Here’s a CD anthology of poetry and spoken word pieces by the American poet John M. Bennett, called A Flattened Face Fogs Through: Selected Sound Poetry (EDITIONS BASILIC EBS2003), compiled and annotated by his son John Also Bennett and given added contextual detail by his friend and collaborator of long standing Al Ackerman, who pens a warm memorial in the booklet notes. The material here is drawn from a number of cassette tapes JMB made in the 1980s and 1990s, which include musical backdrops and other elements besides the recited poetry.
This Chicago-born fellow had an interesting life, mostly working in an academic context connected with Latin American literature and archives, and also travelled widely around America, Japan, and Mexico. He was also working away at his other life as an underground poet, expressing and manifesting this through various small press publications under his own Luna Bisonte Prods imprint, mailart, and of course the cassette tapes which would also be sent through the mail. Perhaps something of a late starter, he didn’t begin publishing in this way until he was in his 40s, but the excerpts from the nine albums represented here – with titles such as Ax Tongue, The Lemurs, Pod King and Autophagia – give you a taste of the range and depth of his endeavours. Through his engagement with DIY culture, it seems he met other like-minded creators (including his wife, I think) and his work intersected with noise and free jazz music. Some of this shows up on the tapes, especially 1987’s The Blur, which includes a number of musicians playing saxophones, trumpet, and electronics, as background to Bennett’s verbiage. By 1993, he was using prepared guitar and field recordings supplied by Mike Hovancsek.
There seem to have been some public appearances, although we don’t know much about them; at any rate, JMB is photographed with microphone in hand, sometimes before a lectern; and he had weird modes of dress to call attention to himself, most memorably an all-white outfit covered with bulldog clips. He could also affect a funny hat to go with his beard and glasses, and on the cover there’s one picture where he resembles Steve Stapleton (minus the mystery or implied menace). As to the poems on the CD, you can expect a queasy array of low-grade American surrealism, with plenty of grotesque imagery and a healthy dose of absurdity, all delivered in John M. Bennett’s rather histrionic declamatory style. You certainly feel the force of his personality when he gets behind the microphone; it’s left to the musicians, when present, to add any degree of light and shade to these recits.
If these streams of bizarre words are intended as a metaphor for an internal struggle, or a symbol for the human condition in the United States, then I didn’t catch it. Bennett’s wider meaning isn’t really conveyed effectively. It’s been interesting to discover this odd fellow, but it’s also difficult to put him in any kind of context; the notes here invite us to compare him to William Burroughs, Kurt Schwitters, and the American concrete poet Richard Kostelanetz, yet there’s no evidence that Bennett actually met these people, or absorbed any meaningful influence from them. I’m all in favour of anything DIY and small press, and I’m also prepared to believe that he “cut a notorious figure in the avant poetry world”, but so far all I’m sensing is a mild eccentricity, a not very original wordsmith, and a somewhat marginal figure who didn’t really make a deep impact on the culture outside of his own parochial boundaries. However, that might all be about to change with the release of this album, available in both CD and LP formats with a full-colour booklet of photographs and notes. From 11th January 2022.