Stephen Vincent Benet
Stephen Vincent Benet
Stephen Vincent Benét /bᵻˈneɪ/was an American poet, short story writer, and novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown's Body, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, "The Devil and Daniel Webster"and "By the Waters of Babylon". In 2009, The Library of America selected Benét’s story "The King of the Cats"for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth22 July 1898
CountryUnited States of America
Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.
American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.
Dreaming men are haunted men.
Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
Books are not men and yet they are alive.
I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man.
Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity.
I think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium.
When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped.
Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines.
The blog is also a way to continue to register what I see and hear in a day - no matter what the form. In fact, my blog is a complete mixture of forms.
I don't think I have ever really gotten Leopold Bloom's interior ramblings out of my head! I am sure that voice continues to inspire the walking consciousness in my work - that is, the way I carry on an interior monologue as I walk through this city.