John Bennett

Writers Are Not My People

Writers are
not my people.

My people are
out there
on the street
making their
slow way
home on foot
from the
grocery store,
a plastic
bag with
looped handles
in each hand,
their feet
kicking up
the autumn leaves.

Write This Way

Occasionally
what I
write coincides
with what
people think
& then
they say
why don't
you write
like this
all the time?

Strength in Numbers

Two people 
are pals
three's 
competition
ten or
more 
is a gang.
Thirty-five is a
lynch mob &
after that 
it's the
Super Bowl.

What It Means to Be Paranoid

I wrote a
prose poem
back when
Pac Man
first started
popping up
in bars,
describing how
it would
lead to
the kind of
world we
live in today,
& people said
I was
paranoid.

 

John Bennett was for many years the driving force behind Vagabond Press which operated on the run from Munich to DC to New Orleans to San Francisco and beyond.  He’s published four novels, two novellas, five short story collections and numerous books of poetry, essays and shards, a poem/story hybrid of his own invention.

He keeps slamming out the words, if anything with more ferocity than ever. As Henry Miller said so eloquently around half a century ago, “You may as well have your say, they’re going to shit on you anyway.”