“Before You Know It;” “Rain Forest, St. Lucia;” and “What Lightning Spoke” by Robert Bensen appeared in Issue 40 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of poetry.
These poems all arise from powerful, life-determining events. Such events come out of nowhere, happen before we know it, and only eventually can we assimilate them in language. Being caged by lightning as a twelve-year-old became “What Lightning Spoke.” “Before You Know It” seeks reentry to the memory of death but finds instead its presence in life. “Rainforest” traverses an unfamiliar world, a natural world that expresses what is beyond nature.
What was the most difficult part in writing this set?
In over 60 years I’ve written many attempts to recreate drowning as a 4-year-old. Indeed that motive may have driven me to poem-making. “Before You Know It” comes close, right up to the edge in the space between lines. In all these poems, seeking what Willa Cather called “the inexplicable presence of the thing not named” is the most difficult part.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I’m reading Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed (2022), a history of enslavement told through travel to seven places significant to that history, such as Jefferson’s Monticello, the Whitney Plantation, Angola Prison, New York City, and elsewhere. I want to read more of his work, especially his poems on fatherhood in Above Ground (2023).
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Clint Smith is obvious, but let me choose Devin Johnston, whose “Poem” on a person’s first words and last words in the NYRB (10/5/23) is breath-taking for its formalism, its decorum, its compression of massive grief into insightful meditation. ”Poem” is an elegy for Robert Adamson, whose work Johnston published in his press, Flood Editions. I’d like to compare notes on maintaining a writing life and operating a small publishing venture.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m finishing a long poem on the prickly wild rose, rosa acicularis. I’d sought and accepted a commission by the Watertown MA public arts project on edible plants and was given this plant to write about. Since I knew nothing about the prickly wild rose, I decided to write a moral history from the Torah to the New Testament to Indigenous America, and so on, keeping true to traditional botanical medicine, popular culture, pre-Colonial and Colonial history, the supernatural, and a little invented personal experience. I’d never written on commission before. It’s odd but a great way to stretch one’s range. What could possibly be next? Tiny poems, maybe, less narrative, perhaps.
Our thanks to Robert for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Before You Know It;” “Rain Forest, St. Lucia;” and “What Lightning Spoke” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/three-poems-by-robert-bensen.
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Robert Bensen’s seventh book of poems is What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems (Bright Hill Press, 2022). His poems, essays, editions, and studies have been widely published and earned awards and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, Newberry Library, NYSCA, Illinois Arts Council, Harvard University, NY State Fair, Eric Hoffer Foundation, and elsewhere. After retiring as Professor Emeritus and Director of Writing at Hartwick College (1978-2017), he founded and currently directs the Seeing Things Poetry Workshop for Bright Hill Literary Center. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois.