John Bennett
Vagabond Press
605 E. 5th Avenue
Ellensburg, WA 98926
Review by Rene Schwiesow
In a 2011 interview, David Hoenigman, described John Bennett
in this way: “. . .John Bennett has always stood up for what's right and wrong
in us, this country, the world. Big heart. Loud voice. Immense mission—to get
it all down. For you to see what he sees. Like it or not. Think about it.” In “Contact is How We Know We’re alive”
Bennett punches it home. And though “War
All the Time” (part of a trilogy that includes “The Theory of Creation and “The
Birth of Road Rage”) is copyrighted 2005, the words ring as true today:
Rugby, football and war. Freeway carnage,
beaten wives, drunk drivers. Elementary –
school shootouts, industry gone
berserk in the
Congo – contact is how we know
we’re alive.
Peace is for pansies. Give us drill teams and frat
houses. Sumo wrestlers, drive-bys and Mike
Tyson. Bite the ears off of Jesus, cop a plea. Talk
shows where we give vent to our
grievance.
The face in the mirror turns its
back. We
shatter into a lifetime of bad
luck.
Yeah. “The truth,” Bennett says in “Drugs &
Wars,” “claws at our backs like a woman in the throes of a climax” and then,
“Historians dip their quills into blood” (“Flat-Line Reptilian Brains”).
You get the point, Bennett doesn’t
wrap the ugly up in a bow.
Throughout the work he alludes to
great writers, texts and individuals and each time the allusions jump from the
page and grab you in the intellect, ask you to consider or re-consider the
original thoughts. For example, “Every
child is Moses in a basket made of reeds that we bulldoze to make room for
urban sprawl.”
He ends a work entitled “Pax
Americana” with:
Are we having fun yet? Good.
Now raise that
flag and snap to. Mass graves full of children.
Tall buildings in rubble. Genocide with a smiley
face. You get the picture.
Myths to live by.
The hero’s journey.
It’s likely that Joseph Campbell
did not have the above in mind when he told us to “follow your bliss.”
Two last thoughts, read the book
for the rest:
On a 10:00 am Sunday morning,
church bells ring
whole families out into their
cars, and just
outside the atmosphere, a huge bat
circles the
earth, casting a shadow that
covers whole
continents. We call it stormy weather and
build solariums in the rain. Giant buildings
come crashing down. . .
And we do not wish to pay
attention, grasp the dire situation for ourselves, then for the children:
Our town. Two kids sitting on a ledge, a boy
and a girl with white holes for
eyes, untouched
by anything, kicking their feet in
a world where
the clocks have stopped ticking,
dreaming the
impossible dream, waiting for good
things to
happen.
*****Rene Schwiesow is a
poet/writer/reviewer/editor and co-host of the wildly popular South Shore
venue, The Art of Words, in Plymouth, MA.
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