The mind confronts the universe; it says,
“You must be better than appearances.”
Unfazed, the universe confronts the mind
as if to say, “The ways are yours to find.”

Poet
Bruce Bennett
—author of Navigating the Distances,
Last Words, The Deserted Campus,
I Never Danced with Mary Beth,
Taking Off, Funny Signals, etc., etc.

on the next edition of
Off the Page
WSKG’s forum for
writers from our region

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Bruce Bennett is an enigma. A contemporary poet whose natural inclination is toward formal rather than free verse, an erudite scholar with a dissertation on the dramatic monologue whose poetic voice seems wholly conversational, a wit who makes you chortle just before you realize you’ve been zinged, a mind whose surface sensibility seems lighter than meringue, even as it opens uneasy depths for contemplation.

Bruce Bennett has been publishing poetry since the 70’s and has more than a dozen chapbooks and collections to his credit, including the most recent major collection: Navigating the Distances: Poems New and Selected.

It seems that nothing’s not grist for this poet’s mill, and apparently no form in which he cannot excel. His subjects range from the uneasy tension between the artist and the practical man-of-the-world to the recollection of the pain of adolescence and youthful love and longing; from a father’s old coat to a photograph of children bound for Auschwitz; from newswire reports and other bits of media flotsam, to the way Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ proves such a nice model for the politics of academe, or business for that matter.

His seemingly-effortless command of free verse and even the prose-poem is compelling enough, but he’s a master—probably one of the last masters—of traditional forms: couplets, quatrains, sonnets and even villanelles proliferate, often with a such a subtle touch a reader is aware of them only in retrospect, going back to check the end-rhymes. The idea, the theme of the poem, has not been poured into the form, but rather seems to emerge from it.

And the poems are such a joy to read: even before the delight in the wordplay begins to fade, the truth of the insight sticks itself, barb-like, in the mind. For instance:

LIFE STORIES

These stories that I tell as true
are not. But what is that to you?
They serve their purpose; make you see.
Your stories do the same for me.

So why not tell them? What is strange
about a free and fair exchange?
And why should anybody care
if we collude as well as share?

Or:

ITS OWN PLACE

If misery were at an end
and all the world appeared
complaisant as a happy dream
with nothing to be feared

The mind would quickly set to work
constructing woe and bane
until it felt itself besieged
and quite at home again.

Ah, yes. We have met the enemy, and… you know the rest.

He can evoke the poignancy of a road not taken (“The Chipped Cat”), puzzle like a koan with a resonance near meaning (“The Search”), or remake the familiar into something strange and yet inevitable (“The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’”). Bruce Bennett’s work is multi-layered and complex: always accessible at once, though not at once accessible fully. True things are spoken as if in quiet conversation, which keep surfacing in your mind, later that evening… and then the next… and the next… and so on.

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