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
We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones.
I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.
Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls,Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars -They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble,Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesyThat something new is coming to the world,The Lord knows what!Well, it's a long time coming,And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.
Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
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.
I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we're walking in.
Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem.