Montag: (Q8) There seems to be a sensibility in these poems sometimes that is somewhat akin to the middlewestern outlook. I'm thinking of middle European women who immigrated to Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis, who could not go home, but who were not yet home here. They had some of that wanderlust you write of in "Childhood," p. 47, wanderlust so strong that it is hard to distinguish it from homesickness. We always want our lives to mean something but we are not sure they do. We may be ciphers in an infinite progression of ciphers. How would you respond to a characterization of your poems as "middlewestern" is this sense?
Benet: I don’t know much about the lives of middle European women who immigrated to Chicago, Milwaukee or Minneapolis... and I am not sure if you mean Austrians and Germans by that designation, because where I come from is designated as Eastern Europe, and this territory includes Poland and the former Czechoslovakia, as well as Hungary and the former Yugoslavia... but if you pick up on a sensibility in my poems that reminds you of Europeans, European women, and immigrants to the US, well, I suppose that’s there, in all its mix, given the "coordinates" of my situation. I would argue that this sensibility you call "middlewestern" such a way in your question is not necessarily limited to the territory you mapped for me in your comparison. Much of it is independent of place - and that’s just the problem. Unrootdness is now global. In my experience, one of the major socio-cultural (not to mention economic) issues of the last century (and I am talking about the 20th here) has been about the interplay between "homesickness" and "wanderlust," of being unhinged from our roots, even as we keep going in search of home.... So, to answer your question more directly - and maybe this not the answer you were hoping to hear, is this: globalization has made "middlewesterners" of most of us. Montag: (Q9) The most middlewestern statement of all in these poems is: "... an untethered conviction And we would say, in the middle, the center is the edge. How have you come by this understanding? Benet: Well, I suppose that my understanding about the "brink" being a "core," or the center’s recasting as an edge, comes from the simple observation that one’s man’s (or woman’s) blinders are another’s telescope. Again, I am not sure if this is a middlewestern statement, but then, I am not an expert on the middlewest. Given that my son is moving to Madison, Wisconsin, though, I guess that this "borderline" acquaintance I have with the middlewest is likely to become a center for me, which is likely to put me on the edge, sooner or later.... Montag: (Q10) Of all the absences mapped in your poems, your father's absence seems to loom the largest. Would you talk about his absence as a presence in your art? Benet: I am not sure I have an explanation for why my father’s absence looms so large in the poems. Perhaps because he died when I was 19 or so and I have to go back in time, as well as in space, to "map" my memories of him. Montag: (Q11) We need to talk about your mother, and what she represents in these poems. She seems to me to be the marker for all the things that cannot be. Is she? (p. 74: "On my mother's lips, joy conscripts my name: a burden.") Benet: You make an interesting observation about what my mother represents in my poems. I wasn’t aware of this. The fact is that my mother always had high expectations of how life should be in general, and I think that has caused her some distress over the years. Luckily she is very resilient and always found her way back to that perch of expectations, in spite of her experience of years of misery. Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 5, below
that on the border
every brink is the core."
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