While distinctly innovative and post-modern in its approach, Cara Benson’s first full-length collection of poems, (made), harkens back to an artistic impulse a century old. In 1915, Marcel Duchamp painted his name and the title “En prévision du bras cassé” on an ordinary snow shovel, giving birth to the ready-made. In the years that followed, he created a number of similar works, most now lost, a repurposed porcelain urinal entitled “Fountain” perhaps being the best known. In addition to challenging conventional notions about what constituted art, a ready-made forced viewers to question their ambivalence toward the familiar.
While Duchamp’s ready-mades came to life in an era when mass-produced, manufactured goods had just begun to supplant their handmade analogs, Cara Benson writes at a historical moment when communication is often automated, “reality” is often scripted, and conversation can feel as canned as an enthusiastic i’m lovin’ it! Most of us are so accustomed to consuming the world one sound bite at a time, when a beer declares itself “Rocky Mountain Cold” or the PM throws around a word like “patriotic,” we rarely pause to consider what, if anything, is actually being said. The words have become furniture.
All poetry intends for its readers to hear words differently, but with (made) Benson is particularly interested in putting words into unfamiliar combinations and contexts to give them new life and unexpected meaning. For one thing, this slim volume is printed in landscape format, which feels surprisingly weird in the reader’s hands, and which makes the shape of the poems — wide, short blocks — look surprisingly unlike either paragraphs or stanzas. Many poets seem to be reaching for innovative forms these days, but Benson’s simple solution doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. We can’t be sure whether these are prose poems (although the blurb on the back seems to suggest so) or just poems with unusually long lines. Most of the poems are accompanied by a single word in larger font, but it’s hard to say whether these are titles. On most pages they are printed below the poem itself, and only a few are obviously related to the poems that precede them. On some pages just a single word is printed: “and,” “will,” “was.” Isolating a single word this way is like Duchamp’s placing a urinal on a pedestal: the everyday, as the Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme put it, is “elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.”
The poems themselves attempt something similar by juxtaposing diverse words, images, and thought fragments. The resulting non-linear semi-narratives take on a dream logic that forces the reader to redefine familiar words, as in this poem that may or may not be titled “Slumberland”:
Rocks come in sheets: gypsum plaster between paper. There is a softness to the touch, surface scratchable by fingernail. Hung. Taped. Sealed. Papered. Ornamented. Pink fiber concealed. Protection. Separator of wind. View. distribution, all…
What appears like candy to keep us warm, can injure upon a brush. And White can bruise a forehead.
The diction is intentionally awkward. It makes the words seem foreign and opens the reader to unexpected associations.
Part of the tension of the ready-made is the question of whether a familiar object can truly hold our attention. In some ways, the idea of appropriating the original object is more compelling than the appropriated object itself. Benson’s poems hold a similar tension. While the poems accomplish the aim of de-familiarizing language, they sometimes feel too random and uncomposed to be completely satisfying as poems. Then again, something similar was said about “Fountain” when Duchamp first tried to show it in Paris in 1917, and look how that turned out.
Abby Paige is Montreal-based writer and performer. Her website is at http://www.abbypaige.com.
