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THE BODY by Michael Benedikt

THE BODY

By

Pub Date: Sept. 19th, 1968
Publisher: Wesleyan Univ. Press

The world created by these poems has little to do with ordinary reality. But unlike many modern poems, these deal not with non--or fragmented--reality, but with a supra-world with rules of its own, full of wit and surprise. Familiar images may be used in odd contexts, or heaped together in curious juxtapositions, but never arbitrarily, and always in order to form some overall image or fleeting, offbeat emotion. Intensely poetic and evocative lines are often interspersed with casually conversational good-humored phrases; the effect is appealing, often funny, and generally disarming. The awareness behind these poems is acute and wide-ranging, gathering in oddments of artifacts, observations, relations between people, objects, and the universe, and expressing them with apparently artless humor; but ""Underneath. . . the various unobservant stuffs/ There is a spirit, shifting around from foot to foot,"" and alert, waiting, to convey lightly but concisely a sense of joy and complexity in all inner and outer realities.