John Bennett: At the Zoo and At Sea

John Bennett: At The Zoo And At Sea

Some poets spend fifty-one per cent of their time at public relations, courting influential older poets, editors, the media, and hoping to be discovered with a flourish of trumpets. Others, a rarer breed, quietly write their poems day after day, year after year, and spend little time trying to promote the worldly success of their imaginative offspring. In the latter group is John Bennett, now in his mid-fifties and professor of English at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin.

The other thing that sets Bennett apart is that he is an unabashed Christian (a communicant of the Episcopal Church) and that this basic commitment colors and gives form to his poetry. He is, I am convinced, one of the half dozen most powerful Christian poets now writing in America, though one hates to put him into a special category. Say, better, that he is a very fine poet who is also a man converted to the Christian faith in all aspects of his being.

I have known Bennett and his poetry for a long time. Twelve years ago, when he was teaching at Rockford College, I became acquainted with the poems he was writing, and set myself the task of needling him into sending them out to magazines and publishing houses. This was a major chore, since he preferred to write a new poem rather than to put an old one into an envelope and address it, but my persistence gradually bore fruit. The acceptances from magazines began coming in; eventually four books by him saw print. He is still not as well known as his ability merits, but his reputation has steadily risen, especially since—in competition with 300 other book manuscripts—he won the Devins Memorial Award with his volume of verse based on Melville’s Moby Dick.

Bennett grew up in New Hampshire, served in the Office of Strategic Services as liaison officer with the Free French Underground, received his A.B. from Oberlin and his Ph.D. (for a study of Melville) from Wisconsin. He is a big and burly man with a beard suggesting Papa Hemingway, and is fond of dogs, hunting, and well-targeted guns. In him the intellectual and the strenuous outdoor man are combined at top strength.

His first book, The Zoo Manuscript (Sydon Press, 1968), is a modern bestiary in which God’s creation is seen with delight and frequently with humor. The poet views himself as a kind of Adam, giving names to God’s creatures:

Old Adam, father, poet, priest, you stood

in human splendor once in Eden wood

And dreamed the holy names; your dreaming spoke the beasts alive with that first poetry.

So now, Old Father, stranger to an age

when poems are thin knives or bitter smoke,

stand softly at the center of my skull

and chant your early metaphors of love

and set their joy against the bent world’s rage.

After this invocation, Bennett describes his little daughter, Jennifer, in her innocent delight:

Caught up in joy and April and surprise,

sweet Jennifer becomes a magic where:

surrounded by small creatures of her Lord,

she brings the sun to glory in her hair,

and the blue Celtic distance lights her eyes.

The zoo that Jennifer explores with reverent gaiety reveals also the playfulness of God, His sense of humor, implied in the description of the fantastic hippopotamus: “Broader than boats, deeper than trout brooks are, / the hippo turns submersible at will, / or then bobs up like fatly muscled cork / that heaves his cloudy pond to overspill.”

The next volume, Griefs and Exultations (St. Norbert Press, 1970), is a miscellaneous collection of poems with a very high level of achievement. Bennett has a way of turning a passing experience into an eternal moment. In the poem, “On an Old Photograph of Young Men and Women at a Picnic,” he describes three courting couples caught in a photograph—

But I watch them within the photograph

and my heart moves back toward theirs

in their flaming changeless summer.

They are becoming what they have become:

pure actual occasions both doomed and immortal.

Thus three couples “at the edge of eden-meadow” live forever in their photograph and the poet’s response to it.

In “Episode Father and Small Son,” Bennett lovingly describes a childhood incident when he and his Irish father went for a walk, and the father picked up a grass-snake and showed it to him. The father’s gentle way with the snake is a kind of communication to the son—“He put the snake down softly on the grass; / it flowed into its anonymity, / and we walked homeward through the shining air, / our love emphatic as the snake was green.”

The book also contains an exceptionally moving elegy, written for his mother-in-law, Anne Jones, who died after a long illness. The poet mourns and rejoices at the same time—“Ah, Anne! Anne! Again in a turning year, / beyond clear windows, swift on April’s lawn, / your daughter’s children bruit the themes of joy. / Blessed by the year’s renewal and green leaves, / they race and tumble through the spheres of day, / singing the song your singing made for them.”

In many ways the most remarkable and powerful of Bennett’s books is his prize-winning The Struck Leviathan (University of Missouri Press, 1970), a series of meditations inspired by Melville’s Moby Dick. It has an enormous change of pace. We hear Bulkingmusing at the tiller during the midnight watch:

Sharks, whales, and men! all bearers of the Word:

and the Word endlessly falling through starlight and spindrift

or endlessly rising through waveshock and tiller

and the Word in the Beginning which is now the Infinite Now

and I myself, mortal, however It comes,

bearing the Word and affirming myself in the Word!

Dreaming my death, I become authentic Man.

Learning my death, I enter the dream of God.

Darker insights also move through the book, and reveal that though Bennet can find traces of Eden everywhere in the fallen world, he does not deny the existence of spiritual darkness. Here is Captain Ahab as he contemplates the great sea squid:

Deep down and dark where mudbones gird the world,

by arm and sucking arm and sucking arm,

a polyp blob creeps through the heavy depths

where Satan, homeless, might establish home.

I hope these few samples of Bennett’s work will give some idea of a remarkable sensibility and a very high order of poetic gift. He never imposes his Christian faith in a didactic way, but the faith comes through more powerfully in consequence. It is the pair of eyes through which the poet perceives everything from a dying relative to an old photograph to strange shapes moving in the depth of the sea. He writes with a baptized imagination. Such poetry is not fashionable at this moment in literary history, but it has great staying power.

To this point I have discussed mostly the poet’s themes and angle of vision, and have said little about his mastery of the poet’s craft. But the poems can speak for themselves. They are the achievements of a poet who works as carefully as any good sculptor applying chisel to marble. In a letter that Bennett once wrote, he said: “I deeply loathe the mass of so-called poetry which is really chopped-up prose (bad prose!) arrogantly hiding its inadequacies of thought, language, image and feeling under the barbaric yell ‘It’s my thing!’ Hogwash—and worse.”

Bennett has a versatile command of the tools of his trade. He can handle blank verse, free verse, a dazzling variety of stanza forms, intricate rhyme schemes. But technique is never an end in itself. He has something to say, growing out of the kind of awareness that can see in a little girl’s visit to the zoo a revelation of Eden and God’s loving creativity. He stands apart from most contemporary poets, even apart from those who are Christian but have little vision of what Eden might be like. The human spirit finds in his lines a new affirmation of a world that God created and will not forsake. It is a thoroughly sacramental vision of a universe in which the acts of nature “praise / a God who swims through all evolving worlds / as He creates them out of death and night. / The Paraclete sustains the otter dance / and all the dances in the spheres of light.”

CHAD WALSHChad Walsh is professor of English and writer-in-residence, Beloit College.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.