimes best. But it should also be remembered that dreams are founded not only on obviously primordial "basics," but are also concatenations of reality. Dreams of any complexity resemble, do they not, no-holds-barred collages of all of reality's various and disparate aspects--and incorporate the incredible diversity of our waking (and even working!) external lives as well. (Is American Life more complex than any other? In view of our--increasingly--technological preoccupations, certainly American lives must be among the most complex lives being lived world-wide today).
***
In other words: Although the Prose Poem may have a basis in the elemental symbols of the raw unconscious, it seems to me that it needn't be limited to them. Prose poems aren't of course merely psychological documents; but among other things intend, at least, to be aesthetic artifacts, like any others. The raw unconscious obviously doesn't automatically constitute Art. Or, at least, a very high Art. In Art of any elevation whatsoever, obviously things like appositeness of self-contained form, and appositeness of self-contained structure--not to mention freshness and originality--are what count. We expect that--in their own good time, of course!--Art, and Artists, continue to surprise us. The same is true of prose poetry, and of the writers who write it.
***
Another problem with the reliance on Elemental iconography in many American prose poems so far is that, like any iconography, such imagery can become a bit mannered, and predictable --like the often-repeated imagery of any period. For example, roses, cloaks, birds, etc., in, say, 16th century Elizabethan poetry, or old ruins, storms, lakes and mountains, in, say, 19th century Romantic poetry. Of course, we may revel in the exoticism of these things, relative to some of the things we see in our own times; but if we love the best writers who evoke such iconography, I for one would propose that--in the deepest part of our beings--we love them primarily not because of that iconography, but despite it.
***
If the prose poem has a long-term (i.e., centuries-long) future as an alternative to verse (and as an expression of the unconscious, the imagination, or whatever), it will I think have to develop in ways that are increasingly more far reaching--i.e., in other ways than by hearking back to elementals quite so often. And proceed by extending itself--like dreams--into the various other areas of our lives which are vital to us all. I see that as the essential challenge to, for example, the American Prose Poem for the balance of the 20th century and into the 21st.
***
Speaking here as a poet who has published books of poetry in both verse and prose formats, and also as an occasional literary critic, it seems to me that the nature of the Prose Poem itself particularly encourages qualities having to do with such evolution and transcendence and--yes --even outright experiment. In particular, transcendence of its own norms and seeming limits and boundaries, when it threatens to acquire them. And not only encourage such Transcendence, but perhaps demand it! When writing prose poetry--still a relatively new genre, and a genre that's hybrid at that, as are many of the roses now considered to be classics of flowerdom--there's at least one sense in which one does not have to work quite so hard as one does when writing verse: specifically, with respect to overcoming the weight of age-old literary norms.
***
Why? Because the prose poem's medium is prose--a medium used for all sorts of things, from literature with a capital "L" to newspapers and advertisements and love-notes and laundry lists--the Prose Poem encourages a tremendous flexibility of dictional, imagistic, and tonal approach. This is in sharp contrast to the medium of verse, where even the formal constraints of "free verse," such as they are, can offer a certain natural resistance and make for somewhat tougher going in terms of breaking new ground. That is to say: although the Prose Poem "format" encourages, and even demands what might even be termed esthetically "radical" formal invention for success, verse accepts such inventiveness really gracefully--but seems to me, relative to prose poetry, to be able to take it or leave it. For example: whereas the Prose Poem seems to welcome among its flexibilities extreme forms of flights into the fantastic, the medium of verse seems to say to a poet about to take wing in that direction--rather like the classic l950's TV-comedian Jack Benny in his historic, laugh-getting one-liner--"Now Wait a Minute!" To a poet just beginning his or her poem, even those slight--split-second?--differences, can mean a lot!
