The Last LAFT

On Saturday, March 19th, 2005, I received the last issue ever of the venerable neodadazine, Lost and Found Times (or “LAFT” to cognoscenti)—a beautiful and deranged two-volume collection of visual poetry, textual poetry, visual arts, and all manner of undefinable extras. For almost three decades, LAFT provided a forum for writers and artists working at the far reaches of creative expression, artists interested in finding new and often disturbing ways to create art. When I heard that John M. Bennett, the editor of LAFT, was preparing to close down his magazine (fortunately, his press Luna Bisonte Prods will continue), I asked him if he would consent to an interview. What follows is a transcript of the email interview we conducted during the first half of January of this year. (For more information on John M. Bennett, see his website, which includes a good selection of his varied work.)

John M. Bennett, editor of Lost and Found Times (Summer 2004)
(photo by Cathy Bennett)

GH: I’m lucky enough to own a complete set of Lost and Found Times, so I can easily flip through a few folders and see how LAFT evolved over the years from a single-sheet flyer to 60-page magazine filled with hundreds of poems and visuals. I found it interesting to note that the first issue that exhibited the now-standard format of the magazine was number 8, which was also the first issue produced with the support of the Ohio Arts Council. I know that the diminishing support from this agency is one reason for your retirement from LAFT, but can you explain the full reason why this zine is coming to an end just shy of its thirtieth birthday coming up this August?

JMB: The loss of funding was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. Other reasons for stopping are my need for more time to get some of my own enormous backlog of work ready for publishing, the desire to do more little chapbooks and new kinds of things, and the feeling that one of the reasons for the magazine’s existence was no longer quite so important. That had been my desire to publish wonderful stuff that no one else would publish. There are now a number of new venues, many of them on-line, that DO publish that kind of material. I’m delighted to think that LAFT may have played a role in encouraging these folks to do what they’re doing! I also have some vision problems that are slowly getting worse, and the task of laying out and pasting up LAFT has become increasingly difficult. It’s a job for younger eyes, whether done the old-fashioned way with glue and scissors as I do, or on a computer. So I thought it was time to stop when the magazine could go out on a strong note. The last issue will be a 2-volume extravaganza!

I will, however, continue to serve the community of LAFT as best I can through my work as a librarian and archivist, and by doing chapbooks, broadsides, TLPs [tacky little pamphlets], and who knows what else.

GH: It’s almost refreshing to hear you talk about needing more time to complete projects. If there’s anyone in the avant-garde micropress who could be defined as indefatigable, you are the man. The number of poems you create, the quantity of mail you send and receive, and the high speed with which you have consistently responded to submissions is legendary. Can you give us some sense of the volume of work of all kinds you’ve been dealing with over the years? and some sense of how you find balance in your life?

JMB: Oy, the volume is enormous and a bit hard for me to really get a handle on. It’s overwhelming, and I don’t really understand how it happened or goes on happening. Described in library/archive terms, much of the material is in 3 different libraries: Washington Univ. (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, and here at Ohio State Univ. The 3 collections focus on somewhat different aspects of what I’ve done, but all 3 are large. I’m most familiar with the stuff at OSU: the Bennett collection here is one of the largest we have in the Rare Book & MSS Library, and consists mainly of everything I’ve published. Or more accurately, of everything in print that refers to me in some way: I’ve had this nutty idea, since I was a child, that I somehow don’t really exist, that I’m invisible, so I started saving everything that documented the contrary: publications, reviews, mentions, etc. That is going to fill at least 10 ranges of shelving. Cataloging is in process.

So why are all the rooms at home still filled with boxes boxes boxes? There’s the correspondence, the Luna Bisonte files, and god knows what else. Manuscripts. Mailart. Help! I need to be stopped!

So you ask about “balance.” I would say that I keep my balance by continually being out of balance, falling forward and moving to keep from falling. I have a family (wife and 3 sons, plus parents, in-laws, close friends, etc.), a job, and other activities, such as gardening and being President of my neighborhood association. When people ask how I do all this stuff I tell them I’m a bit hyperactive and I don’t watch TV. And fortunately my health hasn’t been terribly bad, tho at 62 with migraine and vision problems I’ve had to slow down a bit... (sorry to end this response with a whine!)

GH: John, you’ve hinted at the fact that you are a special collections librarian. And, as you may know, I’m an archivist myself and Michael Basinski works as a manuscripts curator as well. (I’ll leave the minor distinctions I’m making with the use of these different titles to the layperson’s imagination.) But here’s my point: The three of us are, essentially, archivists (“collectors and keepers”), poets, and visual poets. Do you think that a need to collect and document (as you have done with your life) is somehow tied into the concept of being a poet or visual poet? Do you see such a connection in the example of your own life?

JMB: Well, I didn’t set out to be a librarian, but fell into it as a way to make a living doing something somewhat related to my real work. And as it happened, in the past few years it became very closely related indeed. But I don’t know that there’s any intrinsic relationship between being a visual poet and being a collector. There is possibly a social relationship, in that being a visual poet (or any other kind of non-mainstream poet, writer, or artist) is a lousy way to make a living so one must find something else to do, and collecting/archiving is one thing one can do, that also happens to be of service to the field. But others have done almost anything you can imagine, and I’m sure some you can’t: chemistry, accounting, pizza delivering, house painting, teaching, law, medicine, insurance, landscaping, clerical, SSI, etc. etc. In my particular case, there may be some relationship between what motivates me (in part) to do the kind of art I do and what motivates me to collect, and that would be the desire to create a vision/talisman/totem/image of the whole of reality. To say it all at once in an object and a process that contains and radiates that totality: the material manifestation of this may be the large comprehensive collection of something. But that’s me in particular; not all outsider poets think or feel this way.

