poetry: Chad Bennett
Chad Bennett is a poet based out of Austin, Texas. His poems read like fragments of lust and longing, desires that pulse in and out, persistently, sometimes fading but never forgotten. He has shared with us some insight into his process and inspiration, and the way that queer culture plays into and informs his work.
CB: These poems share a form—“Ten discrete lines: four repeated”—that I’ve been writing in off and on for the past few years. I think of the poems as sonnets, although the impulse behind them is probably closer to the pleasures, and odd terrors, of the villanelle’s inevitable repetitions. Describing their lines as “discrete” is admittedly redundant, since all lines of poetry are in some sense discrete from each other, but I imagine these lines as further discrete in that, in the first poems I wrote using this form, at least, they were mostly culled from other, abandoned poems. I also think of the lines as discrete bits of the cloud of language that eddies around anyone in public in the 21st century, our visual field clotted with the text of signage and screens and our air thick with information, overheard talk, pop songs in earbuds, the one-sided cellphone conversations of passersby. In the midst of and drawing on this vast, collective language, these poems sing queer little songs to themselves. Their unit of thought, feeling, and music is the stray or discrete line.
Certainly Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, with its interests in repetition and overlapping temporalities, was somewhere in my mind while developing this recursive form. Also Gertrude Stein’s ideas about “a space of time that is filled always filled with moving.” But probably more immediately, I was thinking a lot about the art (mostly collage) of Joe Brainard and Ray Johnson, and all those beautiful boys that their work celebrates, pursues, and (lonely) laments. I wanted to get into words that feeling of slightly embarrassed melodrama I find in their work, something intentionally minor yet lush. The form of these poems is an attempt to emulate these queer post-war visual artists’ efforts to build small but sustaining emotional artifacts out of the detritus of a culture not particularly interested in offering queer people sustenance.
White Halls
[Ten Discrete Lines Four Repeated]
Follow any boy down white halls to find
Or follow blue arrows to where touch maps
The small of his, the bend of his, each thing.
Be skin to sound, static to transmission.
Follow any boy down white halls to find
What the air records speaks now to me.
Be buzz to bone, be any, be none.
Wait for the swoon where the cassette’s teeth catch
The small of his, the bend of his, each thing.
Or follow blue arrows to where touch maps
Room after room after room after room.
Begin at the end before my heart breaks.
Funny what the song in memory becomes:
Be buzz to bone, be any, be none.
Black Jacket
[Ten discrete lines: four repeated]
When I nodded off, I was skimming the trees
So tender in the frenzy of, menace of
Your keen t-shirt, back’s curve, piano keys
With what we know now could we want it back
While on TV the secret century leaks
So tender in the frenzy of, menace of
My throat, tongue, my lip to testify
Your paperbacks, black jacket, awkward sigh
Like waking to the arms of a strange room
When I nodded off, I was skimming the trees
Or in the kitchen door with the party conked out
Your eyes’ lines, jeans’ crease, steady sway, yours
My throat, tongue, my lip to testify
While on TV the secret century leaks
Lake Fogged Silver
[Ten discrete lines: four repeated]
There where life cleaves I woke against the grain
Hounding each dark lead through to air so queer
(For now into thick the straight ways had wandered)
And in that blackest wood sometimes would find
A lake fogged silver by daybreak’s breath.
Can I tell you what it was finally like?
There where life cleaves I woke against the grain
And in that blackest wood sometimes would find
Words half-worried into chewmarked worlds,
Hounding each dark lead through to air so queer
Until how I came here I could not say.
“You’ve had your fun”: how it always begins
(For now into thick the straight ways had wandered)
Trailing sky with a stink of blood on its lips.