Chapter 10 - Mark Bennion

Poet Mark Bennion talks about "capturing the ineffable" through writing and wordplay. 

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Emma: Mark Bennion teaches writing and literature classes at BYU-Idaho and is also the author of several poetry collections including Beneath the Falls and Forsythia among others. Mark, thank you so much for coming in today.

Mark: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Emma: Of course. So, why do you write?

Mark: Well, a big reason is to try to—and this is an answer that's been around for a long, long time, but it's to try to name the unnamable. There are so many experiences that we have that we don't have a name for in some way. And so I think writing to try to express the ineffable, something that hasn't been said before is one reason why I write. Now I know that sounds a little presumptuous and maybe even a little pretentious, and I don't mean it that way. But sometimes there's something that happens to us. It may be something as simple as you slip on the stairs, for instance, and it catches your ankle or you injure yourself in some way, and you want to capture that moment of slipping or a moment of... when you see a child who plays a piano piece perfectly or does something that's exciting and you wanna capture that in a way that can last longer than the here-and-now that will be passed down, hopefully, to the next generation and the generation after that and beyond. So it's a... Poetry is a record of experience, but it's also to try to name those things that happen that we don't have a name for.

And I'll give you one quick example. I had an uncle who passed away. And I really wanted to write... Prior to his passing I wanted to write him a letter, but then he passed away, and I wanted to write a eulogy, but his passing was such that we couldn't celebrate the passing right away. So I took this desire of writing a letter and this desire of eulogizing him and I created a new word. I called it "leteulogy," and I wrote a poem for him because I had this this internal feeling of wanting to write him a letter, but also write a eulogy. And so I yoked those two words together and tried to put a name to what I was feeling. So maybe that's a concrete example of what I'm trying to do and hopefully capture it.

Emma: So I know you write poetry. Are there any other genres that you write in?

Mark: Well, I've been tinkering and dabbling a little bit with creative nonfiction. I wouldn't call myself a creative nonfiction writer. I've written some reviews, three or four reviews of books, but I'm interested in creative nonfiction.

It's very malleable, a lot like poetry in many respects, and I'm curious to see what will happen with that. I haven't really published anything yet in that area, and I'm not hoping to right away. I'm just trying my hand at it because I think writing in a different genre, there's a kind of cross-fertilization that happens. If you write poetry and then try something else, that poetry experience helps in the other genre and then vice versa. So I'm hoping that as I write creative nonfiction, that will help me to be a better poet in some ways.

Emma: It does seem like language is an import—well, obviously language is important for any types of writing, but similar uses of language, I guess, in poetry, and...

Mark: Absolutely. And each genre requires a different set of skills at one level or a different set of... You have to approach each rhetorical situation differently. And so just being a little more versatile in terms of looking at a particular situation and going, okay, what am I trying to do here? Is there anything in this situation in writing a creative nonfiction piece or essay that would help me to write poetry better? Is there a way that I could take, say, rhyme and sound and rhythm and imagery that's used in poetry in a way that may translate into creative nonfiction as well? So, there are certain trade offs, certain things that help one another.

Emma: When I took your drama class, and that was, like, a year ago, when I was at BYU-Idaho, and I have to explain because I don't do drama. But, we were reading all these different plays, and I remember you opened a class with this dramatic monologue, and it was... Oh, it just blew us all away. So as someone who appreciates the theater,

Mark: Sure.

Emma: has that influenced the way that you write poetry?

Mark: Oh, absolutely. I fell in love with language through the theater. When I was eleven, I was in South Pacific, and I was the little boy Jerome. And I had to speak French. There weren't many lines, maybe twenty, and it was all like "bonsoir" and "bravo, papa." It was that kind of thing. Wasn't anything huge, but I loved just to hear language spoken and then also sung. And then later on, a few years later, I went to see a couple of Shakespeare plays at the Southern Utah Shakespeare Festival. I saw Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night's Dream back to back on two different nights, and I was just blown away. And I thought, I love what Shakespeare is doing with language.

And so I got involved in theater. I mean, I continue to be involved in theater and plays, and I love the... just the musicality of both the spoken word in theater, but also the songs. And I wrote some poems as well, because poetry is a kind of theater to a degree, whether you're writing a lyric poem or a narrative or dramatic poem. And I absolutely loved it. I loved the theater. I recognized, too, as I... And in fact, when I started college, I was a theater arts major, but realized I wasn't a good enough actor that I was gonna make it on Broadway even though I had, you know, these wild dreams that that would happen.

