John M Bennett

Jim Leftwich on the poem "Steering", from Allam & Bennett's Tongue Ticking, 2013: If we add them together - the two minds of the authors and the third mind created through their collaboration, plus the two minds as a reader (the first mind with its first thought, which Ginsberg and Trungpa have called the best thought, and the second mind, which Chester A. Burnett aka Howlin' Wolf has in his "Killing Floor" warned us not to ignore) - we have five minds to act as a kind of steering committee as we navigate this windstorm, maybe a couch, curtains flapping in the wind, down by the sea, dustpan in hand, prepared to do battle with the wiggling hanger... (Editor Note: This book is dedicated to Jim Leftwich in Memoriam, 1956-2025)

John M. Bennett's LAVANDER A NOMBRE is pamjacked with everything we've come to expect of & enjoy in his work - an erudition, his ability with words & their placement (including a remarkable skill to break them up so they break out by themselves), a recognition & appreciation of others, his prolificacy. Plus an underlying social awareness whose presence is always there; & a humor that tends to lurk throughout but sometimes will be allowed to take center stage. I'm still cracking up over "PEPPERONI BRAIN SCAN." - Mark Young In his most recent book, LAVANDER A NOMBRE (which Bennett translates as "A Laundry Called Name"), there is a poem entitled "break fast." Why is there a space in the middle of the word "breakfast." Make a break for it, and do it fast. Put an end to your refusal to eat (to consume? to possess? to process? to ruminate?) And do it at the start of your day, as a source of nutrition. Why do I need to remove the space between before attempting to assess the available or potential meanings? Are Bennett poems always primarily about reading, in the sense that reading is often if not always primarily about thinking? - Jim Leftwich

This poetry was written between July 2021 & July 2022. It has textual poems in English and/or Spanish; and many visual poems. John M. Bennett is recognized internationally as a presence in the avant garde for his unique, highly personal, and uncompromising work. INFACTURAS contains some of his most vivid and mature poetry yet. "...autopsia /de un viajito estancado enc/errado en un volver perp tuo...", "...yr/wroteing time's straw s/inks below yr eyes I/ssaw what didn't see..."

John M. Bennett has perfect pitch. Drawing from classical sources and earthbound realities of the human body, Bennett illuminates miraculous and fleeting discoveries. His uncanny ability to elevate this realm of existence affirms the beauty of Bennett's work. A palpable sacredness blends with humor in this multi-lingual spree of sounds and visual poetic delights. Bennett's extensive use of the Hicucu form, invented by Jim Leftwich, is an event to celebrate. So are the tiny poems in which he dissects a word into tiny parts, each its own universe. There are some shockingly pure, beautiful, and lyrical poems dedicated to C. Mehrl Bennett which remind us that poetry is the greatest and most powerful gift. -Sheila E. Murphy

Visual Poems - Collaborations by John M. Bennett & MT Stolte made over a 10-year period, with a section of poems by John M. Bennett.

IS KNOT is: Poems, many incorporating visual elements, in English or Spanish or both, interspersed with visual poems, Fluxus-like texts, hacks, and collaborations. Written in 2016, it is a tour de force of Bennett's unique poetics. "Your visuals are priceless, John ... I prefer them to so much experimental work, either in the realm of the so-called visual arts or "concrete poetry" (which they really ain't) ... your so-called poetry which calls itself verse, but is the cryptically deranged response to "official literature", stands head and shoulders above ... Superimpositions of the subconscious stripped of Freudian valor (values?) ... And knockout minimalism " - Iv n Arg elles

The fifth volume of the flagship periodical of mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press contains nearly 90 pages jam-packed with the most underground, anti-normative, formally exploratory, epistemologically challenging, anti-institutional, non-commercial literature and art of the (mostly) contemporary (mostly) anglophone avant-garde. Not an inch of page-space is wasted in this chaotic melange of hundreds of pieces of otherstream writing, visual poetry, collage, Post-NeoAbsurdism, Mail Art, Fluxus, Critical Theory, Neoism, Manifestos, translations, Surrealism, performance scores, reviews, Asemia, and documentation, and much more by forty contributors from across the world; with a special section dedicated to the memory of Steve Dalachinsky.

Bennett's realignment of this fabulous text is divided into 26 somewhat brief, but incredibly beautiful, dense, unpunctuated and asyntactic sections, each with its own title. The overall effect reading these passages is that of a sublime but often disturbing dream, that requires its own rules and sets of margins or lack thereof. The relentless run-on flow of words as enactments of sounds dredged from an archaic distance has affinities with not just earth's surface but more precisely what lies underneath, an inherent chthonic Hell. Bennett's oneiric vision plunges the reader into a shadowy, indefinable alternate reality, an aphasia of the senses. Things more often unnamed--murders, children, cries, vengeances pass through a misty lens, light transmogrified by language into a tenuous dark other-world. The text is short enough to be read in one sitting and should be in order to get its full effect, a powerfully mesmerizing excursion through this telescoped concise language into a turbulent epic scenario, not unlike the constantly shifting nuances of the Mahabharata, except that here we are in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. - Iv n Arg elles

Contents of this book include poems written by the author February through May, 2016. Interspersed throughout are a series of eight visual poems written in the author's signature calligraphy with rubber stampings. Sinclair Scripa aka Tara Verheide, wrote the following: "Ode to the work of John M. Bennett; I believe that the broom closet is where John M. Bennett's words hide. Bennett's language, immersed in buckets of wetness, emerge from the closet, carried by Fantasia's Micky Wizard's brooms in intense exponential rigor. They spill as poetry, endlessly over the edge and down the stairs of the effervescent fountains of life's dark and mysterious castles."