***
On the other hand, when starting to write a verse poem, I for one have often found the historical norms of verse quite comforting--especially when compared to the sheer multiplicity of possibilities that electrify me (and sometimes virtually electrocute me), when beginning a prose poem. In other words, the familiar patterns of verse--even "modern" or "post-modern" verse-- give me a kind of "down home feeling." With verse, I find that I "know where I stand"--at least before I start really writing the poem and, to keep myself interested, deliberately start to a greater or lesser degree pulling the rug out from under myself. Things do not start out so vertically with prose poetry. After all, while the traditions of verse relate mainly to writing verse, the writing-genres to which prose poems relate are myriad, and are not necessarily esthetic in origin. From certain poets of a relatively formal, academic bent to certain "slam poets" (who mainly write in verse), too often verse-writing invites posturing--a temptation best resisted, of course, at all costs. (Yes, their apparent informality notwithstanding, many "slam poets" too, know all too well exactly "where they stand"; and so do their audiences!). It's much harder to posture in the medium of the poem in prose--whose traditions include everything from the stately prose of the US Consitution and the arcane prose of Mutual-Fund prospectusses, to notes to, for example, one's babysitter &/or dogwalker.
***
Its origins in the unconscious notwithstanding, I for one tend to take those prose poems most seriously in which the poet pushes his or her unconscious, with all its feeling for elementals floating around in it, just a little bit harder than one might expect against the flinty surface of consciousness, and the realities recognized by the conscious mind. That's where the essential spark in the prose poetry of the future will, I think, be lit--at the point where the meeting of the deeply internal, and the surprisingly external, takes place. Further Speculations: Is it possible that in our complex times, the fantastic technological and other "information-overloads" to which all our psyches are subject, and which assault our consciousnesses daily, have because of their fantasmagorical variety started to rival the dreaming, or dream-like, fantasies of the psyche itself? Is it possible that the reason why an increasing number of writers today seem to be writing prose poetry, is that the prose poem is a natural meeting-place for their confluence?--making the prose poem, for many writers and their readers, too, a sort of Town Hall for the expression of what living today really feels like? In any event, I for one am convinced that the essential spark which will ignite the best--i.e., the most entertaining and the most useful--prose poems in the future, and which will set others than the writer most afire, will be written by those prose poets who welcome angles-of-vision and other perspectives on the external world which are as revolutionary--and as surprising!--as is the idea of writing poems in prose, itself.
[TO BE CONTINUED]
(Forthcoming in this essay: some thoughts on critics
hostile to the Prose Poem, supplementing those expressed
in
Poetry Society of America Interview at this site; &
essay finale)
[This version of Essay, © l999 by Michael Benedikt]
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Note: Many of Benedikt's books are now represented by selections at various Websites
Contemporary US poet Michael Benedikt has published five collections of poetry. His most recent volume is The Badminton at Great Barrington; or, Gustave Mahler & The Chattanooga Choo-Choo, a book of love poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, l980). His collections with Wesleyan University Press are Night Cries (prose poems, l976); Mole Notes (prose poems, 1971); Sky (l970); and The Body (l968). His work is represented thus far in 65 + anthologies of US poetry. Books he's edited include an anthology of global prose poetry--The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (Dell/Laurel, l976), a landmark, 600-page anthology which is the first of its kind world-wide and which includes an extensive critical Intro. as well as notes on each of its 70 authors. Benedikt has also edited the 375-page The Poetry of Surrealism (Little, Brown & Co., l974), an antho. of French poetry with Critical Intro. It, too, is the first of its kind in English. It includes additional prose poems, from the French. A former Poetry Editor of The Paris Review, his editorial selections are represented in The Paris Review Anthology (Norton, l990). His literary criticism has appeared in Poetry and American Book Review. He's currently a Contributing Editor for The American Poetry Review. Benedikt has taught at Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Hampshire, and Vassar College/s and at Boston University; and has read from his poetry at many other colleges & universities + bookstores, etc. Benedikt is a graduate of Columbia U. & also NYU; & lives in Manhattan, NYC.
E-Mail at benedit4@aol.com. Please note quaint yet correct spelling of mailto address
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OTHER BENEDIKT
SITES
(Including
Mini-Sites)
All Sites Modified in 2001--many
modified or in work for 2002
[Nearly all poems at these
sites--including those from Benedikt's books--appear-in Y2K-era
updates]
SITES BASED ON BENEDIKT'S POETRY
BOOKS
[MOST, PROSE POEM &
SURREALISM-RELATED]
Prose Poems &
Microfictions, companion-site to this site, with
other works fusing fact & fantasy from Night Cries.
Som
brief, some microfiction size. With London Times Literary Supplement book
review re Romantic roots of MB's prose poetry
& tie to traditions of
Visionary literature. Added '02: 'Doorway of Perception' (+
Author's Notes).