But I wanted theater to continue to be part of my life, and I kind of transitioned from being a theater major to being an English major because I love language and then continued to fall in love with poetry and write it and explore it and use it as a way to express myself. And so in many ways, too, when I write something, I will always read it aloud because I'm interested in how it sounds. And I think part of that is because I love how Shakespeare's language sounds. You know, you have phrases like, "Avant, be gone, thou hast set me on the rack." That's a line from Othello. I love how... Just the sound of that! You know, he has such incredible sounds, not just with rhyme, but alliteration and assonance, onomatopoeia that he uses. And so I wanna use that in my own work. And there's a lot of wordplay, too, that Shakespeare uses, which is also what happens in poetry. There's a lot of wordplay and double entendre and paradox and that kind of thing.

Emma: I've only written poetry a handful of times, and half of those times were for schoolwork.

Mark: Sure, yeah.

Emma: And, you know, kind of forced to do it. But I just had never considered how much when you're writing poetry, you're not just focusing on how they look on the page and all that, but reading it out loud, too, to see how it sounds. I never even considered that, which sounds a little silly. But then again, I'm not a poet really. So...

Mark: No. I—and a lot of people don't. Sometimes we think of poems as something you read in a book, but poetry is meant to be spoken, originally. When the Odyssey was written and other ancient poems were written, they were meant to be spoken. And then as you heard them, you could memorize them. A lot of people that were illiterate would memorize poems because of their musicality.

And today, we have music, songs, everywhere. We turn on the radio. That, in some ways, is our poetry today. But it has words, of course, to a very, you know, musical beat. Poetry has continued to survive even in light of having such a music-saturated culture. And I think part of that is because the sound of language excites us.

Think of Dr. Seuss. When you hear Dr. Seuss when you're young, and just how rollicking his phrases were, and the speed with which they kind of fall off the tongue. We love that. And I don't think we outgrow it. We love it as kids. But as we get older, we love it when there's some kind of wordplay or some kind of humor that draws us in when someone uses language creatively.

Emma: That's true. When I was in middle—not middle school, it was high school, and I had to memorize a scene from Romeo and Juliet, and my sister memorized it with me. And it's the part when Mercutio and Tybalt are fighting.

Mark: Sure.

Emma: And we still have snatches of it memorized, and we'll just quote it to each other all the time.

Mark: That's great.

Emma: Language is powerful.

Mark: It is. It's very, very powerful, compelling. And I think for me, I think, how can I communicate in a way, hopefully, that's clear, that's honest, that's hopeful, that hopefully inspires to a degree, and hopefully, shows some empathy too?

Emma: Do you have any favorite forms or conventions of poetry?

Mark: That's a great question. I don't know if I have a favorite. I like a lot of different forms. I like, of course, the sestina and the villanelle, the sonnet. I enjoy writing some Japanese forms known as the haiku and the haibun. There's also a Korean form known as sijo. I like using some of the Hebraic parallel structures that exist. Climactic parallelisms are interesting to me.

I can't say I favor one over the other. I do try at times to write a poem that is maybe in free verse and then to write a poem that is in, say, a sonnet form or a villanelle form. I think writing in form, which is, of course, a huge tradition that's been handed down to us from the time of the Greeks up to the present, been handed down not just from in Western culture, but in Eastern cultures as well.

Those forms have a lot to teach us about discipline. In some ways, those forms are a lot like the lines on a tennis court. Those lines on a tennis court kind of give us a place to play and set rules for us, and we find out what we can do within that form. But then there's also free verse, which in some ways... I don't wanna say it's harder, but you have to try to develop a form of your own that connects with the content, a form that complements the content. And if you don't do that, not that it's a cardinal sin, but the poetry may not be as compelling or as engaging as potentially could be.

Emma: My brother says that free verse isn't poetry. We all laugh at him, but he's adamant about it. He's like, "it has to have a form," and we're like "mmmm"

Mark: Yeah. Well, and a lot of people feel that way, and I certainly respect that attitude. There was certainly a time from about the 1950s to 1970s when writing in free verse was absolutely huge, and to write a form poem was seen as heretical or anathema. But I think there's a healthier relationship to poetry now in the sense that people see the value, or I should say people writing poetry and people who appreciate it see the value of form and see the value of free verse poetry, that both methods speak to our experience, speak to who we are as humans. And we don't have to alienate one to privilege the other, so to speak, or denigrate one, I should say, to privilege the other.

Emma: Yeah, it's all just different ways to get your ideas out.

Mark: Absolutely. Yeah.

Emma: I mentioned this in the email I sent to you, but sometimes I have... This is going back to when you have to write a poem for school.

Mark: Sure. Yeah.

Emma: And similarly, you might not... You know, now that I've graduated, I'm not in school anymore. But sometimes in your writing, you might have deadlines that you have to meet.

Mark: Sure.

Emma: Or even just... Not even if you have forced deadlines, you don't wanna just keep working on the same thing forever and ever and ever. You want to get to a point where you're like, okay. Maybe it's not completely finished, because you know, some people say writing's never finished, but...

