Chris Bendon (1951-) did not emerge into the poetry world until the mid-eighties. Born in Leeds, he worked as a tour courier in Egypt, subsequently took a degree in English at the university of Lampeter, in West Wales, and has continued to live in Wales. From 1982 to 1985 he edited Spectrum magazine. Works from the mid-seventies, (self)published by Spectrum ten years later (Testaments, Aetat.23, Posthumous) reveal already a determined voice; the traits of writing at length, taking himself as the subject worthy of so much attention, and of non-engagement with the literary techniques and explorations of the day, are already present. These are distinctive if slightly awkward books. Their lack of melodrama points to another of his traits, that of avoiding obvious effects; his idea of life is not dominated by violent flare-ups. This could lead either to slowness and irrelevance, or to a fascination for detail which high-octane artists overlook. In praise of low music came out in 1981, Matter in 1986. Maturity produced Cork Memory (Stride, 1987) and the volume containing Ridings Writings and Scottish Gothic (Stride, 1990). By this time Bendon's distaste for blatant effects has become a wish for disorientation and perversity, fashionable at the time; perhaps too many poets were striving for this effect. It pushed against the grain of his realist preoccupations, and the logic and determinism present, to some extent, in a life, his own. Bendon was by now one of the most prolific poets on the scene. Books include Constructions (1991), A Dyfed Quartet (1992), Perspective Lessons/ Virtual Lines (1992), Jewry (1996), the verse 'libretto for an imaginary opera' Crossover (1996), by now several hundred pages, of which much is cheerful and banal. The cumulative projects have imposed a logic and dutiful organisation which has perhaps limited his work; individual poems are much more mysterious and exciting. The larger framework adds little to the poems. Residence in Wales has perhaps encouraged the concern with family, family history, and details of daily life; Jewry, an investigation of a Jewish past (Bendon's father was Jewish, but because of a divorce he knew little about that tradition), could be considered as one of a genre of Anglo-Welsh writing, prolific but of little literary merit. He should take off into a more complete fiction where the contents of the poem derive more from the impetus of the project and less from the outside world. His forte is not not reflections on the past but quick contact rendering of the mystery of the present as it surrounds us. He is someone who may miss their flight by not being intellectual and avant-garde enough in their approach, in a severely realist and anti-intellectual culture.
In Scottish Gothic a Rouault painting attracts him because of its 'Emancipation of mood and paint/Roughness of the untouched Real', qualities which his poetry at that stage lacked; the book takes off only when he appoaches them.
At Fraisthorpe, at my godparents' farm
ammonite fossils in the yard,
huge furry caterpillars in the corn
beetles in art nouveau enamels
dusk's burnets, lappets, lutestrings
before night's extinction.
(Ridings Writings, p.14) This is charming, but there is still too much unpoetic labelling, nailed on to reassure us that the imagination is not taking over. The imagination does not go down a treat in Yorkshire.
A great deal of the book reveals itself as philosophy, but lacks sufficient sense of doubt to arouse the intellect, and so fails as philosophy. It is too commonsense (a Yorkshire trait, as he wryly admits); it is not there for anything except to anticipate more searching poems later.
Then, "I am on a moor, in a mist"
evaporating all my artifice
till "I" becomes sketchy, discontinuous,
except for that haunting line,
that is remodelled by linear time:
a survival stratagem, like a perspective virtual line
or societal necessity (perhaps I exist in other minds?)
From memory then: and where was memory?
Changing in the changing head.
And where is the head?
This is the best passage from Ridings Writings. The musical flow stumbles, again, over too much labelling. The denial of coherence is the most promising trait of the book, but is denied by a kind of structural oxymoron as everything is nailed into an autobiographical framework, the parts fail to achieve mystery and autonomy because they are excessively labelled. He is worried about a Yorkshire audience thinking him too airy-fairy (p.22), but not sufficiently about an intellectual audience finding him insufficiently curious and speculative. At this point he is not yet writing poems about music, a trait predominant in Jewry, and a giveaway that the writer wants to abandon realism and build his own aesthetic world. The arrival of sophistication offers either a call for ten times more energy to be poured into the text, or a retreat into dilettante passivity, poems about listening to the radio. The line of ascent must be to throw away the music and write poetry about poetry, or about rigorous aesthetic contemplation. I believe Bendon's poems got steadily better during the nineties, until at their best they had an Asa Benveniste-like mystery, a tango of gematria.
Drowsy, bourgeois Weimar, Dresden.
Lime trees, willows. From an open window,
Bach well tempered on our iron-frame pianos.
A dropped Homburg, a comic line of ducks...
An incident gives Now to a reminiscent Sunday
or a prospect of endless Sundays... a fish
or bird, not an eagle exactly
then the Colours merge and shift in a subtle dance.
Seeing the simple films and photographs (Evidence: exhibits A-Zzz)
you would not think we dreamed of colour.
(I did not think I wrote thrillers.)
(from 'I'Faith', in Jewry)
By Jewry (and the uncollected poems of the same time which I saw as editor of Angel Exhaust) he has acquired enough confidence to take on material with which he is not so familiar that it holds no mystery for him; the time of the poems has opened up, they have started to swing; a thousand possibilities open up and he is not banging them into place to retain commonsense and order. Jewry, clocking in at 128 pages, is too diffuse and sometimes too slight.
confused or interfused genre of impromptu table talk and mixing of idioms. artistic and domestic space spilling into each other. the figures of music collide with the plates and broken meats scattered across the writing-table. bric a brac of self. offering a new genre, a new grammar of poetic ordinance. sustained by verve and the discipline to discard banality and discover new verbal melodies.
Bendon has a prolific energy (six volumes so far in the nineties, and a lot of uncollected poems) which promises to transform itself into energy as structure.