From his home in Toronto, poet, artist, and experimental artist Greg Evason has for many years been producing an extraordinary amount and variety of work, ranging from the highly esoteric to the... More > surrealistic, to more accessible poems, stories, paintings, and drawings that reveal a person fully engaged in the journey to encounter and understand his, and our, existence. This new book takes the form of brief story-like texts or prose poems of intense thought and emotionality, couched in a surrealism expressed through what seems to be an everyday language. But, in fact, the language is one of great condensation and word play; not really “everyday” at all: “Loot of oven happy sneak of clean ashes. We are bloated cars swinging through a spark of crashed healthy sneezing. Boats are cloudy.” Evason has pulled off a unique and difficult feat, and Plowing Down the Cut will be a source of immense fascination and delight through many readings. The book includes a series of his crisply detailed and inventive drawings.< Less
John M. Bennett, The Sticky Suit Whirs: Los Preolvidados.
From a deep whispering closet comes a “whirring like a/s tick y su it”, like an immense door of sound, preforgotten sound which... More > thus forms the protean shape of memory itself. These poems are language as water in flux through all its forms: rain, lake, fog, river, ice, steam, storm, sea, and a cup sloshing on the table or still as glass. At 67 pages, this short book has an intensity of expression and a swarming variety of voices unlike any other writing you can find. “...I/saw the crown of tree I/ni remumembered where/the flaucet was”; “...ticking in your/,throat the;;;;;ra/in )counted with a hammer”.< Less
"This book is an anti-virus program. It dissolves grammatical build-up. Soothes syntactic overdose. Relieves the pressure of a world gone viral. Open up. Worlds flow in. Rote acceptance... More > crumbles. What flow? Listen down, beyond earshot. You fade into shelved oblivion, reclaimed from human swamp. Mind contusions pend. Feral undercarriage bottoms out, gutters into upside trough. Touchpad hues cry for you. Entrails point to all signs in weathered veins. Towns collapse. Datelines fault into summer lofts. Skies sift memorized self tonic; undertones resurge in fallen shock. Drink down sweltering ingots of Ganick attack. He’ll shave your morning; you turn up again in raw words." ---John Pursch< Less
Bennett is obviously at home with both Siglo de Oro literature and its linguistic excesses, as he is with contemporary avant garde literature with its multidirected experiments to both destroy... More > language and to re-create it. In short, this intricate and faithful-to-the-original (homophonically speaking) “translation” will surely find its place among the major experiments in contemporary poetry. -Ivan Argüelles
Bennett’s transduction of Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño was written, he has said, by “pretending I don’t know Spanish and writing it out (reading it) as if it were English.” This process arises from “an interest or attention paid to speech and hand writing as ‘texts’ full of meanings that have nothing to do with linguistics. I often read, or try to read, printed texts that way, too.” .... John Bennett’s project is as significant as any we will find in current poetical practice. - Jim Leftwich< Less
Short text and mantra blocks by John M. Bennett, mostly in English, with some in Spanish and other languages. Each tightly coiled poem contains Bennett’s signature textual inventiveness and... More > compression, humor, bizarre and surrealist metaphor, and intense lyricism. These works could be described as “haiku” on steroids: “locksmith wobbled in/the afterbreath...)))dirt/whistle ,corncob and g/ravel...)))” or “los anos tantos años/alejados como una tos/tada en el traspa tio lo/que veo muje y el/sueño del conejo tengo”.< Less
John M. Bennett's LIBER X is a tour-de-force of poetry, mixing textual, visual, oral,typographic, and linguistic procedures to create a unique and inexhaustible work. A delight to the eye, the mind,... More > the ear, and to one's imagination. At 226 pages, the poems vary in size from filling the page, to minimalist "haiku"; from English to Spanish (and occasional other languages) to everything in between. Bennett's signature lyrical surrealism and intelligence, his intense textual visuality and musicality, and his wild metaphorical and imagistic power are all on full display in this major new work in his canon.< Less
De John M. Bennett, dice César Espinosa, “Hiperprolífico. Irremediable ‘hombre orquestra’; es decir, porque desde un principio destacó por su sapiencia y... More > dominio del oficio.” [Escáner Cultural, ago. 2009] Con este tomo Bennett añade a su creciente obra en español con poemas y poemas visuales escritos en Guatemala y México. Es una poesía pasional, surrealista, íntima, social, y experimentalista en grado mayor:
“el párvulo sindical y la lujuria que perdía
mi contexto linderal el lago el lago se
hunde en el sueño de la arena que era
mi despertar cuando despierto ¡o mono!
y sube el zopilote .liderazgo .plumífero”
“en este cuarto una snombra hay e
n este cuarto una silla de nagua hay
eneste cuarto una bliblioteca en
llamas hay un cnonejo ene ste
cuarto una botella de norinas hay”< Less
John M. Bennett’s The Gnat’s Window shows the evolution of a new form combining the textual, the oral, the visual, and even the artifactual, as the pieces can be seen as windows, or... More > televisions, or computer screens. The poems can be read left-to-right as traditional texts, or up-and-down, or in-and-out, or in any number of other configurations, and thus have participatory and even performative dimensions within what at first glance seems to be a closed form. They are “dreams’ doubled crust” indeed: shaped and emotional, conceptual and somatic, sparklingly clear, and enigmatic.< Less
Poet, Sheila E. Murphy, wrote in a haibun for Peter Ganick (read full version at http://ex-ex-lit.blogspot.com): "The word for weeds that should be jewelry makes the yard a globe. The place to... More > pay admission is the mind, where rock formations dry after an overdose of winter." That empty yard is a landfill for every full & generous poem in orientation. Look here to energize the mind's eye and elasticize the sky.
"some sunshine every sleeper is
convinced of essences a malleability-
cull it ductile-seeking neutrality one
step from togetherness-"< Less
The poems in A Day in the Sun say goodbye in a multitude of ways as the author’s identical twin, the New Age philosopher/artist José Argüelles, simultaneously vanishes into the... More > universe and manifests as absolutely everything. Great loss has always been a perpetrator of great poetry. Tennyson’s In Memoriam sent that poet spinning into a questioning of all the tenets of Victorianism. Ivan Argüelles’ vision—“small tokens memento / mori the whirring faces”—goes even further because it opens the mind to its ultimate ground in chaos. José Argüelles redefined the Western calendar and pointed the way to a universal harmony, a “convergence.” In Ivan’s work, the universe is expanding and contracting at once, and speech, far from clarifying, constantly returns us to the fact of Enigma. The world is wild, exciting, in constant motion, but also horrifying, painful, an endless blow to our Narcissism. Both visions can nourish and sustain, but A Day in the Sun beautifully offers us the elegiac, shadow side. –Jack Foley< Less
For additional LBP books by John M. Bennett and by other writers and artists, go to: http://www.johnmbennett.net/ Since 1974, Luna Bisonte Prods has published a wide variety of experimental, avant-garde, audio, and visual literature in a wide variety of formats by artists from all over the world. Among the authors and artists published are such major and emerging figures as Ivan Argüelles, Sheila E. Murphy, Jim Leftwich, Andrew Topel, Carlos M. Luis, Scott Helmes, Jake Berry, John M. Bennett, Susan Smith Nash, Al Ackerman, Bob Heman, Richard Kostelanetz, Charles Henri Ford, Dick Higgins, Robin Crozier, Peter Ganick, and many others. LBP books are collected in major libraries and institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Sackner Archive, Princeton University, SUNY Buffalo, The University of Wisconsin, Brown University, New York Public Library, Washington University, Ohio University, The Ohio State University, and many others.
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