Mark: Sure.

Emma: You actually feel good about it. But I feel like it's hard to find a balance sometimes between just... You're like, "okay. I want to write," and you sit down and you just have no... you have no idea what to write, and it's hard to force that creativity and that inspiration. But at the same time, if I'm like, "oh, I'll just wait for creativity to come to me," I would hardly ever write. So what advice would you have in that situation?

Mark: Well, I think kind of setting aside time every day. If you're... Say you have a deadline, and the deadline's a week away. Our human tendency is to wait till the night before and get'r done. And that doesn't work very well for most of us. Some people it may work for. But I think a large part of kind of finessing that tension is to sit down and go, "okay. I've got a week. Tonight, I'm going to write for an hour and see what happens." And tomorrow night, I'll write for an hour. And the next night, I'll write for an hour, or morning, depending on... But doing a little at a time so that you give yourself time to write something. And it may be total junk the first night or two, but then you find a groove.

If you show up to write and to work and to do something, you develop some momentum. Momentum begins to accrue slowly but surely. And as that momentum starts to increase, you start to get ideas. You get to the point where, "wow, I can't wait to sit down to write," because you find you're full of ideas and those ideas accrue. But if it's just a little here and a little there or you're writing to beat a deadline, then at one level, the end product's probably not going to be as successful as you want it to be.

I think sometimes as writing teachers too, we privilege, say, a page count on this date needs to be done. And so a lot of students, instead of thinking of their ideas, will think, "I need to write 10 pages" instead of "I need to write down some ideas that could potentially change the world," or "write down something that's meaningful." And if we're not careful as teachers, we can privilege the page count and then students are like, "man, how can I make the sentence just a little bit longer so I get onto that eighth page and then I can be done?"

And so I think, certainly, we have to have deadlines. But if the focus is solely on that deadline, we'll end up writing for the deadline and not end up writing for meaning or purpose, in my opinion. I hope that makes sense.

Emma: Oh, definitely. That makes a lot of sense. And even now thinking back on it, it's true that when I actually do sit down to write, even if it's not the best writing, it's better than if I hadn't written at all. And it does kind of inspire me to come up with more ideas.

Mark: Absolutely.

Emma: There's some kind of, you know, discovery that comes from just sitting down and at least trying.

Mark: Right.

Emma: Tell me more about the poems that you're going to read today.

Mark: So one of the things my wife and I, Kristine and I, we have five children, four daughters and a son. And I learned pretty early on with our first daughter when I was in the labor and delivery room to be quiet, to do whatever my wife asked, and just to keep my mouth shut because anything I said in that moment was gonna fall flat and maybe anger her in some way or... But when our children were born, that experience was such a gut-wrenching, beautiful moment. And I remember my mom saying to me, "Mark, you will know how much I love you when you have your first child." And it was powerful. It was overwhelming. And so I wanted to... I thought "I need to write a poem." Again, here's an experience... It's the ineffable... How do I describe this?

And so two of the poems I have planned to read today, one is one for my mother. I think on birthdays, we have it all wrong. We need to give the credit to our moms and not to us for what they did. And so one of the poems I'm going to read is kind of a tribute to her. She also gave birth to five children just as my wife has. And so this—I guess this poem in some ways is a tribute to any mother, not just to her. And then another poem is a poem that I wrote right after our son was born. He's the youngest of our five children.

Another poem is based around the death of... My brother died when I was quite young. I was six, and he was almost three. And many years later, when our own son was born, our own son is named after my brother. A man who had been close to my family called my parents and shared an experience with them. And so that other poem I'm going to read deals with that experience of what happened when he spoke to them, or to our family, I should say.

Emma: Wow, thank you. I'm excited. No pressure or anything, but with all your theater background.

Mark: Alright. Well, I'll go ahead. I'll read the birth poems, and I'll start with the poem called "Imagining You the Morning After My Birth."

You cradle me in the yellow haze
after a fitful night. Your stomach
still ablaze with uterine contractions
as I learn how to eat. The St. Mary
nurses coo and question, juggle IV’s
and needles, medicine and bed sheets.
You look for yourself and your parents
in my swollen face, measure this fist against
your pointer finger. There are shivers

of hunger passing between us, muscles
that will take another three trimesters to heal.
With one hand you trace the cartilage
and sinew along the ridges of my nose
and chin, with the other you prop up
my neck and witness my effort to swallow.
From the other rooms come staid, doctored
voices and intermittent moans. You’d pray
for these women—your sisters now in their terror—

in their offering of blood, lungs, and bone,
but it’s all you can do to remember
the next visitor as your head begins to nod,
bobbing to the even rhythms of sleep.
I hear your regular heartbeat and open one eye
toward the hunch of your shoulder
and wrinkled hospital gown. Your hair is matted
with the strains of yesterday’s sweat, the strands
of blond tucked in by exhaustion as you take

this moment for yourself, this necessary
point of departure, like a ship heading
for the sea. In days to come I’ll receive
the newspaper praise and starboard attention
from my brothers. Yet in the core of wrinkles
and puppet fingers, in the jolts and stops
of this flesh and the scarred emblems
of your body, we know the real star
of the past nine months—a constellation

I am just now beginning to see.

