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13 March 2005: As evidenced by his stuff in the show at the Durban Segnini Gallery in Miami, John Bennett is continuing to evolve as a visual poet. Here's the piece he had in the catalogue for that show:
What really makes my neurons tingle about this piece is simple: the way Bennett has gone from frames of rubber-stamped (generally) dopey (but highly comic and/or connotative) images (monkey wrenches, say, although I'm not sure whether he's used them or not; I'm almost certain he's used monkeys) to scrawled letters and now to words. Not counting all his many many inbetween steps. In this piece, too, his frame whooshes outward at the top. Hence, it escapes pure framery, as few of his previous frames did, that I know of (although some had windows or doors, and some were thicker than others). Conceiving the frame in the first place was a brilliance, but greater is his exploiting it in practically every way imaginable.
When I first encountered Bennett's work, I thought him not a visual poet, for I thought he merely enhanced his poems visually. Be that as it may, he is now unquestionably a major visual poet--and one, I'm pleased to see, who continues to keep his texts as semantically important to his aesthetic aim as his illumagery.
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