John M. Bennett

JOHN M.  BENNETT first caught my attention because of his book FOUND OBJECTS (1973).  Another product of creative serendipity, the discovery of this volume in the Olin stacks proved to be the precursor to many hours of chuckling.  The book is made up of poems constructed from newspaper headlines and phrases.   Bennett didn't invent the procedure;  incorporating such text has a noble Modernist lineage.   d.a. levy reproduced pasted and collaged text in the same manner as Bennett, and he was dead 4 years before this book came out.

The point, however, isn't that this kind of collage technique was or is itself something new and avant, but that a technique repeatedly dismissed as mechanical and soulless still is capable of conveying poetic voice.  FOUND OBJECTS is funny, the themes distinct.  It reads like Bennett.  I was prompted to seek out his other work in response to my delight in this book, and found throughout his oeuvre the same compulsive inventiveness, wry humor, sexual irony, sense of  play.  He continues producing poems that have a way of dismembering gay facades, riding over lines that in the hands of a lesser poet simply wouldn't work.

Bennett is a vigorous writer.   Seek out his poetry!  He told me in an email a few years ago that FOUND OBJECTS was his only book dedicated solely to collage.  He is, however, known as a prominent  concrete and visual poet, two areas which share some of the same concerns as collage.  Bennett is committed to experimentation; the range of his experimentation may require further exploration on this page.   With subtle hints of sci-fi, humor and aggression, his poems can befuddle and thus, provoke.   After that, it's up to you.  There's no coddling with Bennett. 

More poems by John M. Bennett 

Two poems scanned from John M. Bennett's FOUND OBJECTS (1973):

Centerless Grinder                                Be Doubted

"I had become interested during the early 1970's in the material or physical nature of language.  I had always been strongly conscious of the visual appearance of words on the page in poetry, and strongly valued the blank space at the ends of the lines.  So one weekend, around 1970 or 1971, when we were visiting a close friend from California (the ceramic and glass artist Robert Coleman, who now lives near Columbus) in Kent, Ohio, I cut up some tabloid newspapers and collaged words and phrases from them in visually significant manner.  Over the next couple of years I compiled quite a number of these, and a selection of them was eventually published under the title Found Objects (New Rivers Press, 1973).  I learned a lot about everyday language works (and doesn't work) through this process of deconstruction and reconstruction.
     That activity led to an increasing interest in visual and conceptual uses of language:  I made labels (short phrases or single words mimicking labels or technical instructions or warnings on products, etc.); collages, including visual images as well as words; concrete poetry; conceptual texts; sculptural assemblage pieces using language as one element; drawings; and, increasingly, the "drawn writing" that I continue to do and that has developed into a unique blend of calligraphy and visual poetry.  At the same time, I continued to write more traditional-looking poetry, typed, with line breaks and so on.  I had made some friends at OSU--especially Mark Tomlinson, a ceramic artist not interested I just making pottery, and Doug Landies, a painter.  With both of them I engaged in some collaborative projects, and I look upon those years as most stimulating, my conceptions of esthetic possibility being considerably expanded.  With Landies, I entered into the delightful world of mail art, and continue to be active in that field:  it's a way to directly exchange art and idea with people all over the world with no institutional intervention and absolute freedom and spontaneity."

from Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 25.