With info on The Prose Poem: An International
Anthology. Top of This
Site
Early
Poetry: The Body & Sky.Selections from
Benedikt's lst two, Surrealism-oriented
poetry books. Verse written in later
l960's. With page of Dark Love
Poems. Scare (or inspire?) your Valentine!
For fans of
poetry in the horror-&-fright genre, has Halloween
& All Year Round.page.
And (as if that weren't enough)--for teachers,
& writers of theses & college-level term-papers, etc.--also
a
classroom educational resource in poetry: a Thematic
Index of topics in both books.
(Subject-index includes semi-copious notes
& commentary. General Readers may enjoy notes; photos)
The
Badminton at Great Barrington, opening sections of book
of verse published just after Night Cries.
Benedikt's 5th
collection is a sequence of love poems telling story of goofily star-crossed
lovers
SITES BASED ON BENEDIKT'S
ANTHOLOGIES
[PROSE POEM &
SURREALISM-RELATED]
Aloysius
Bertrand: First French Prose Poet. Brief Intro +
Translations of Prose Poems by a highly original
19th-Century writer &
forerunnner of both Symbolism & Surrealism. Fantasies on the dark, gothic
side from
Bertrand's major work, Gaspard de la Nuit.Includes
Bertrand's Preface. New: Gaspard piano suite
by Ravel. Top
Theatre, Film &
TV Poems, with poems about 'showbiz' in both verse &
prose. 2 prose poems from Benedikt's
3rd poetry book, Mole Notes;
& new 3 Microfictions--post-modern
poetic fantasies in memory of 20th-cent. Italian filmmaker
Federico Fellini.
Also, info on 3 anthos. of modern European drama. (French, German, & Spanish
Surrealist & Surrealist-influenced
plays from 'The Theater of The
Absurd,' many translated by Benedikt).
Includes Agent Contact info.
for obtaining play performance rights, reprint rights etc, after faxed
enquiry.
Robert Desnos: A
Unique French Surrealist Poet
Intro & Translations
of 6 major Desnos love poems: "The Voice of Robert Desnos,"
"If You Only
Knew," new "Spaces Inside Sleep," "No, Love Is Not
Dead," "I've Dreamed of You So Much" &
"From The Marble Rose to The Rose
of Iron." With gen'l info on Benedikt's landmark, first-of-its-kind anthology in
English,
The Poetry of Surrealism. New: A 2nd Desnos page, under construction at Desnos2
WORKS IN PROGRESS
The
Thesaurus & Other New Verse, from manuscript entitled
OF: Philosophical & other poems.
With supplementary
page of: 3 Poems Praising
Peace
Poems from Boston
& Cambridge, from mss. entitled
Transitions. Mainly realistic, narrative verse. With
photos.
New: Xmas edition + supplementary page with mini- Yule
Log for cold wintry nights
'Of Orson
Welles Remarkable l938 Radio Program The War Of The
Worlds' poem-in-progress
re l938 Halloween-Eve program that
(accidentally) shook a nation. Also, warning re Gov't news
censorship
'The
Takings' Germany in l938. With 'The
Kapos,' re attempted recruitment by Nazi regime of voluntary
prisoners
for first concentration camps. (1st in a cycle of 3
poems-in-progress about the impact of World War II on civilians)
'Of The
Colorful Taganka Troupe in Soviet Russia, l957'
with poem re daring theater company
which sparkled in
repressive times, & which still plays in Moscow today. Also re State
censorship of art (& life)
'American
Vibrations' with poem re some of
19th-Century USA's unsung Female Erotic Pioneers
overlooked by official
history-books
'Of Living Alone But Not Brooding Too Much About It' with poem about those living alone & liking it
'Of
An Only Child's World' with poem about
growing up siblingless & surviving it
& last but not least
Info. at About.com re Background of Benedikt's
Websites via article,
'The
Compleat Michael Benedikt: Poet Laureate of The
Net.'
(A smaller, earlier selection of Benedikt
links appears at end of article, posted by About.com 4/99)
Pages at Academy
of American Poets
(Pages posted by Academy
5/99)
Thermopylae,
E-Zine, with interview with Benedikt on Literature,
Technology & The Web
in the 'Writers Talk About 2000' series.
Prognostications & predictions re Literature for Millenium.
(Page posted
by Themopylae 4/00)
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