A selection from over 40 years of Bennett's work, introduced by Ivan Arg elles. "Where to begin writing about this baffling and certainly most "avant-garde" of all poets living and working in the USA today? Bennett's reputation is international, and his interest in Mesoamerican culture has drawn him frequently to that part of the world where he is a recognized figure. His experimentations over the years have encompassed multiple techniques, including visual poetry, and his own "polyglottery," moving in and out of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French or some Mesoamerican language. What may seem aleatory is in fact more intentional and grounded than is first apparent. Bennett has roots in traditional literatures, those of 'Siglo de Oro' Spain and of Elizabethan England, but he is capable of transducing those literatures, metamorphosing them by way of the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, into something utterly innovative and New, such as few contemporary artists have done."

Poet John M. Bennett interprets, deinterprets, inexplains, and generally expands upon the dreams of Fluxus artist Bibiana Padilla Maltos. The poems are surreal, resonant, and full of unexpected connections, like dreams themselves, and, in fact, like poetry itself. Bibiana's original dreams are included in a special section. Some of the Dreams, as well as some of the Inexplicaciones, are in Spanish. If you want to know what your dreams "mean", this is a good place to start figuring them out Includes some reinexplicaciones of Bennett's poems by Ivan Arg elles.

From the opening poem, "...mumbling in the/attic "roof" out there, mud beyond my head...", this revised and definitive 2nd edition of John M. Bennett's classic "la M al" confirms its position as one of the poet's best works. Bennett has created a unique language to express the depth and complexity (or the complexity has created the language), of thought and emotion, or emotional thought that are the core of human experience: ..."drain" a laundry think .but think re diction think a congeries of faucets faucets like yr "running-sore" a window to a moon ."a moon all" right a tab le o yr "lips were draped... The language swarms, swells and ebbs, shatters and recoheres, turns and returns, in patterns that resonate with all the currents, hidden and visible, of the self or selves that inhabit us. An essential book that fully realizes the possibilities of language to contain and know what is.

Poetry: "...walking the/spiral map of your/fumbled face, and/incomplete, sha/king in re verse .oh/nightly coagulation/.foaming in your fists/or spoken, splashed/across the roofs "

MIRRORS M SCARAS is the 3rd volume in John M. Bennett's major series focused on particular topics that consists, so far, of LIBER X and OLVIDOS. It includes a series of typographic poems in the form of masks, followed by textual poems in a wide variety of styles and forms, in English, Spanish, some French and other languages. Bennett's inventiveness and energy, his visuality combined with highly literate, resonant, conceptual and aural beauty, make this unique work a force to change the language and to change the way language is used.

The faces, frames, words, and concepts in this book speak to and of the author's obsessions, history, and lunacy, but they have a resonance from a complex and rich cultural past that enriches them. These visual poems are not Mayan at all, yet they could not have come into being without an experience of Maya culture. Human cultures are never exclusive or "pure", but consist of dynamic mixings of many sources from many times and places. They are constantly in flux, and these pieces represent the incorporation of aspects of the ancient Maya world into the world we inhabit today. This is just one of the many ways in which the richness of the Maya universe is alive and well, and continuing to evolve. This is visual poetry with complex cultural and historical roots, and great contemporary resonance.

Bennett has been the avant in avant-garde in the latter half of the 20th century with his Lost and Found Times, one of the great "small press poetry rags" of all time, and then through his Luna Bisonte Prods press. OLVIDOS ("Memories"; though the word also and literally means "things forgotten") is quite possibly his masterpiece. 339 pages of zany often inarticulate expositions of a kind of lunar madness that can only be the work of the descendent of such poets as Vicente Huidobro and Guillaume Apollinaire. There is most likely something for everyone here from minimalist visual techniques and zen-like koans to architectured poems such as "olvidos y fragmentos" with its enigmatic phrase "lock the boot". But then the entire text is one immense sequence of enigmatic and puzzling dicta, summed up best in his own portmanteau word "hablacagada". This is an important work and should place Bennett centrally on the map of great, innovative American poets. - Ivan Arg elles

El Sendero Luminoso—The Shining Path—is Peru's long-standing Maoist revolutionary group that has significantly shifted the entire landscape of Peruvian political, social, and cultural life in fundamental ways. Emerging from the fractured leftist movements of the 1960s, The Shining Path has garnered world-wide attention as a unique, self-sufficient revolutionary group. The focus of the bibliography is on major works dealing with The Shining Path, articles and studies published in Latin American and other related scholarly journals, and Peruvian books that deal directly with the effects wrought by The Shining Path upon Peru. Also included are titles that do not deal directly with The Shining Path but discuss in depth the political context which nurtured the development of revolutionary groups such as The Shining Path and MRTA (Tupac Amaru), the Peruvian guerrilla group that captured world attention in 1997 by holding the Japanese embassy hostage for months. Approximately 1500 entries are included in this thorough bibliography. Short annotations highlight important aspects of the source. The bibliography is segmented into helpful subject areas that provide a cohesive sphere of information concerning the intersections of The Shining Path and Peruvian life, as well as interest in the revolutionary movement abroad. A helpful index completes this work.