Word: benedikt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...BODY by Michael Benedikt. 77 pages. Wesleyan...
...Benedikt might be a cubist or surrealist painter, reconstructing the body, finding new relationships between lip and eye, discovering with insane logic that man's hair is the most important part of love. Raised in New York City, Benedikt is continually inspecting, distorting and re-creating the skyline of human existence. The method is often deliberately and delightfully nonsensical...
...Benedikt's poems, the body is somehow in a contest with the spirit, while fact struggles with fancy. The result is a verbal battlefield strewn with strange, barely recognizable victims of war, delighting in their own demise...
...that the poem as ballad is simply coming back into its own. In any case, the music world is experimenting with a revolutionary surrealism, and contemporary songwriters and poets are apparently enriching one another's work. Many folk-rock lyrics stand up as poems, and some poets-Michael Benedikt and Canada's Leonard Cohen among them-are devoting part of their energy to writing songs. Meanwhile, a modern music has entered into and enlivened the poem, giving Faulkner's demon-driven creatures new voices for their poetic torments...
That isn't exactly Ode on a Grecian Urn; neither is Benedikt picking his way through seven types of ambiguity. For all their seeming frivolity, these lines exhibit a directness that has been increasingly admired ever since the mid-'50s when Allen Ginsberg and the beats accelerated the popularity of the simple, charged statement...