The Avant-Gardener Surrounded by Sunflowers and Sunlight

Hampton Inn, Room 129, Columbus, Ohio

After nine and a half hours of driving, my family and I arrived in Columbus, Ohio, more specifically in one of those many clusters of hotels that dot the Columbus area. But soon after I arrived, I returned to the car and drove the four miles to the home of visual, sound, and neodada poet John M. Bennett.

The story about the genesis of this visit is simple and fortuitous. This week as we were preparing to travel to see family, Nancy reminded me that we had planned to reserve a hotel room, rather than rely on our method of turning up at hotels and requesting a night's stay. (Last time we did that, we drove half-way through Kentucky before we found a place to rest for the night.) After searching for a relatively inexpensive hotel, we found this Hampton Inn and booked the reservation online. A day or so later, I thought to check to see how far from this hotel John was living. When I discovered it was about eight minutes away, I decided to request an audience with John. I dropped him an email message, and we made the arrangements.

I found his home easily, since it was covered with cedar shingles, just as he told me it was. It was a remarkable sight, but what I first noticed about the house were the giant sunflowers--a forest of them--in front of the house and drinking up the sunlight. I jumped out of my car and snapped a few pictures, trying to capture something of the character of this place where John had created the legendary zine, Lost and Found Times, for almost thirty years.

John M. and Cathy Bennett's Home, Columbus, Ohio (13 Aug 2005)
Unsure of where to enter the home, I knocked on the side door. John opened the door, and then the tour began. I saw the recent addition to the back of the house, the downstairs, the upstairs, the garage, the yard--everything but the basement. And what I found was a house filled with stuff. Every visual poet I've visited exhibits a couple of similar characteristics: Their homes (and especially their work areas) are filled past capacity with books, zines, manuscripts, artwork, supplies, equipment, and they seem to have a penchant for collecting stuff: music, toys, books (of course), art, magazines. I've seen this at the homes of Bob Grumman, Carlos Luis, Guy r. Beining, and Roy Arenella (to list them in the order of my visits) exhibited both these characteristics.* What, John and I wondered, drove visual poets to be such collectors as well as such inveterate creators?


John M. Bennett in His Studio, Columbus, Ohio (13 Aug 2005)
John's studio was filled to the rafters with books, and on each shelf he had placed a number of small toys and tchotchkes--all of which gave a strange Bennettian cast to the whole place. Everything was a bit weird and wonderful. And I was glad to see someone stuffing his bookshelves as full as mine are. John is a manuscripts curator, which is essentially an archivist, so we spoke a bit about the business of collecting and managing collections of records. I talked about my own personal records, which take up boxes and boxes of space in my house, and which equal probably 50 cubic feet.† I talked about how I couldn't quite give up my manuscripts yet to anyone (even though John offered to accept them into his collection at Ohio State University) because I felt a continuing need to return to them for evidence and information (coincidentally, the two general values records have). And John talked about his life curating the Avant Writing Collection and a huge collection of Cervantes publications--and some about the experience of being the person organizing his own papers at OSU!‡


John M. Bennett's Rubberstamp Work Station, Columbus, Ohio (13 Aug 2005)
One of my favorite parts of John's house--though I have to admit to loving it all--was his rubberstamp work station, where he had a small workspace surrounded by all manner of rubberstamps. One of the most common elements in John's visual poetry is rubberstamping, so I was happy to have him show me how he used his letter stamps: how he laid the ink on thick, how he smudged the letters to suggest movement of letters upon the page.


C. Mehrl Bennett's Sculpture in Her Husband's Studio, Columbus, Ohio (13 Aug 2005)
One of my pleasures of this trip was meeting John's wife Cathy for the first time. I toured her studio as well, and she showed me her own recent work, including a quite beautiful little book of digital photographs designed to expand on a small poem written by John and fellow visual poet Jim Leftwich. Cathy was the person who pointed out the pictures of their sons, the photographs that John's father (an anthropologist) took in Asia, and the painting she herself had made from a photograph of a kewpie-doll-haired John with his mother.


