Time is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt

Six Passages

10 six passages INTRODUCING MICHAEL BENEDIKT Robert Archambeau 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” (49). 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 ,andintheearlysixtiesalternatedbetweenundertakingtranslationsfrom 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 11 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, herecruitedhisimmediateinfluences(NewYorkSchoolpoetslikeFrankO’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch) and his favorite poets from the English Romanticschool(WordsworthandColeridge)totheSurrealistcamp.Benedikt eventuallybecamewaryof beingtoocloselyidentifiedwithSurrealism,though, claiming in 1977 that Surrealism was no longer central to his work. But, as the poemsinthepresentvolumeattest,fromtheearliesttothelatestwork,hispoetry 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 Aconfirmedagoraphobe,Benediktwasalwaysmorethanordinarilyattuned 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 instructionmanuals”againstanotherworldaltogether,theworldof “internal, ‘personal,’ or psychological things” (9). This, he goes on to say, is “not only an aesthetic imperative but a moral imperative” (11). 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. Consider Mole Notes, the most sustained and most powerfully imagined workinBenedikt’soeuvre.Thissequenceof prosepoemsrepresentssomething 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 12 literal and psychological underground. One understands the urge to retreat, especiallygiventheeventsof 1971,theyearinwhichMoleNotesappeared:the Weather Underground bombing of the Capitol building; the conviction of both Charles Manson and of the American lieutenant found guilty in the Mai Lai massacre; the arrest of 12,000 antiwar 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 in his interview with Shihab, Mole Notes and his next book, Night Cries, represented a “black pessimism” (26), it was pessimism well grounded in events. It was also a pessimism that faded, and the poems of The Badminton at GreatBarrington;orGustaveMahler&theChattanoogaChoo-ChoofindBenedikt 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...