Emma: That is such an interesting perspective. I like it.

Mark: Thank you.

Emma: I almost wish... It's kind of, like you said, poetry was meant to be spoken originally, but there's so much to be gained in rereading poetry. Even when you sent me the poems beforehand, I read them, then I read them again, and I was like, "woah." You notice so much more. So when it's on a podcast, I'm almost like, go listen to it again. You know?

Mark: Well, I think that you're hopefully striving for that, too, when you write a poem that hopefully it's something that can be reread, re-remembered, savored, and something that you'll go back to and you'll see hopefully something different each time you look at it. I think that's one of the end goals of writing poetry is trying to have people go back and see it again.

This next poem, again, this one is about the birth of our son. It's called "Fifth Set."

After nine months of estrogen, after
They rush to the hospital, mid-morning,
To witness unfolding, the nurse banter
With the doctor, clinical auguring,
She closes her eyes, foregoes the spinal
Block to forge kinship with hosts of women
And her rising son, her fifth child, the final
Note, akin to a blunt, tingling Amen,
Or like the pound and heave in the fifth set:
The whale arc and splash for the dipping ball,
The crosscourt volley, then overhead stream,
Bruise in the tailbone, nothing left to sweat
Just one more dive amid the muscles’ gall
When she hears him open his mouth and scream.

Emma: With that poem, I wanted to ask about the enjambment or enjambment as...

Mark: Sure.

Emma: I think enjambment is prettier.

Mark: Yeah.

Emma: More French.

Mark: Sure, yeah.

Emma: Because... Correct me if I'm wrong, because it's been a while since I've taken any sort of poetry creative writing class. But isn't that, like, with the lines, how you kind of break them?

Mark: There's no punctuation at the end of the line. So you have... When there's punctuation at the end of the line, it's called the end stopped line. And then you how'd you say that? Enjambment? Okay. I don't speak French anymore like I did when I was eleven. But that enjambment is fun because enjambment kind of keeps the reader on their toes. And the meaning is both horizontal and vertical. And so I think a lot of wonderful poets, what they'll do is they'll have a nice mix of an end-stopped lines and then enjambment lines. And the enjambment will, again, create some surprise for the audience. And that surprise is what we love when we read. We love to be surprised. And so as a poet, when you're writing a poem, trying to use a little bit of that, hopefully, creates some surprise and some engagement that may not otherwise be there.

Emma: That is so cool. And it works just as well when you read it out loud because with the pauses and where you endd each line you can kinda tell.

Mark: Sure. Okay. Last poem, this is called "Dream.: And again, this one is about my brother who passed away.

Dream.

It rolls in after the shock
of morning ablutions,
circling back at the right turn
of the head, at the stop-gap
between shaving and conversation—
light jacket for a cool day.

It comes to a friend
we haven’t seen in 30 years,
a man who delineates sunshine
in subterranean darkness, a friend
gathering manna
of years and experience.

And when he calls
on a frantic mid-morning,
when he says, “Your son came to me
last night,” the whole house heats up,
the heart sheds its weight,
yields to after-world iridescence,
to the uneven focus and slow-motion
of the mind’s metaphysical matters.

Hale and missionary-like,
a piece of rare jade unveiled,
you arrived like a Leonardo sketch
at auction in a nearby city—
fine lines, small canvas, a frame
we can again hold onto.
No matter you didn’t come to us,
we’ll take you in any form
at whatever price.

Emma: That's beautiful.

Mark: Thank you.

Emma: Is there anything else that you'd like to share about writing or anything?

Mark: I think writing is just a way to deal with the difficulties in the world and the beauty in the world to hopefully try and capture it and to hopefully leave something behind for those to follow. And that's, I guess, the main reason why I try to write things down. Hopefully, to use it as a gift for other people, not for my own self aggrandizement, but to hopefully say thank you to people who have inspired me because my wife, my mom, my children, my brother, my students inspire me. They inspire me to want to be better. They inspire me to want to look at life in a new way and to hopefully capture the ineffable. And so I'm just very thankful for that opportunity, and that's why I write poetry.

Emma: Like I said earlier, I've never been much of a poet, but I love hearing about it. I love hearing the poetry, so thank you.

Mark: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Emma. So good to see you and spend some time here talking about poetry.

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