John M. Bennett, "CAULK" (photo taken 13 Aug 2005)
The walls of the house were encrusted with art of all kinds: visual poems, paintings, photographs, what-have-you. (The effect reminded me of my wife's dorm room in graduate school, where she had covered almost the entire surface of her walls with posters, photographs, and postcards.) John and Cathy and I talked about the artworks, especially those by people I know: Scott Helmes and K.S. Ernst, for example. But we did not discuss "CAULK," a classic work of Bennettian calligraphy that I photographed in John's studio when he had stepped out of the room to retrieve something.


John M. Bennett Demonstrating His Calligraphic Methods, Columbus, Ohio (13 Aug 2005)
That poem reminded me that I wanted John to show me how he created his calligraphic works, which use a weird scrawl-like style of writing and which seem three-dimensional to me whenever I look at an original. (This effect is washed out in any reproductions.) John showed me the tools he uses, all of which are in my arsenal: simple Schaefer calligraphic pens, Rotring calligraphic pens, and China markers. Those weren't quite the answer to my question; what really made his calligraphy work was his imagination, how he was able to envision a strange and different way of using these tools. For instance, some letters (like the N) he always writes backwards. He constantly throws undulating but jagged curves into his letter, and finishes a stroke by turning his pen on its thin edge to create a squiggly narrow tail. What I learned is that his calligraphic imagination wasn't trapped (as mine is) by training in calligraphy.^Ω His is a unique take on this form of creation.


John M. and Cathy Bennett's Garage, Columbus, Ohio (13 Aug 2005)
I ended my trip in the Bennett's backyard, where Cathy took a picture of John and me in front of their garage, and where John showed me his cornucopious garden. The sun bathed the garden in heat, and his plants were vibrant and rampant. He was growing all kinds of basil I had never heard of before (Korean, for instance, which had weirdly shaped leaves that reminded me of John's own visual poetry).

I enjoyed my hour and a half at the Bennett's home immensely. The two of them were great hosts, and we had too much to talk about. Before I left I apologized for talking so much and asking so many questions. I explained that I talk for a living, so it comes naturally now, but I was also excited by this art-filled home and the two of them. My only regret is that I forgot to take a picture of Cathy.

My thanks to John for his conversation; for sharing his methods for micropress publishing and artmaking; and for giving me a little sample of his calligraphy, a recent tacky little pamphlet, a small leaflet of poems he created with Al Ackerman, and two especially attractive booklets: Five Million Copies: First Gathering (which documents the Five Million Copies Project run by Ross Priddle) and The Complete Dr D, which reprints all the "Dr D" comics that appeared in Lost and Found Times.

Too bad I forgot to bring him the gift I had already forgot to give to him in Boston in July. Okay, I have two regrets.

_____

*I met Crag Hill and his wife Laurie Schneider back in 1994 (I think) when they were living in Mill Valley, California, but I don't remember the inside of their home. I remember walking the hills rising out of the Pacific with them, eating a hot fudge sundae in a small restaurant, their friend John, and standing on their porch in the dark looking out at the peaceful black night. So Hill and Schneider might be exceptions to this rule.

†I realize that the term "cubic feet" doesn't mean much to the layperson, but its meaning is reasonably clear. Consider this as well: A standard cubic foot box holds about 2,500 sheets of letter-sized paper when perfectly full and it will weigh about 35 pounds, so let's assume that my imagined 50 cubic feet equal about 125,000 separate sheets of paper and weighs about 1750 pounds. Of course, this estimate is way off, since some of my manuscripts include jars and shells and stones, and almost none include 2,500 sheets of paper. Instead, they include hundreds of tiny leaflets and chapbooks and zines--and mock-ups and manuscripts. And I have plenty of oversized material as well.

‡I also asked John why he wasn't attending the Society of American Archivists' annual conference in New Orleans next week. He's not involved in this organization that is a significant part of my life.

^ΩTonight, I created a little homage to John with my small handful of calligraphic markers, combining what I learned about John's techniques with my own techniques--but modifying both. Soon, a copy of this piece--"aRroW (Homage to John M. Bennett)"--will be up at qbdp: the mailartworks.

ecr. l'inf.