GH: The term you’ve chosen to describe the type of poet you are interests me: “outsider poet.” How would you define this term? What kinds of poetry do outsider poets make? And what propelled you—if you have any way of determining this—to create this type of poetry instead of more mainstream poetry?

JMB: An outsider poet is just someone who writes something unique, outside the norms of the prevailing literary cliques. So by this definition, all outsider poets are completely different from each other. Not that there isn’t a group of such poets that read and like each other’s work, are stimulated by it, and collaborate in numerous ways—there is; but we’re all quite different. As to why I write this way: I was just never satisfied with what I was reading, for the most part, but felt a need for poetry. So in order to have something I wanted to read, I started writing it. To oversimplify: I write in order to have something to read. Many mainstream poets are somewhat more interested in the career aspects of poetry-writing. I’ve never been interested in that, really. In fact, it seems kinda nuts to try making a “career” out of poetry. I can’t help believing that poetry is a way to understand the world and oneself and one’s life, not an end in itself.

GH: So let’s talk about one type of outsider poetry—visual poetry. Here are a bunch of questions for you to churn into an answer: How did you become interested in visual poetry? When did you begin creating visual poetry? Finally, to my eye, your visual poetry is closely related to your textual poetry—yet still usually stunningly beautiful in an intentionally unsettling way! Your vispoems appear to be visualizations of extant textual poems. Is that how you create these visual poems? or do you use a process completely separate from your process for creating textual poems?

JMB: I’ve always been aware of the visual aspect of a poem, even before I did what might be called actual “visual” poetry. The blank space at the ends of lines, the spacing, etc. Maybe I did some visual poems (tho not thinking of them in those terms) in high school—I thought of them not as poems at all, but as magical little word things with some kind of cosmological connection/function. In those years I was also writing “poems.” Much later in 1970 I had the idea of cutting words and phrases out of newspapers and such and collaging them into poems—many of these collages were in shapes: tables, rockets, etc. (I’m in no way the first to do this; but I don’t recall where I “got” the idea—seems like it came out of my own head.) From these works I moved into other types of collages with words and images, then started developing a “spirit” type of handwriting (in mid-1970’s?) that I continue playing with, in combination with images, collage, etc., as the need strikes me.

Many of my visual poems are “visualizations” —“readings” really—of textual poems. It’s a way of revealing another layer of the texts. But many are also created with no reference to any pre-existing textual material. Some of these latter reveal elements that later go into textual material, in fact. So it’s a two-way street. The process for visual or textual or visu-textual or texto-visual is basically the same, in practical terms. It’s a complex process which I’ll never fully understand, but I bet I can guess what your next question will be!

GH: Given that you don’t completely understand your own processes for making poetry, does your poetry surprise you as much as I believe it surprises others? Do you make any hard distinctions between your visual and textual work? Have your textual poems changed over the years under the influence of your visual works? Are you drawn towards one mode of poetrymaking over others—visual, textual, or aural? (Was one of these the expected question?)

JMB: If I knew what I was going to write before I wrote it, I wouldn’t bother to write it. I always seek to surprise myself, and often do. I want to read something I haven’t read before and that I want to read: that’s part of why I write. I don’t feel a strong distinction between the visual, textual, and aural work. All my work is very somatic: it comes out of my body and is an expression of my body translated by my minds, or transduced by my minds. Language is a very meaty thing... (You almost asked the expected question, but not exactly!)

GH: Let me ask you about the work that appears in LAFT (which “insults . . . the last 3,000 years of literature” as The Nation once put it). Much of this work is merely textual, without any significant visual component. Some of it is purely visual. But a good portion of it is a mix of text and image, of visible word and shape. Some of this verbo-visual stuff is definitely visual poetry, some is comics, and some is something like collage (which might also be visual poetry). Did you see presenting such verbo-visual work as an important addition to LAFT? Did you plan on publishing such material? How did this material slip in between those covers?

JMB: The work I chose for LAFT has reflected my own evolving interests and tastes and has been a reflection of my own work in a way. And as with my own work, I have never really bothered with critical distinctions between the visual, the textual, the collage, the conceptual, or whatever it was. It’s ALL important, and it all got in because it excited me in some way.

GH: In flipping through my copies of LAFT, that is the impression I have: of an olla-podrida of art, a gathering of anything reproducible by photocopy. But I’m also struck by the dramatic change in your work over the years. In the late-1980s, your textual poetry was dramatic and chantlike. At this point, you are writing a much more spare poetry, one that frequently breaks words apart to create a seizurelike reading experience. (The reader is held up then pulled along, held up again.) If you look back at your work, do you see a general pattern of evolution in your work? (I’m not sure I do.) And, if so, can you imagine where your imagination will take you next?

JMB: There is a definite evolution in my work. It goes through various modes or schticks, but each new mode incorporates aspects of all the previous ones. At the same time, there’s another pattern that’s more pendulum or wave-like and that’s a movement back and forth between a kind of expressionism and a more formal constructivism. Of course, each incorporates elements of the other. The geometric structure that combines a wave motion with an evolutionary motion would be a spiral. Which is a pattern I believe you can see in human history and in the earth itself.

ecr. l’inf.