A Visit to a Minimalistic Poem
by Bob Grumman

Among the many untraditional poems John M. Bennett has written, “The Shirt, The Sheet” might be the most puzzling, for it consists of nothing but the phrases, “the shirt,” and “the sheet,” repeated over and over—and over and over and over and over. Monotonous? Well, as orally presented by Bennett on the Luna Bisonte tape, “Live Chains,” it does seem that at first. A shirt? Okay. A sheet? Okay, what else? A shirt? A sheet? Bennett seems to promise a poem, and begin a scene, then renege on his promise

When I first listened to “The Shirt, The Sheet,” though, I listened to it all the way through, for I was familiar enough with Bennett’s work to expect to like it. And, after some initial irritation, I did begin to like it, soon realizing that Bennett was using the sh...t form of his two main words primarily as a kind of wind instrument to do interesting things to vowels with. And so his chant blurred down to timbres, temperatures, sizes, colors—at one point doing nothing but hiss. Its sh...t form had become a conduit—a chute,if you will—into the elementalmyriad-shaped animality that lurks beneath all language (and which is a cardinal destination of Bennett’s poetry as a whole.)

But gradually, hypnotically, the words began to reassert themselves as words—but now wobbling out of themselves into other words: “dessert, deceit,” for instance, and “berserk.” Bennett was repeating his original text into seldom attended extra resonances. Of course, such a swirl of semi-arbitrary associations can only be of mild interest to anyone with a modicum of esthetic sophistication: vague flickerings toward the kind of maybes that the trivial minded enjoy gushing into but which quickly seem shallow to the rest of us.

But more happened for me. The shirt and the sheet started feeling like antitheses— natural symbols, at length, of...Life and Death. More exactly, I associated the shirt with waking activities, activities one gets dressed for: work, principally; the sheet, of course represented sleep, both the ordinary kind, and the kind the winding sheets are part of. (note well, incidentally, the similarity of the way the words for work and sleep sound to the way “shirt” and “sheet” sound). So: Bennett was using his four words to portray, in black and white, wail and song, semantics and growling, the whole great round of work, sleep, work, sleep that our existence is. How could a poem do more?

— MALLIFE, 20/21 1991