Reintroducing Michael Benedikt: Time Is a Toy

Charlotte, North Carolina's WFAE has Craig Morgan Teicher writing about the relatively unknown poet Michael Benedikt (1935-2007), who was briefly the managing editor of Locus Solus in the sixties, and is associated with the most surreal of the New York School. As Teicher notes: "He was also a dedicated editor of anthologies, especially the groundbreaking The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, and was briefly the poetry editor of the Paris Review, so he played a small part in shaping the direction of poetry to come. Most importantly, though, he was really good — accessible, funny, sad, sympathetic. He was the kind of poet one might recommend to someone a little afraid of poetry." Apparently, Benedikt suffered from agoraphobia, and we almost lost his books to a dumpster. Thanks to poets and editors John Gallaher and Laura Boss, the work was salvaged. And we can read from Benedikt's five out-of-print books in a new selected, edited by Boss, Time is a Toy (University of Akron Press 2014). Teicher writes:

The earliest poems are very talky — like versions of O'Hara's "I-do-this-I-do-that" poems inflected with a mischievous, fabulist flair, looking out on a kind of goofy urban landscape:

Our window is covered by the beard
Of the man overhead
Leaning out the window
Watching the jewel-thieves

By the time of The Body (1968), Benedikt's in full surrealist mode, banging out poems that feel simultaneously personal and impossible. It's the work of a man who sees himself in the way of the world:

The gravedigger's eye is hollow. It is surrounded by a thoroughly contemporary serenity.

The dynamite salesman's eye is like a pool, in which he who leans to drink may be lost. Drifting forever, like a cloud.

The maiden's eye is tucked under.

The billiard-player's eye comes to a point. It is like a mild wine. Each billiard-player suffers from imperfect nostalgia.

These poems are simply delicious — one wants to gobble them one after another. As silly and improvisatory as they seem, the stakes are always high; the poet wants to get close to his life, but it's hard for him. He must describe the obstacles, asking, for instance, "isn't that you I see concealed underneath there/ Inside the shield, or conning tower, of your head."

Then come the sinister prose poems of Mole Notes (1971) and Night Cries (1976), jerky and odd as those of James Tate and Russell Edson, but more personal. What better representative for an agoraphobe's experience than a talking mole in search of friends at "a large garden party in Scarsdale"?

Very politely, he asks: "Would anybody here like to come down sometime and see my worm collection?' Evidently not; suddenly he feels an empty hors d'oeuvres tray whizz past his whiskers.

A playful, slightly masturbatory sexuality creeps into these poems' explorations, as in the hilariously creepy "The Journey Across Your Thigh," in which "Our ten intrepid travelers set out across the vast expanse by traversing the narrowest section of the promontory." I'll leave it to you to imagine where they end up.

Read it all at Charlotte's NPR outlet, WFAE.

Image above courtesy of EPC Buffalo. Poetry Reading in Central Park, New York, 1969. From left: Michael Benedikt, John Perrault, Vito Acconci, John Giorno, and Hannah Weiner.